Profound thinker of deep thoughts
Adam Kuper finds that a new biography does justice to its intellectually inspiring subject. Mark Glanville reads through a closing speech
He caught one of the last boats ferrying refugees to the United States
Lévi-Strauss: A Biography
By Emmanuelle Loyer (Trans: Ninon Vinsonneau and Jonathan Magidoff).
Polity, £35
Reviewed by Adam Kuper
EMMANUELLE LOYER provides a compelling portrait of Claude LéviStrauss — structuralist, anthropologist and prophet of modern environmentalism. She situates him in the extraordinary cohort of politically engaged intellectuals that emerged in Paris after the Liberation. And she reveals the private man, austere but passionate about the arts, who made himself into one of the finest French writers of his generation
Born in 1908, Lévi-Strauss grew up in a densely intermarried circle of cultivated Parisian Jews of Alsatian ancestry. His family background featured both rabbis and artists.
His mother’s father was the rabbi of Versailles. His father and his mother’s brother were painters, and both men hyphenated their names to celebrate their descent from a common grandfather, Isaac Strauss, a composer known as “the Strauss of Paris”.
His parents were second cousins and all his three wives came from the same milieu. The first, Dina Dreyfus, was the sister of a childhood friend, Pierre Dreyfus. The second was Pierre Dreyfus’s sister-in-law.
And he discovered that his third wife, Monique Roman, a Guggenheim on her mother’s side, was related to him through her father.
Lévi-Strauss started out as a philosopher but, as a young academic, he jumped at the chance to join the faculty of a new university in Brazil and begin anthropological fieldwork among Amazonian Indians. He returned to France in March, 1939, just in time to serve in the army. After the French surrender, he was demobilised in Vichy. Armed with a letter of appointment to a post at the lycée Henri-IV in Paris, he asked a local official for a travel permit. “With your name, you tell me you are going to Paris? Don’t even think of it,” the man told him. “It was only at that moment,” Lévi-Strauss recalled, “that I began to understand.”
He then made his second sudden departure for the New World, catching one of the last boats ferrying refugees to the United States.
He became fluent in English, and Americanised his name, presenting himself as Claude L. Strauss
(A colleague had told him that his real name would make students laugh, “because of the blue jeans”.) In New York, he developed the theoretical basis of structural anthropology, but in his leisure hours he would go foraging for African and Native American art in the city’s antique shops with André Breton, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp.
Returning to Paris after the Liberation, he wrote the remarkable Tristes Tropiques. With its haunting evocations of Brazilian Indian life, it was an anti-traveller travelogue, pessimistic about the prospects of an overcrowded and homogenising world, a lament for Europe’s rape of the tropics, and a critique of Western civilisation itself. Published in 1955, the book captivated the French literati.
Lévi-Strauss’s fortunes were transformed. He married for the third time, a marriage that lasted for over half a century, ending only with his death in 2009, just short of his 101st birthday.
Lévi-Strauss established a “Laboratory of anthropology” and launched his new and revolutionary theory of human modes of thought. The ethnographic record showed that categories of thought are culturally variable, indeed wonderfully diverse, but Lévi-Strauss argued that, underlying the most exotic beliefs, there was a universal style of thinking, distinct from formal logic but just as strictly governed by a set of rules.
The systems of categories are set in motion in myths, which unfold in an imagined time “when humans and animals were not yet distinct”. The four volumes of his masterpiece, the Mythologiques, cover more than 800 myths and many variants among some 350 Native American peoples.
This splendid biography brings to life one of the greatest figures in a now almost mythical era of French intellectual life.