Structural Anthropology Zero. Claude Levi-Strauss
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and its Enemies, in which Lévi-Strauss detected the excesses of “Christian and democratic thought,” which, by constantly expanding the “limits of the human group,” failed to see the need to think of humanity as an ensemble of groups whose tendencies toward excessive aggression as well as collaboration needed to be regulated (p. 147). We should also take the measure, four years after the world became aware of the extermination camps, of the resonance of the following pronouncement: “There is always a point beyond which a man ceases to take part in the essential attributes of humanity … Yet this denial of human status [in so-called primitive societies] only very rarely takes on an aggressive character. For if humanity is denied to certain groups, they are not comprised of men and, as a consequence, one does not behave in relation to them as one would with other human beings” (p. 145). This is the main argument of the article: the violence of one group toward another is itself a recognition of the possibility of partnership; sheer negation of the other manifests only as lack of interest and “strategies of avoidance.” Aggressiveness between two groups must thus be thought of as “a function of another, antithetical, situation – i.e. cooperation” (p. 147). In other words, those who were our enemies yesterday were not so by nature, as a result of some primal aggression inherent in the constitution of any community; indeed, they may become our partners tomorrow, as part of a regulated regime of international cooperation. Against the search for universal principles (which would make war and cooperation “instincts” characteristic of all groups), the Nambikwara example shows us that war and trade are the manifestations of a single principle of exchange operating on a gradient between aggression and cooperation – confirming Mauss’s thesis that the exchange of gifts precedes market exchanges. “Thus, what we are dealing with here is a continuum, an institutional chain, that runs from war to trade, from trade to marriage, and from marriage to the merger of social groups” (p. 142).
This was already the central proposition in “War and Trade among the Indians of South America”: “conflict and economic exchange in South America represent not only two types of coexisting relations, but also two opposite and indissoluble dimensions of a single social process” (p. 115). The article, published in 1943 in Renaissance, the journal of the École Libre des Hautes Études, also reflects the urge to anticipate the post-war and to lay the foundations for future national and European political life – a concern shared by many French intellectuals exiled in New York.26 What is most striking in retrospect is the optimism of these men, many of them young (Lévi-Strauss was not yet forty), who, in the midst of war but far removed from European horrors, were keen to “work in teams” to reinvent the post-war world. This was reflected in the very name of the journal Renaissance (itself founded in 1942), as well as in the promising titles of the many generalist periodicals that blossomed after 1945 taking “civilization” as their principal subject, such as Chemins du Monde and L’Âge d’Or (a journal launched by the publishing house Calmann-Lévy, which was as ambitious as it was short-lived, and to which Lévi-Strauss initially contributed “Techniques for Happiness”). In addition to offering a prehistory of the first two volumes of Structural Anthropology, “volume zero” should be understood in terms of the sense of tabula rasa that animated its author and the larger project – shared with many others – of civilizational renewal on fresh foundations.
The welfare state and international cooperation
Lévi-Strauss’s political speculations in those years dealt essentially with two themes. First, the issue of the articulation of individuals and the group, which in liberal democracies needed to be rethought, maintaining an equal distance from both class and national affiliation – the former because it reflected the failures of the Soviet model and the latter because the recent past had shown it could find expression only in aggression and lead to war. A close reading of his articles of the time shows that, while he was not necessarily aware of it, Lévi-Strauss’s analyses resonated with other contemporary publications in English, especially those developing the notions of “social citizenship” and the welfare state, with a view to maintaining the link between individual and community in mass democracies.27 From the example of Nambikwara society, in which the chief’s generosity is the essential instrument of his power, Lévi-Strauss retained that the group is linked to its chief (in himself devoid of any authority or power of coercion) by a relation of reciprocity that creates obligations for both, the “refusal to give” being analogous to the “confidence motion” presented by governments in parliamentary systems. Power is thus a matter not simply of consent (an affiliation with Rousseau that will be strongly reaffirmed in Tristes Tropiques) but of the consent of the group as a group (and not as a collection of individuals). Lévi-Strauss concluded in particular that “the interpretation of the State conceived as a security system, recently revived by discussions of a national insurance scheme (such as the Beveridge plan and others), is not a modern development. It is a return to the fundamental nature of social and political organization” (p. 130).28 Even if they might appear quite distant, Lévi-Strauss’s 1940s observations on the United States are not unrelated to these concerns. The title “Techniques for Happiness” – beyond its touch of European irony with regard to a society that seemed devoted entirely to the material and psychological satisfaction of the individual, itself considered as an adult child – also conveys a keen interest in the “social techniques” deployed to suppress conflict and create a “civilization in which both masses and elites find satisfaction.” In the same way as the Nambikwara community, contemporary America represented an “original” and “fertile” sociological experiment, which Europeans “would do well to closely monitor” (p. 99).
The second focus of Lévi-Strauss’s political reflections had to do not so much with the relationship of the individual to the group as with that of groups with one another. The two concerns are linked since – and, in this respect, the articles are artifacts of their times – they originate in a conviction, shared by many contemporary thinkers, that the nation-state model had become obsolete. Lévi-Strauss was thus determined to contribute to the reinvention of international relations, at a moment when the road to federalism seemed an inevitability, following the examples of the United States and the USSR, as well as Brazil and Mexico. Here, again, reciprocity appears as the first principle, even when it would seem belied by relations of subordination between the groups under consideration (p. 134). At the international level, this principle not only linked societies to one another via bilateral services but also each of them to the ensemble they formed together, for humanity was not an abstract reality whose unity could be ensured by principles but a “a set of concrete groups between which a constant balance must be found between competition and aggression, through pre-defined mechanisms for buffering the extreme forms that may arise in either direction” (p. 147).
When he wrote these lines, Lévi-Strauss was a cultural attaché, and it is very likely that they bear the mark of his exchanges with Henri Laugier (thanks to whom he had obtained that position), himself the Under Secretary-General of the brand-new United Nations, to whose founding he had contributed. In “The Foreign Policy of a Primitive Society,” the ability of Amerindians to recognize rivers as “international waterways” and the strategies they developed to settle rivalries “in a no doubt hostile yet not overly dangerous manner” thus served as models. In the same vein, his description of the “industrial and commercial specializations” of the Xingu tribes is a discreet call for a form of international division of labor, facilitated by diplomats whose role would be similar to the multilingual mediators that were found in each of the villages. It is probably the Nambikwara conception of territory that offered the most fertile ground for contemporary political thought, since Amerindians entirely severed the notion of territory from that of land and thus paved the way for an immaterial definition of community whose unity was no longer determined by borders but by shared values: “For us, the Nambikwara territory covers a specific land area; it is a space bounded by borders. For them, this reality appears as different as the X-ray image of a body would from the image of that same body seen by the naked eye. Territory is nothing in and of itself; it is reduced to a set of modalities, to a system of situations and values that would appear meaningless to a foreigner and might well even go unnoticed” (pp. 143–4).
Rereading these texts of the 1940s, it is clear that the