The narrow-mindedness condemned by Lévi-Strauss was perfectly illustrated in the French refusal to open the national community “on the basis of equal rights” to the “twenty five million Muslim citizens” from the colonies, a timorous isolationism that contrasted with the audacity of the United States a century earlier, when it opened its doors to mass immigration by poor and uneducated Europeans – a successful gamble “which saved America from remaining an insignificant province of the Anglo-Saxon world.”38 This comparison between the two national destinies figures in the very last chapter of Tristes Tropiques, written in early 1955, as the Union Française – the political organization of the French colonial empire from 1946 on – was falling apart and the Algerian war was just beginning. For Lévi-Strauss, this debacle was due to the hypocrisy of the system of representation within the Union Française, the so-called double college which, despite a theoretically egalitarian Constitution (since “indigenous” status had been abolished and all Union members had the status of citizens), established a highly unequal system of representation between metropolitan French and colonial populations. This is the only allusion in Tristes Tropiques to an issue that was both at the center of French current events and the essential dynamic of the international context at the time of its writing – i.e. decolonization – which has been singled out as conspicuously absent from Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology. Thus, neither at the international nor at the national scale had the post-war period kept its promise of a new deal.
At the end of “The Theory of Power in a Primitive Society,” Lévi-Strauss cited the very important memo of November 8, 1941, on the “new indigenous policy in French equatorial Africa” by Governor-General Félix Éboué, which he had read in English translation. In it, Éboué recommended a policy of gradual and realistic association which took existing social structures into account, respected traditions and relied on traditional leaders – and it was with regard to the latter point that Lévi-Strauss mentioned it. This memo was to serve as the starting point of the Brazzaville Conference (January 30 to February 8, 1944), which led to the creation of the Union Française. The latter was widely inspired, at least at the level of principle, by the federalist ideal that Lévi-Strauss supported, having seen nationalism as a scourge ever since his early socialist years. In February 1943, writing for a few interlocutors at the US State Department, he argued: “The disintegration of national sovereignty must start from within through a process of federalism, on the one hand, and the creation of economic bodies, on the other, that will undermine the differences between national groups.”39 But by the mid-1950s that ideal was already anachronistic. “Federalism” had become an accusation leveled by the nationalist right and the colonial camp, in particular against Pierre Mendès-France (whom Lévi-Strauss held in high esteem and with whom he met as he was writing Tristes Tropiques), and even against Jacques Soustelle, himself an anthropologist by training and a socialist in his youth, who had been appointed Governor General of Algeria in 1955. Independentist leaders, for their part, saw federalism as nothing but an empty catchword, as demonstrated by the hypocrisies of the Union Française – nothing but a way of surreptitiously perpetuating French rule. The principle of nationhood thus resurfaced everywhere, and Lévi-Strauss understood that he had to accept defeat in the face of what he later termed the “powerful engine” against which “no dominating state, not even a federating state, can stand up to for long.” However, as he would immediately add, this was “nothing to celebrate” – “national sovereignty is not a good in itself; it all depends on what use is made of it.”40 In this respect, the early 1950s was indeed a moment of disillusionment for Lévi-Strauss, and, when he incorporated the text of “The Theory of Power” into Tristes Tropiques, he removed the reference to Félix Eboué and his comments on the necessity of dialogue between anthropologists and colonial administrators.
In his eyes, the history of the world was now determined, and in some sense overwhelmed, by the expansion of Western modernity. No force, no regulatory mechanism could oppose it any longer. “We have placed the colonized people” in a “tragic position”: they are “forced to choose between ourselves or nothing.”41 This accounts for the absence of the colonial question from the work of Lévi-Strauss, since this return of the nation-state forced him to make a distinction between, on the one hand, “small traditional societies, protected by their own isolation from the ravages of civilization, with no other ambition than to live apart” from capitalist modernity and, on the other hand, peoples who wanted to “take part on an equal footing in international life and to become full members of industrial society, in relation to which they can only feel like latecomers.”42 The two do not belong to the same history or call for the same approach. In this respect, the turning point was probably “The Foreign Policy of a Primitive Society” (chapter X) which articulated for the first time the idea on which Race and History was to conclude in 1952, and which was to become the central thesis, albeit in a much more pessimistic mode, of Race et Culture – namely the relative incommensurability of cultures and the need to maintain differences between groups. Making the “notion of humanity … coextensive with all human beings peopling the surface of the earth” was progress, but the foreign policy of the Nambikwara reminds us of the need for each group to continue to “think of itself as a group, in relation to and in opposition with other groups,” for this balance is the only way out of the alternative between “total war,” from which we had only just emerged in 1949, and “the utopian ideal of total peace” (p. 147).
The early 1950s was thus marked less by a withdrawal from politics as by a change of scale in thinking, as well as, it must be said, a rise in pessimism. For it was then that the “unilateral system” of Western civilization as a whole, and the fetishism of progress, became the targets of Lévi-Strauss’s critique. It was also then that he began to apply the thermodynamic metaphor of entropy to global history, in the rich sense the term entropy had recently acquired from information sciences and cybernetic theory – i.e. the multiplication of exchanges between human groups flattens and equalizes an enclosed world – and condemns it to disorganization.43 This did not prevent him from continuing for a few more years to act as an expert within the newly founded UNESCO, whose headquarters were in Paris, not far from the Musée de l’Homme. He was on the panel of scholars the organization formed in December of 1949 to reflect on what was to become UNESCO’s first Declaration on Race;44 in August 1950, he went on a four-month mission to India and Pakistan to investigate “the state of the teaching of the social sciences in Pakistan”; and, at the behest of Alfred Métraux – who directed a collection of publications entitled “Race and Racism” – he wrote Race and History, which was published in 1952, at the same time as he became head of the UNESCO International Social Science Council. As Wiktor Stoczkowski has noted (and as opposed to Lévi-Strauss’s own later account), he was very actively involved, at least during the first few years, even if his interventions betrayed a certain scepticism regarding the principles governing the organization.45 It was within this framework that his thinking on a “generalized humanism”46 developed from his critique of traditional humanism, which was in his view poisoned from the start by the “self-love” that had led man to isolate himself from his environment and from the rest of the living world. It was then that he became convinced – sounding incongruous at the time and resonating with disturbing relevance today – that “these recognized rights of humanity as a species will encounter their natural limits in the rights of other species.”47
The genocide of Amerindians and the destruction of European Jews
Yet this account of the 1950s turning point as a direct consequence of disillusionment