Review of Patrick Wilcken's "Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

If there was one reason why I tend to shy away from biographies, it would be because many biographers tend to be either hagiographers or attack dog hacks. Patrick Wilcken’s biography of Claude Levi-Strauss, maybe the most influential anthropologist of the twentieth century, avoids both of these. The result is a beautiful book that takes Levi-Strauss seriously and gives him the due consideration he deserves, but never becomes obsequious toward its subject. 

Aside from presenting the arch of Levi-Strauss’s life, he does the same thing for the place of academic anthropology in both the United States and Europe. In fact, as Levi-Strauss was doing his fieldwork in Brazil among the Bororo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib peoples, anthropology departments were just in their infancy. The giants in the field at the time were Malinowski, Mauss, and Boas, all of whose work seems oddly anachronistic now in the light of Levi-Strauss’s and his students’ influence.

Levi-Strauss’s training was in law and philosophy, but during his youth was constantly engaged with art (his father was a portraitist), music, and politics. While he was mostly interested in mythography and kinship studies, he occasionally wrote on art and music, which also maintained his interest. He was an avowed leftist during the interwar years, but he later turned inward and became apolitical. In his old age, he would become disgruntled at the growing multicultural nature of France, especially with Islam. 

In 1955, Levi-Strauss’s best-known book “Tristes Tropiques” appeared, a memoir which recounted his time spent among the aboriginal peoples of Brazil, and his only non-academic book. In it, he began to show the first signs of pessimism about the preservation of native peoples and traditions, and how Brazilian “civilization” was destroying them. 

Because of Levi-Strauss’s peculiar path – he chose to interrupt his formal work by accepting an invitation to do fieldwork in Brazil – he had difficulty reentering the academic world when he returned to France at the end of the 1940s. The eruption of World War II, during which he fled to New York City, didn’t help him getting back on track, either. While in the U.S., he found work at the New School for Social Research, where he would first gain contact with one of his biggest influences, Russian-born linguist Roman Jacobson. It was only after Levi-Strauss borrowed from Jacobson’s linguistic structuralism that he himself became known as the father of structuralist anthropology. Structuralism is a theoretical paradigm that suggests culture – or language, or myth, or whatever else – can only be fully understand as an interrelationship between its smaller parts. This idea would be absolutely fundamental to Levi-Strauss’s later analysis of mythology and kinship systems. Wilcken seems to have a particular interest in showing how Levi-Strauss’s interest in structuralism as a formal method developed in tandem with his interests in Freud, Jacobson, art and literature.

Levi-Stauss’s work, while sometimes known for its cold formalism, was just as often attacked for its lyricism and overly subjective, aestheticized approach, especially in his mythography. I find this duality appropriate for a thinker who himself was always splitting things into twos and fours, and building n-dimensional matrices to suss out the true complexities hidden in the permutations that he spun out of his mythemes. 

Wilcken discusses Levi-Strauss’s most important work in a fair, even-handed way, devoting a whole chapter to “Tristes Tropiques” and quite a bit of time considering his epic, four-volume, two-thousand page “Mythologiques” quartet, the masterpiece of his middle career. With the exception of “Tristes Tropiques,” Levi-Strauss’s work has the reputation of being fantastically difficult, replete with charts and graphs of endogamous and exogenous kinship relations that probably only the fully anthropologically initiated can fully understand. And while Wilcken never really scratches the surface of Levi-Strauss’s ideas – this, while a wonderful biography, is by no means a form presentation of his ideas – the way he talks about his development goads the reader (or at least me) to want to learn more about him. To that end, I’ve dusted off a few related books in my library, including Levi-Strauss’s “Myth and Meaning,” Christopher Johnson’s “Levi-Strauss: The Formative Years,” and even “Tristes Tropiques” itself.