Structural Anthropology Zero. Claude Levi-Strauss
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Kroeber, who denied to anthropology the status of a real science, and against American cultural anthropology more broadly, Lévi-Strauss thus reaffirmed the validity of Durkheimian methodological principles (“For our part, we remain convinced that social facts must be studied as things,” he would still write in 1948 (p. 85) – it was the atomistic and mechanistic conception of these “things” that he found wanting in Durkheim), as well as the ambition, at once explanatory and universalist, of anthropology.17 This article (as well as other articles from the period) also expresses for the first time one of Lévi-Strauss’s deep concerns, namely the fear that the otherwise legitimate critique of nineteenth-century evolutionism might reduce anthropology to a mere compilation of monograph studies void of any comparative horizon or universal claim: “Are we condemned, like new Danaids, endlessly to fill the sieve-like basket of anthropological science, vainly pouring monograph after monograph, without ever being able to collect a substance with a richer and denser value?” (p. 117). In retrospect, this was to be the main benefit of his prolonged stay in the United States, which made him aware of the rut in which the discipline could get stuck: aimless accumulation. Thus, with an ambition, intelligence and capacity for hard work bordering on madness, he took it upon himself to pull anthropology out of this rut and to infuse it once again with the mission of achieving “a truth endowed with general validity” (p. 117).
There are two points to be made here. First, that many of these articles initially appear anecdotal but in fact represent occasions for more robust theoretical reflection; and, second, this reflection is itself directly linked to Lévi-Strauss’s own condition of exile at the time he was writing them. At first glance, many of the pieces gathered here – historical overviews, reviews and tributes – appear not to be making any argument. However, even the tribute to Malinowski makes no secret of Lévi-Strauss’s “serious doubts” with regard to the former’s theoretical work, paving the way for “History and Anthropology” (the first chapter of Structural Anthropology). His critique of Malinowskian functionalism and its tautological character grew stronger over the years (see chapters I and V, in particular). The unexpected, and seemingly curious, rehabilitation of Edward Westermarck (chapter III) can be seen in a similar light. The Finnish sociologist’s attempts to account for the prohibition of incest in his 1891 work The History of Human Marriage had indeed already been largely discredited, especially by Durkheim and, more broadly, by the critics of nineteenth-century British evolutionism. But in his obituary written in 1945, six years after Westermarck’s death (the war accounting for the delay), Lévi-Strauss reviews the criticisms raised by the work only to highlight its merits (its theoretical ambition and erudition, its “insistence on a sociology that could furnish a comprehensive explanation,” the link maintained between sociology and psychology, its “dissatisfaction with historical and local explanation”) and, more importantly, to reformulate the question in a way that was to play a decisive role in his subsequent work: “At the root of the prohibition of incest lies neither the physiological link of kinship, nor the psychological link of proximity, but the fraternal or paternal link, in its exclusively institutional dimension” (p. 72). In other words, the moral rule that prohibits incest finds its source and explanation in an entirely social imperative – we are thus getting very close to the sensational reversal that later opened The Elementary Structures of Kinship and its reading of the incest taboo not as a prohibition but as an obligation to exogamy.
In the same way, technical or anecdotal pieces such as “On Dual Organization in South America” (chapter XIV) or “The Name of the Nambikwara” (chapter IV) provide occasions for theoretical clarification, whether on the historicity of forms of social organization (and the status of the historical hypothesis in anthropology) or on the question of the naming of native tribes, which is often a false problem threatening to engulf anthropology in sterile academic disputes. At first glance, the title of “Reciprocity and Hierarchy” (chapter IX) may appear somewhat misleading, but, beyond the detailed discussions of the terms used to designate the other moieties in Bororo communities, what is at stake is the persistent principle of reciprocity at the root of social life, even when relations of subordination would appear to prevail.
It is in the book reviews that Lévi-Strauss’s dialogue with American anthropology is most vigorously pursued. The five reviews (chapter V) included here are all little known and yet of far-reaching significance (and continuing relevance, seventy years after they were first published). Written for L’Année Sociologique (a journal founded by Durkheim, whose publication had just resumed after the war), they all focus on works published in the United States – Lévi-Strauss acting as emissary for an American anthropological tradition that was still largely unknown in France. Two of the reviews had indeed already been published in English, but the French adaptations that Lévi-Strauss submitted were often less restrained than the original versions and provided him with an opportunity to launch more forceful attacks on what he saw as the dead ends being pursued by anglophone anthropology – be it functionalism and its “providentialist” tendencies or the American school about to claim the name “culture and personality,” which outrageously simplified the relationship between individual psychology and culture and accorded far too much importance to native autobiographies.
In still more incisive fashion, he targeted the so-called “acculturation” studies that were beginning to develop in the United States, which focused on the transformation of native societies that were losing their former ways of life under the influence of a dominant modern civilization. Lévi-Strauss strongly disapproved of the ecumenical functionalist premise that led these groups threatened with demographic and cultural collapse to be considered as objects comparable to traditional societies, on the grounds that they were “functioning” communities. The tone is both pessimistic – Lévi Strauss draws a particularly grim picture of these degraded societies, which is not sparing of individuals – and accusatory – for the relationship of equivalence according to which “all human community is a sociological object, simply by virtue of the fact that it exists” (p. 89), which appears as epistemological tolerance and axiological neutrality, serves in fact to mask the violence of the confrontation; he sees in it an attempt on the part of a civilization to deny responsibility for having imposed on others paths that were not of their own choosing. We can see two forms of history emerging here: on the one hand, a history of borrowings and exchanges between societies and of their development under mutual influence; and, on the other, an external history of destruction, a tragic chronicle of the annihilation of ancient social forms by an exorbitant Western civilization. The first can constitute an object of scientific inquiry and is essential for the anthropologist; the second is a function only of the power imbalances at play and the hubris of a devastating modernity with respect to other cultures, as well as to a natural world it is irreparably defiling.
However, what is most important to understand is that this body of work was profoundly shaped by Lévi-Strauss’s expatriation and the particularity of his New York experience during the war years and the years immediately afterwards.18 Indeed, what all these texts have in common is that they were written either in exile or over the course of a diplomatic career, which, although brief and repeatedly minimized by Lévi-Strauss in subsequent interviews, was far from idle,19 yet constantly subject to a dynamic of double-estrangement with regard to the intellectual traditions of both home and host country. These years were also ones of professionalization and, more generally, of a reconfiguring of Lévi-Strauss’s intellectual and social identity – as well as of his private life, having separated from his first wife on the eve of World War II. This process was aided by his family connections in New York, which facilitated his integration and made it possible for him to circulate between different heterogeneous worlds,20 as well as his extraordinary capacity for hard work, which enabled him to digest the entirety of the anthropological literature contained in the New York Public Library and to become