Levi-Strauss Interviewed, Part 2

Author(s): Didier Eribon

Source: Anthropology Today, Vol. 4, No. 6 (Dec., 1988), pp. 3-5
Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3032944
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 pared to pursue policies which are unambiguously
genocidal and ecocidal. The enthusiasm for hydroelec-
tric projects, however, draws attention to the World
Bank's central role in the scandal, dams being a major
feature of currentBank activities throughoutthe world.
Although much lip-service was paid the environment
and the rights of indigenes at the recent Berlin IMF/WB
conference, the fact is that the proposed Xingu project
is the second stage of a project which is already well
under way. The Tucurui dam on the Tocantins River,
adjacentto the Xingu, is an earlier World Bank-funded
project which involved the displacement of thousands
of Indians and peasants, and which has resulted in a
vast diminution of cacao yields and fish populations in
the lower reaches of the Tocantins as well as consider-
able concern over the long-term health and ecological
consequences of creating a lake within the tropical
forest. Brazilian government officials argue that such
projects represent the only sensible way to develop
Amazonia, and point to the need to increase the extrac-
tion of Amazonian resources in order to ease Brazil's
foreign debt. Published figures, however, suggest that
the Amazonian contributionto such debt management
is only of the order of 1 to 2%. It is ironic and tragic
that the proposed dam schemes are so similar to those
proposedby Hudson Institutein the 1960s, and rejected
amidst so much nationalistflag-waving.
A friend of Brazil
See report in New York Times, 14 August 1988, 'Brazil
Accuses Scholar of Aiding IndianProtest'.
Letters of concern should be addressedto: Excelentisi-
mo Senhor Presidente Jose Sarney, Palacio do Planalto,
Brasilia - DF, Brazil; Excelentisimo Senhor Ministro
Paulo Brossard, Ministerio da Justicia, Esplanada dos
Ministerios, Brasilia - DF, Brazil; BarberConable, Presi-
dent, World Bank, 1818 H. Street, NW, Washington,
D.C. 20433, USA

Levi-Strauss
interviewed
by Didier Eribon -Part 2

This is the second pair throughlack of resourcesand on account of the interna-

of extracts in English At the begininingof the Seconid World War Levi- tional situation, but where, in compensation, I had
translationfrom De Pres Strauss served briefly in the F-ench Army as a liai- every freedom to do theoretical work. There the possi-
et de Loin, marking son officer, but in 1941 was invited to benefitfrom a bilities were, I would say, unlimited.
Claude Lvi-Strauss's scheme organized by the Rockefeller Foundation to
80th birthdaywhich was
I realized, too, that for 20 or 30 years material had
celebrated on 28
rescue Eu-opean scholars who were under threat been accumulating in considerable proportions,but in
November1988. De Pres fr-om the Nazis. He then joined the New School for such disorder that it was not clear how to make sense
et de Loin is an Social Research in New York, where he stayed till of them and use them. It seemed to me urgent to bring
interview,in bookform 1945. This extract is fronmChapter 3, 'Le boheme a to light where this mass of documents had brought us.
prepared by Didier New York. Finally - why not admit it? - I was fairly quick to dis-
E-ibon, published at 89F
by Editions Odile Jacob, D.E. You gave classes, you wrote... How did you or- cover that I was more a man for the study than for the
Paris, who has kindly ganize your day? field. Without any pejorativeintent - quite the contrary
gr-antedpermissionfor C.L.-S. Every morning,I went to the New York Pub- - I would say that fieldwork is a little bit 'women's
reproducingthe extracts.
Thefir-stextract deals lic Library.What I know of social anthropologyI learnt work', which is probablywhy women succeed so well
withUvi -Strauss's during those years. I was there at opening time and at it. For my part,I was lacking in care and patience.
period in New York only left at noon or one o'clock. I lunched in a small D.E. Yet in spite of the dangers we have already
during the gr-eaterpart restaurantand returnedhome to write. mentioned,you did seem to enjoy fieldwork a lot.
of WorldWar 2. The D.E. The Public Library in New York must be an C.L.-S. Yes, I did. But those were my first expedi-
second extract is a tions. I am not sure that if there had been others I
astonishingplace?
discussion of the
str-uctur-eand plan of C.L.-S. There were many people there, but one met would not have experienced growing exasperation on
Mythologiques, few universitypeople; they preferredthe libraryat Col- account of the disproportionbetween usable time and
LU'Oi-Strauss's umbia. I preferred42nd Street because it was nearer wasted time.
four-volume workon the where I lived. The place had great presence: a little an- That was true then, and has only got worse since. A
analysis of American
tiquated,as old New York institutionsoften are, but full few days ago someone sent me from Canada, as a cu-
Indian myth.(The titles riosity, some questionnaires, forms and so on which
of all his books of charm.
mnentioned her-ear-e D.E. Yet there are large holdings in social anthropo- must be filled in in many copies before a 'band' (the
given in French; all are logy? official designation)of Indiansin British Columbia will
available in English C.L.-S. Considerable. Even this library designed to authorizeyou to come and work with them. They won't
t-anslation.) popularize knowledge had very rich holdings and was narratea myth unless the informantreceives a written
? Editions Odile
Jacob, Par-is.The kept up-to-date.It was there that I found a large part of assurancethat he has the literaryproperty,with all the
t-anslation is by the sources I used for Les Structures 'lementairesde la legal consequences implied. You must admit that this
Jonathan Benthall. parente. finicky bureaucracy,this taste for red-tape - a carica-
In ouR October issue, D.E. An objection that has often been addressed to ture of our own practices - does remove much of the
we published anothe- you is that you have read many books but done little old appeal of fieldwork.
pal- of extracts in D.E. Did you also feel what Malinowski described in
translation,one on
fieldwork.
LUvi-Strauss'schildhood C.L.-S. Circumstancesso decided. If I had obtained his diary:feelings of irritation,even of disgust?
and the othe- on his a visa for Brazil in 1940, I would have returnedto the C.L.-S. Very much so. Social anthropologistswere
publications about sites of my pre-warexpeditions and done fieldwork. If hypocritically indignantwhen this diary was published,
racism and anti-racism there had not been a war, I would probablyhave gone claiming that it contradictedhis work. But who has not
since the 1950s. A
off on a research project. Fate took me to the United gone throughthose moments of depression?Alfred Me-
mnispr-int
needs to be
corrected in thefour-th States where I was not able to carry out expeditions, traux, who did an enormous amountof fieldwork, men-
tioned them willingly. You know that when one has

ANTHROPOLOGYTODAY Vol 4 No 6, December 1988 3

Claude Levi-Straussin and also because of the lesson I learnt. The research
thefield in Brazil, 1938. grew more and more complicated, new avenues kept
opening up, and Saussuredied before having published
anything of his immense work. I felt exposed to the
same danger, and resolved to escape it. Otherwise, my
project, like his, would never come to an end.
D.E. When you worked on these myths, your first
task was to provide summariesof them. I suppose that
the myths are longer and more diverse than the version
which you give of them.
C.L.-S. I have been reproachedfor this unfairly. For
the details which I leave in suspense in the summary
are reintegratedlater in my analysis. I had to enable the
readerwho is quite ignorantof this mythology, and for
whom America is an unknown world, to begin by ac-
quiring a syncretic vision of each myth or group of
myths. 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 their role and their necessity.
D.E. These are wonderful stories, real literary texts.
It must have been an immense pleasure for you to be
immersedin that literature.
C.L.-S. They are magnificent stories, and often mov-
ing. Provided that the informant is also a good story-
teller, which is not always the case. I began to work on
mythology in 1950 and I finished Mythologiques in
1970. For twenty years, rising at dawn, drunk with
myths, I really lived in anotherworld.
The myths saturatedme. So much more had to be ab-
wasted a fortnight with an indigenous group without sorbed than what was used! And when one shows that
line: Levi-Strauss'sgreat
grandfatherwas of succeeding in getting anything from the people around such and such a myth, from such and such a popula-
course born in 1806, not one, simply because one gets on their nerves, one be- tion, exists in a modified form in a neighbouringpopu-
1906. There are also two gins to hate them. lation, it is necessary to go through the whole ethno-
slips of translation:in D.E. Did that happento you? graphicliteratureon that populationin order to locate -
line 4, 'my mother's in its environment,its techniques, its history, its social
father' should read 'my
C.L.-S. In the barrensavanas of central Brazil, how
mother'sfather' and in often I had the impressionof making a mess of my life! organization- all the factors which can relate to those
p.6, 1.24, first cousins' To come back to what you were just saying, and with- modifications. I lived with all these peoples and with
should read 'second out comparingmyself to Malinowski, I have done more their myths, as if in a fairy story.
cousins'. fieldwork than my critics say. In any case, enough to D.E. It's also an aestheticexperience.
The latest of Claude C.L.-S. An aesthetic experience all the more exciting
learn and understandwhat fieldwork is - an indispens-
Levi-Strauss'sbooks to
able condition for the healthy judgement and use of because these myths appearfirst of all as puzzles. They
to be translated into
English is The Jealous work done by others. Let us say that my field experien- tell stories without head or tail, full of absurdincidents.
Potter (originally La ces represented what psychoanalysts call a 'didactic'. One has to 'hatch' the myths for days, weeks, some-
Potiere Jalouse, Plon, At the same time, I think I made some finds and re- times months, before suddenly a spark bursts out, and
1985), translatedby portednew facts. in some inexplicable detail in a myth, one recognizes a
Be'nedicteChorier (U. of
transformationof some inexplicable detail in another
Chicago P., ?15.95).
This has come to be myth, so that by this expedient they can be brought
Below: an extract from Chapter 14, 'En suivant le
regarded as one of his together as a unity. Each detail in itself need mean
dcnicheurd'oiseaux'.
most accessible books nothing; it is in their differentialrelationshipsthat their
and is specially notable D.E. Each volume of Mythologiquesconsists of sev- intelligibility is to be found.
for its debate with eral hundred pages. At the end of L'Homme nu, you D.E. The titles of your four books have become fa-
psychoanalysis.
Didier Eribon is also
look back on the whole as a homogeneous work. mous. Le Cru et le cuit, Du Miel aux cendres,
the author of a similar C.L.-S. With the reservationthat having written the L'Origine des manieres de table say a good deal about
book of interviewswith third volume, I said to myself that I would never suc- the project as a whole, which is to show the passage
Georges Dume'zil,the ceed in finishing it because several more would be from natureto culture.As for the last, L'Hommenu...
eminentFrench student needed. I took the decision that there would be only C.L.-S. This goes back to the starting-point,for the
of Indo-Europeanmyth
one more, the fourth, and that I would include in it, naked in relation to culture is the equivalent of the raw
and ideology who died
in 1986 (see A.T., whether by way of allusion or of incitement to future in relation to nature. The first word in the title of the
December 1986, for an research, everything which I still had to say. That is first volume, and the last word in the title of the last,
obituaryand comment). why this last volume is thicker than the early ones, and answer each other, just as the journey begun in South
of a more complicated construction;it contains the ma- America and progressinggraduallyto the northernmost
terial for two or three books. parts of North America returnsat the end to its starting-
D.E. You feared for the failure of your venture? point.
C.L.-S. I rememberedSaussure and his work on the D.E. When you called the first volume Le Cru et le
Nibelungen. He spent part of his life, the greater part cuit, did you think then of calling the last one
perhaps, in unravelling this mixture of myths, legends L'Hommenu?
and history. There are still a hundredor so handwritten C.L.-S. I didn't have such a clear view. But I knew
exercise books in the Geneva Library,of which I have by and large what my route would be. Starting from
obtained and studied microfilm copies. Reading these myths which make out of invention, or discovery, of
fascinated me because of all the ideas I found there, cooking food, the standardfor the passage from nature

4 ANTHROPOLOGYTODAY Vol 4 No 6, December 1988

 to culture - pushed on by the internal logic of the sage from one continent to another is necessary, and
myths and getting nearer and nearerto them - I ended this book straddles the two. The last volume, entirely
up with myths for which the dividing line between cul- North American,carries the readerto the furthestpoint.
ture and nature does not pass any more between raw For by a curious paradoxwhich I try to take account of,
and cooked, but between the acceptance or refusal of it is between the most geographically distant parts of
economic exchanges; that is to say the acceptanceor re- the New World that resemblances between myths are
fusal of a social life that goes beyond the frontiers of clearest.
the group. Fairs and markets, where even peoples who The second movement you speak of is a logical one.
are enemies meet each other periodically to exchange The myths that I introducesuccessively are approaches
foods and the productsof their industry,achieve an ela- to problems of growing complexity. Those discussed in
boratedform of social life, comparable- and the com- the first volume exploit oppositions between sensible
parison is made by those concerned- to that first trans- qualities: raw and cooked, fresh and rotten, dry and
formationwhich a culture on its own imposes on nature moist, and so forth. In the second volume, these opposi-
throughthe operationof cooking its food. tions give way little by little to others which appeal not
to a logic of qualities but to a logic of forms: empty
D.E. At the same time as working out from the and full, containerand contained, internaland external,
centre, your book is organized around an ascent from and so forth. The third volume, L'Origine des manieres
South America to North America. de table, accomplishes a decisive step. It deals with
C.L.-S. It is in the north-west of North America, myths which, instead of opposing terms, oppose the
from Oregon to British Columbia, that myths tend in contrastingways in which these terms came to be op-
the direction I have just outlined, on account of the ex- posed to one another. How, the myths ask, does the
ceptional development of commercial exchanges be- passage from one state to anotherfunction?
tween tribes. So it was particularlyclinching to my ar- Myths which narratea journey by dugout canoe have
gument that I found there the South American myths a strategic importance in the book because they illus-
which I had startedfrom, in barely modified form. The trate this type of problem admirably.When the journey
loop closed on the spot, as well as between the two he- starts,it turnsout that as it progresses the near becomes
mispheres. distant and the distant becomes near. When one arrives
D.E. Your starting point, as you have recalled, is a at its destination,the initial values of the two terms are
Bororo myth about a bird's-nester. How does one inverted. But the journey has taken time. The category
choose a 'reference myth' which is going to allow all of time is thus introduced into mythic thought as a
the others to be linked to it in a chain? necessary means to disclose relationshipsbetween other
C.L.-S. I had lived in a Bororo village at the time of relationshipsalready given in space. Which means that
my first expedition. My attention was drawn above all a novelistic dimension interweaves itself into the myth-
to social organization;when I had to concern myself ic dimension, with all the consequences which that im-
with religious studies in the Cinquiemesection [part of plies for the evolution of the two genres. And that
the Sorbonne in Paris] I became interested as well in shows, too, that mythic thought is capable of abstrac-
the mythology that the Salesian missionaries had been tion, albeit in an implicit way, when it combines, al-
collecting for half a century. ways with the greatest subtlety, terms which startedoff
D.E. Which suggests that the choice is completely as concrete images drawnfrom sensory experience.
arbitrary?
C.L.-S. At the beginning, yes. As I was saying to D.E. You unveil in this work the logical thought
you earlier about history in general, today I can explain which you had defined in La Pense'esauvage. In a little
my choice retrospectivelyand even justify it. But when digression inserted in Du Miel aux cendres, you ask
I did it, it was for accidentalreasons. why people who possessed such a capacity for logical
D.E. In theory, you could have startedfrom another abstractiondid not effect the passage to scientific and
myth, anotherpopulation. philosophical reason which took place in other civiliza-
C.L.-S. Yes indeed, and as the earth of mythology is tions, in Antiquity.
round, anotheritinerarywould have broughtme back to C.L.-S. I don't know the answer. Perhaps it was
the same point. However, I did understandafterwards necessary, for thought to transformitself, that the so-
that this myth occupies a strategicposition in the set of cieties themselves became of anothertype.
Amerindianmyths. It articulatestwo systems concern- D.E. As regardsGreece, it is true that Vernantrelates
ing, respectively, the vertical and horizontal axes; that the passage to rationalthoughtto the political organiza-
is to say, between on the one hand high and low, earth tion of cities...
and heaven, nature and supernature,and on the other C.L.-S. Yes, and others have seen legal thought as
hand between near and far, fellow-citizens and foreign- making demandsin precision and vigour which are pre-
ers. conditions for the appearance of scientific thought.
D.E. Mythologiquesfollows a geographic movement, These different interpretationsseem to be quite close to
but also a progressionin the complexity of the analysis. each other.
C.L.-S. That is true. The four volumes progress in a D.E. Your journey into mythology finishes in
double movement. On the one hand, geographical ex- L'Homme nu with a chapterentitled 'The single myth'.
tension. The analysis in Le Cru et le cuit is confined to Did you mean that all the myths analysed in the course
South America and above all to Central and Eastern of the four volumes were only in fact variationson one
Brazil. Du Miel aux cendres broadens the field of en- and the same myth?
quiry, to the south as much as to the north, but is still C.L.-S. At least, variations on one great theme: the
South American. In L'Origine des manieres de table, passage from natureto cu'lturewhich had to be paid for
the analysis starts again with a myth which is still by the definitive ruptureof communicationbetween the
South American but more northern,meeting the same heavenly world and the earthly world. Hence the prob-
problem by means of a different imagery which is bet- lems for humanitywhich this mythology focuses on.
ter illustratedby myths from North America. The pas-

ANTHROPOLOGYTODAY Vol 4 No 6, December 1988 5