The noted French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, died on October 30, 2009, less than one month shy of his 101st birthday.
To call him an anthropologist probably fails to do him justice. Lévi-Strauss was a polymath and a lyrically gifted prose writer on many topics, proud possessor of the kind of creative intelligence that leaves a school or schools in its wake. The main name of the main school associated with the name of Lévi-Strauss is “structuralism,” and since we allegedly live in a “post-structuralist” age (a synonym for “post-modern” in many quarters), then Lévi-Strauss may seem a spokesman for a forgotten era. And so, in some ways, he is.
But we forget the man at our peril. His wide-ranging anthropological rumination, Tristes Tropiques, is in fact one of the great works of the tumultuous twentieth century. It deserves close attention and even closer re-reading.
A Vast Work of Mourning
Lévi-Strauss tells us a great deal about his own intellectual formation along the way of describing his repeated trips to Brazil in the 1930s, his flight from France after the Nazis overran the country in 1940 (he fought in that failed French attempt to hold the Maginot Line against the German Blitz), and his happenstance return to Brazil (he was granted a visa to come to the New School of Social Research in New York, but got held up in French Martinique, and eventually made his way back to Brazil where he sat out the war).
His intellectual formation was very, very French (it is painful, this necessary turn to the past tense). He cut his teeth on Freud, Bergson, Saussure, Marx, the German Phenomenologists and French Existentialists. How he found his way to anthropology was never exactly clear, but it had something to do with his desire to escape from what he perceived to be the narcissism of Modern European thought which has made the self its primary topic and the subject its great obsession.
In this sense, Lévi-Strauss was a very prescient representative of the dramatic turn to the Other.
Yet things are never simple in Lévi-Strauss’s universe. His long years in Brazil, most of them spent probing tentatively for untouched “primitive” experience, failed to deliver what he wanted or expected. No matter how far into the Brazilian interior he went, he was unable to find people who had not had prior contact with European explorers. His quest for the pristine Other kept rebounding back upon the interrogating European Self. “There is no way out of the dilemma,” he tells us.
So Lévi-Strauss concludes the book with a long section entitled simply “Return.“” It is not just about his return to France; it is really about his return to himself. But now, it is a self that has been dramatically changed by its encounters. The last pages of Tristes Tropiques are dizzying in their complexity, and dazzling in their scope and vision for the future. “There will never be another New World,” Lévi-Strauss reminds us. In other words, our quest for the pure and pristine Other is doomed to fail. In the face of this momentous admission, the mode of modern anthropology shifts.
It becomes, in part, a vast work of mourning. We moderns had undertaken our travels in the hopes of meeting the purely non-Self, the truly foreign, the emblematic Other… only to discover that such an Other does not exist. And so we are driven, all unwillingly, back upon our Selves.
Yet this mournful return to the Self is not a call to resignation or passivity—not at all. The most surprising, and admittedly the strangest, pages of Lévi-Strauss’s conclusion concern contemporary geopolitics, all viewed in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Shoah. The barbarians, it would seem, we always have with us.
The West of the East
As a Frenchman, Lévi-Strauss was especially mindful of the postwar dilemma posed by French imperialism in North Africa. He, like so many French intellectuals of the day, was consumed with the question of Algeria.
But because Lévi-Strauss was an anthropologist, his interests in politics were inflected by his lifelong interest in religion. For him, the question of Algeria was also inescapably a question of Islam. “Islam,” he professes in mantic fashion, “is the West of the East.” And then, still more surprisingly, he notes that Napoleon was nothing more than a failed Muhammad. It is a difficult aphorism to comprehend, apart from the obvious reminder that comparative imperialisms get us nowhere very interesting.
What Lévi-Strauss seems to have had in mind (a mind he playfully tells us was “neolithic” in its proclivities) as his restless energies roved around the world was partly historical and emphatically religious. He was in the end worried about a subtler connection; between monotheism and imperialism, the totalizing of thought that disenables our capacity to see the Other we claim we desire. No honest imperialist can truly desire the Other, he believed—the imperials desire colonies, not people.
And yet Lévi-Strauss turns in his final reflections to Alexander the Great, and he poses an unanswerable historical question to us, as the emperor gazes upon a seashore with no worlds left to conquer. What would the West be like today, Lévi-Strauss asks, if Alexander’s attempt to unite the Mediterranean world with India had enjoyed more time to germinate? Might this strange synthesis have achieved a more lasting success? Would Christianity or Islam ever have come into being? “It was chiefly the presence of Islam which troubled me,” he tells us, when he comes finally to the Alexandrian site of Taxila. This was in 1955.
Ever an astute reader of the visual (he published a lovely little book on modern art entitled Look, Listen, Read in 1993), Lévi-Strauss was acutely moved by the Taj Mahal, seeing it as an enriching symbol of what he always dreamed: an authentic blending of Self and Other, in this case the rich aesthetic possibilities opened up by a more cosmopolitan empire and an enriched Muslim-Hindian synthesis.
If he worried about anything, Lévi-Strauss worried about false dichotomies. He was interested in the hyphens that bind, not the selves that divide. Fascinated as he was by the mental structures the human mind imposes on reality as it attempts to make order and sense, he was not as simplistic a dichotomist as some of his critics believed.
Binary logic is the logic of Nazism and imperialism—he knew this well—but it was also the logic of too many apostles of the Revolutionary “Rights of Man.” If I mySelf am a promoter of human rights, then what have I made of the Other who opposes me? The Cold War was, for Lévi-Strauss, simply the latest instantiation of a perennial, tragic human error.
Still, this restless traveler and gorgeous stylist insisted that neither resignationism nor monasticism were credible modern options: if there is no New World, then there is no place to which one might escape modernity and its discontents.
Lévi-Strauss’ this-worldly mysticism drew him to a rather strange conclusion, a Neolithic conclusion of sorts: “The world began without man and will end without him.” Was he post-humanist? Post-monotheist? Such terms are too binary to capture a man of Lévi-Strauss’ subtlety.
What he was in the end was mortal. And his life’s work was a careful reminder to all persons in positions of privilege that they are mortal too, and should confine themselves to mortal thoughts. With his passing, we can do no more, nor less, than miss him. And remember.
