entrevista a lévi strauss 2/2. 1988

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Levi-Strauss Interviewed, Part 2

Author(s): Didier EribonSource: Anthropology Today, Vol. 4, No. 6 (Dec., 1988), pp. 3-5Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and IrelandStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3032944

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pared to pursue policies which are unambiguouslygenocidal and ecocidal. The enthusiasm for hydroelec-tric projects, however, draws attention to the WorldBank's central role in the scandal, dams being a majorfeature of currentBank activities throughout he world.Although much lip-service was paid the environmentand the rightsof indigenesat the recent BerlinIMF/WBconference, the fact is that the proposedXingu projectis the second stage of a project which is alreadywellunder way. The Tucuruidam on the Tocantins River,adjacent o the Xingu, is an earlier World Bank-fundedproject which involved the displacementof thousandsof Indians and peasants, and which has resulted in avast diminution of cacao yields and fish populations nthe lower reaches of the Tocantins as well as consider-able concern over the long-termhealth and ecologicalconsequences of creating a lake within the tropicalforest. Brazilian governmentofficials argue that suchprojects represent the only sensible way to develop

Amazonia, andpoint to the need to increasethe extrac-tion of Amazonianresourcesin order to ease Brazil'sforeign debt. Publishedfigures, however, suggest thatthe Amazonian contribution o such debt managementis only of the order of 1 to 2%. It is ironic and tragicthat the proposed dam schemes are so similarto thoseproposedby HudsonInstitute n the 1960s, andrejectedamidstso muchnationalist lag-waving.Afriend of Brazil

See report n New York Times, 14 August 1988, 'BrazilAccuses Scholar of AidingIndianProtest'.Letters of concernshould be addressed to: Excelentisi-mo Senhor PresidenteJose Sarney, Palacio do Planalto,Brasilia - DF, Brazil; Excelentisimo Senhor MinistroPaulo Brossard, Ministerio da Justicia, Esplanada dosMinisterios,Brasilia- DF, Brazil;BarberConable,Presi-dent, World Bank, 1818 H. Street, NW, Washington,D.C. 20433, USA

Levi-Straussnterviewedby Didier Eribon -Part 2At the begininingof the SeconidWorld War Levi-Strauss served briefly in the F-ench Army as a liai-son officer,butin 1941 was invited to benefitfrom ascheme organizedby the RockefellerFoundation torescue Eu-opean scholars who were under threatfr-omthe Nazis. He then joined the New School forSocial Research in New York,where he stayed till1945. This extract is fronmChapter3, 'Le boheme aNew York.D.E. You gave classes, you wrote... How did you or-

ganize yourday?C.L.-S. Everymorning,I went to the New York Pub-lic Library.WhatI know of social anthropology learntduring those years. I was there at opening time andonly left at noon or one o'clock. I lunched in a smallrestaurant nd returnedhome to write.

D.E. The Public Libraryin New York must be anastonishingplace?C.L.-S. There were many people there, but one metfew university people; they preferred he libraryat Col-umbia. I preferred42nd Street because it was nearerwhere I lived. The place had greatpresence: a little an-tiquated,as old New York institutionsoften are, but fullof charm.

D.E. Yet there are large holdings in social anthropo-logy?C.L.-S. Considerable.Even this library designed topopularizeknowledge had very rich holdings and waskept up-to-date.It was there thatI found a large partofthe sourcesI used for Les Structures 'lementaires e laparente.

D.E. An objection that has often been addressedtoyou is that you have read many books but done littlefieldwork.

C.L.-S. Circumstancesso decided. If I had obtaineda visa for Brazil in 1940, I would have returned o thesites of my pre-war expeditions and done fieldwork.Iftherehad not been a war, I would probablyhave goneoff on a researchproject. Fate took me to the UnitedStates where I was not able to carry out expeditions,

through ack of resources and on account of the interna-tional situation, but where, in compensation, I hadevery freedom to do theoreticalwork. There the possi-bilitieswere, I wouldsay, unlimited.I realized, too, that for 20 or 30 years materialhadbeen accumulating n considerableproportions, but insuch disorder that it was not clear how to make senseof them and use them. It seemed to me urgentto bringto light where this mass of documents had broughtus.Finally- why not admit it? - I was fairly quick to dis-cover that I was more a man for the study than for thefield. Withoutany pejorative ntent- quite the contrary- I would say that fieldwork is a little bit 'women'swork', which is probablywhy women succeed so wellat it. Formy part,I was lackingin care andpatience.D.E. Yet in spite of the dangers we have alreadymentioned,you did seem to enjoy fieldwork a lot.C.L.-S. Yes, I did. But those were my first expedi-tions. I am not sure that if there had been others Iwould not have experiencedgrowing exasperationonaccount of the disproportionbetween usable time andwastedtime.That was true then, and has only got worse since. Afew days ago someone sent me from Canada,as a cu-riosity, some questionnaires,forms and so on whichmust be filled in in many copies before a 'band' (theofficial designation)of Indians n BritishColumbia willauthorizeyou to come and work with them.They won'tnarratea myth unless the informantreceives a writtenassurancethathe has the literaryproperty,with all thelegal consequences implied. You must admit that thisfinicky bureaucracy, his taste for red-tape- a carica-ture of our own practices- does remove much of theold appeal of fieldwork.D.E. Did you also feel whatMalinowskidescribed nhis diary:feelings of irritation, ven of disgust?C.L.-S. Very much so. Social anthropologistswerehypocritically ndignantwhen this diary was published,claiming that it contradictedhis work. But who has notgone through hose moments of depression?AlfredMe-traux,who did an enormousamount of fieldwork, men-tioned them willingly. You know that when one has

This is the second pairof extracts in Englishtranslationrom De Preset de Loin, markingClaudeLvi-Strauss's80th birthdaywhichwascelebrated on 28November1988. De Preset de Loin is aninterview, n book ormprepared byDidierE-ibon, published at 89FbyEditionsOdileJacob,Paris, whohas kindlygr-anted ermission orreproducing he extracts.The ir-stextractdealswithUvi -Strauss'speriod in New Yorkduringthe gr-eater artof WorldWar 2. Thesecond extract is adiscussionof thestr-ucur-e ndplan ofMythologiques,LU'Oi-Strauss'sfour-volume workon theanalysis of AmericanIndian myth. The titlesof all his booksmnentioneder-e r-egiven in French;all areavailable in Englisht-anslation.)? Editions OdileJacob, Par-is.Thet-anslation is byJonathanBenthall.

In ouR October issue,wepublishedanothe-pal- of extracts intranslation, one onLUvi-Strauss's hildhoodand the othe- on hispublications aboutracism and anti-racismsince the 1950s. Amnispr-inteeds to becorrected in the our-th

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Claude Levi-Strauss nthe ield in Brazil, 1938.

wasted a fortnight with an indigenous group withoutsucceeding in getting anythingfrom the people aroundone, simply because one gets on their nerves, one be-gins to hate them.

D.E. Did that happento you?C.L.-S. In the barrensavanas of central Brazil, how

often I had the impressionof making a mess of my life!To come back to what you were just saying, and with-out comparingmyself to Malinowski, I have done morefieldwork than my critics say. In any case, enough tolearn and understandwhat fieldwork is - an indispens-able condition for the healthy judgement and use ofwork done by others. Let us say that my field experien-ces represented what psychoanalysts call a 'didactic'.At the same time, I think I made some finds and re-portednew facts.

Below: an extract from Chapter 14, 'En suivant ledcnicheurd'oiseaux'.D.E. Each volume of Mythologiquesconsists of sev-

eral hundredpages. At the end of L'Homme nu, youlook backon the whole as a homogeneous work.C.L.-S. With the reservationthat having writtenthe

thirdvolume, I said to myself that I would never suc-ceed in finishing it because several more would beneeded. I took the decision that there would be onlyone more, the fourth, and that I would include in it,whether by way of allusion or of incitement to futureresearch, everything which I still had to say. That iswhy this last volume is thickerthan the early ones, andof a more complicatedconstruction; t containsthe ma-terial for two or threebooks.

D.E. You fearedfor the failureof yourventure?C.L.-S. I rememberedSaussure and his work on theNibelungen. He spent part of his life, the greater partperhaps,in unravellingthis mixture of myths, legendsandhistory.There are still a hundredor so handwrittenexercise books in the Geneva Library,of which I haveobtained and studied microfilm copies. Reading thesefascinated me because of all the ideas I found there,

and also because of the lesson I learnt. The researchgrew more and more complicated, new avenues keptopening up, and Saussuredied before having publishedanything of his immense work. I felt exposed to thesame danger,and resolved to escape it. Otherwise, myproject, ike his, would nevercome to an end.D.E. When you worked on these myths, your firsttask was to provide summariesof them. I suppose thatthe myths are longerand more diverse than the versionwhich you give of them.C.L.-S. I have been reproached or this unfairly.Forthe details which I leave in suspense in the summaryarereintegratedaterin my analysis. I had to enable thereaderwho is quite ignorantof this mythology, and forwhom America is an unknown world, to begin by ac-quiring a syncretic vision of each myth or group ofmyths.Then I go on to oblige him to go into all the de-tails without any omissions, at the time when my ana-lysis brings to light theirrole and their necessity.

D.E. These are wonderfulstories, real literary texts.It must have been an immense pleasure for you to beimmersed n that iterature.C.L.-S. They are magnificentstories,andoften mov-ing. Provided that the informantis also a good story-teller, which is not always the case. I began to work onmythology in 1950 and I finished Mythologiques in1970. For twenty years, rising at dawn, drunk withmyths,I really lived in anotherworld.The myths saturatedme. So much more had to be ab-sorbed than what was used! And when one shows thatsuch and such a myth, from such and such a popula-tion, exists in a modified formin a neighbouringpopu-lation, it is necessary to go through the whole ethno-graphic iteratureon that population n order to locate-in its environment, ts techniques, its history, its socialorganization all the factors which can relate to thosemodifications.I lived with all these peoples and withtheirmyths,as if in a fairystory.D.E. It's also an aesthetic experience.

C.L.-S. An aestheticexperienceall the moreexcitingbecause these myths appear irst of all as puzzles. Theytell stories without heador tail, full of absurd ncidents.One has to 'hatch' the myths for days, weeks, some-times months, before suddenlya sparkburstsout, andin some inexplicabledetail in a myth, one recognizesatransformationof some inexplicable detail in anothermyth, so that by this expedient they can be broughttogether as a unity. Each detail in itself need meannothing;it is in their differentialrelationships hat theirintelligibilityis to be found.D.E. The titles of your four books have become fa-mous. Le Cru et le cuit, Du Miel aux cendres,L'Originedes manieresde table say a good deal aboutthe project as a whole, which is to show the passagefrom nature o culture.As for the last,L'Hommenu...

C.L.-S. This goes back to the starting-point, or thenakedin relationto culture s the equivalentof the rawin relation to nature.The first word in the title of thefirst volume, and the last word in the title of the last,answer each other, just as the journey begun in SouthAmerica and progressinggradually o the northernmostparts of North America returnsat the end to its starting-point.D.E. When you called the first volume Le Cru et lecuit, did you think then of calling the last oneL'Hommenu?C.L.-S. I didn't have such a clear view. But I knewby and large what my route would be. Starting frommyths which make out of invention, or discovery, ofcooking food, the standard or the passage from nature

line: Levi-Strauss's greatgrandfatherwas ofcourse born in 1806, not1906. Thereare also twoslips of translation: nline 4, 'my mother'sfather' should read 'mymother's ather' and inp.6, 1.24, first cousins'shouldread 'secondcousins'.The latest of ClaudeLevi-Strauss'sbookstoto be translated ntoEnglish is The JealousPotter (originallyLaPotiereJalouse, Plon,1985), translated byBe'nedicteChorier (U. ofChicagoP., ?15.95).This has come to beregardedas one of hismost accessible booksand is specially notablefor its debate withpsychoanalysis.Didier Eribon is alsothe authorof a similarbook of interviewswithGeorgesDume'zil,heeminentFrench studentof Indo-Europeanmythand ideology who diedin 1986 (see A.T.,December1986, for anobituaryand comment).

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to culture - pushed on by the internal logic of themyths and getting nearerand nearer to them - I endedup with myths for which the dividing line between cul-ture and nature does not pass any more between rawand cooked, but between the acceptanceor refusal ofeconomicexchanges;that is to say the acceptanceor re-fusal of a social life that goes beyond the frontiersofthe group.Fairs and markets,where even peoples whoare enemies meet each other periodicallyto exchangefoods and the productsof theirindustry,achievean ela-boratedform of social life, comparable and the com-parison s madeby those concerned- to that first trans-formationwhich a culture on its own imposeson naturethrough he operationof cooking its food.

D.E. At the same time as working out from thecentre, your book is organizedaround an ascent fromSouth Americato NorthAmerica.C.L.-S. It is in the north-west of North America,from Oregon to British Columbia,that myths tend inthe directionI have just outlined,on accountof the ex-ceptional development of commercial exchanges be-tween tribes. So it was particularly linching to my ar-gument that I found there the South American mythswhich I had started rom, in barely modified form. Theloop closed on the spot, as well as between the two he-mispheres.

D.E. Your starting point, as you have recalled, is aBororo myth about a bird's-nester. How does onechoose a 'referencemyth' which is going to allow allthe others to be linkedto it in a chain?C.L.-S. I had lived in a Bororovillage at the time ofmy first expedition. My attention was drawn above allto social organization;when I had to concern myselfwith religious studies in the Cinquiemesection [partofthe Sorbonne in Paris] I became interestedas well inthe mythology that the Salesian missionaries had beencollectingforhalf a century.D.E. Which suggests that the choice is completelyarbitrary?

C.L.-S. At the beginning, yes. As I was saying toyou earlier abouthistoryin general,todayI can explainmy choice retrospectivelyand even justify it. But whenI did it, it was for accidentalreasons.D.E. In theory, you could have startedfrom anothermyth,anotherpopulation.C.L.-S. Yes indeed, and as the earthof mythology isround,another tinerarywould have broughtme back tothe same point. However, I did understandafterwardsthat this myth occupies a strategicposition in the set ofAmerindianmyths. It articulates wo systems concern-ing, respectively, the vertical and horizontalaxes; thatis to say, between on the one hand high and low, earthand heaven, nature and supernature,and on the otherhand between nearand far, fellow-citizens and foreign-ers.D.E. Mythologiques ollows a geographic movement,but also a progression n the complexity of the analysis.C.L.-S. That is true. The four volumes progress in adouble movement. On the one hand, geographicalex-tension. The analysis in Le Cru et le cuit is confined toSouth America and above all to Centraland EasternBrazil. Du Miel aux cendres broadensthe field of en-quiry, to the south as much as to the north, but is stillSouth American. In L'Origine des manieres de table,the analysis starts again with a myth which is stillSouth American but more northern,meeting the sameproblem by means of a different imagery which is bet-ter illustratedby myths from North America. The pas-

sage from one continent to anotheris necessary, andthis book straddles the two. The last volume, entirelyNorthAmerican, carriesthe reader o the furthestpoint.Forby a curiousparadoxwhich I tryto takeaccount of,it is between the most geographicallydistantparts ofthe New World that resemblancesbetween myths areclearest.The second movementyou speak of is a logical one.The myths thatI introducesuccessively are approachesto problemsof growingcomplexity.Those discussedinthe first volume exploit oppositions between sensiblequalities: raw and cooked, fresh and rotten, dry andmoist, andso forth. In the secondvolume, these opposi-tions give way little by little to others which appealnotto a logic of qualities but to a logic of forms: emptyand full, containerand contained, internaland external,and so forth.The thirdvolume,L'Originedes manieresde table, accomplishes a decisive step. It deals withmyths which, instead of opposing terms, oppose thecontrasting ways in which these terms came to be op-posed to one another.How, the myths ask, does thepassage from one stateto another unction?Mythswhich narratea journey by dugoutcanoe havea strategic importance n the book because they illus-tratethis type of problem admirably.When the journeystarts, t turnsout that as it progressesthe near becomesdistantand the distantbecomes near. When one arrivesat its destination, he initialvalues of the two termsareinverted. But the journeyhas taken time. The categoryof time is thus introduced into mythic thought as anecessarymeans to disclose relationshipsbetween otherrelationshipsalready given in space. Which means thata novelistic dimension interweavesitself into the myth-ic dimension,with all the consequenceswhich that im-plies for the evolution of the two genres. And thatshows, too, that mythic thought is capable of abstrac-tion, albeit in an implicit way, when it combines, al-ways with the greatestsubtlety,terms which startedoffas concreteimages drawnfromsensory experience.

D.E. You unveil in this work the logical thoughtwhich you haddefined in La Pense'esauvage. In a littledigression inserted in Du Miel aux cendres, you askwhy people who possessed such a capacity for logicalabstractiondid not effect the passage to scientific andphilosophicalreason which took place in otherciviliza-tions, in Antiquity.C.L.-S. I don't know the answer. Perhaps it wasnecessary, for thoughtto transform tself, that the so-cieties themselvesbecame of another ype.D.E. As regardsGreece, it is true thatVernantrelatesthe passage to rational houghtto the politicalorganiza-tion of cities...C.L.-S. Yes, and others have seen legal thought asmakingdemands n precisionandvigour which arepre-

conditions for the appearance of scientific thought.These different nterpretationseem to be quiteclose toeach other.D.E. Your journey into mythology finishes inL'Homme nu with a chapterentitled 'The single myth'.Did you mean that all the myths analysed in the courseof the four volumes were only in fact variationson oneand the same myth?C.L.-S. At least, variationson one great theme: thepassage fromnature o cu'lturewhich had to be paid forby the definitiveruptureof communicationbetween theheavenly world and the earthly world. Hence the prob-lems for humanitywhich this mythology focuses on.

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entrevista a lévi strauss 2/2. 1988

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