Structural Anthropology Zero. Claude Levi-Strauss

maturity, is thus unfounded. Quite the contrary, the table of contents reflects the work of careful selection. This is the first observation at the origin of the present volume, Structural Anthropology Zero,⁶ which brings together seventeen articles that Lévi-Strauss rejected when he composed the 1958 volume. Some of his decisions are easily enough understood and, indeed, Lévi-Strauss himself offered explanations for them: “I have made a choice, rejecting works of purely ethnographic and descriptive character, as well as others of theoretical scope but the substance of which has been incorporated into my book Tristes Tropiques.” Other texts, such as “The Art of the Northwest Coast at the American Museum of Natural History” (chapter XII of the present volume), had probably appeared dated: the sense of wonder was still there, but progress in the discipline had rendered the theoretical point (in this case, diffusionist questions) obsolete. Finally, some of the studies seemed to have been superseded by more recent ones, as for instance “Indian Cosmetics” (chapter XI), which, in 1942, had provided readers of the American surrealist review VVV with a detailed description of Kaduveo makeup, the in-depth analysis of which was yet to come in Tristes Tropiques. Similarly, the long presentation of “French Sociology” (chapter I) must also have seemed outdated to Lévi-Strauss, superseded by his Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, published in 1950.⁷

We were thus left with a loss, which the present collection seeks to remedy. A loss because the final selection effectively excluded many insights – such as, for example, certain passages of “The Theory of Power in a Primitive Society” (chapter VIII), on which Lévi-Strauss amply drew in Tristes Tropiques, yet whose remarkable final considerations on the notion of “natural power” were left out; or, to take another example, the very dense discussion of Durkheim’s work found in “French Sociology” but that did not find its way into the 1950 study on the work of Mauss – itself an important and difficult article, the much discussed “bible of structuralism,” into which the 1945 text on Durkheim provides much insight.⁸ But a loss also because Lévi-Strauss’s selection left out articles that did not fit with the theoretical project of Structural Anthropology yet played a major role in the development of other ideas outside the scope of structuralism. This is the case for both “War and Trade among the Indians of South America” (chapter VII), as well as “The Theory of Power in a Primitive Society.” Both of these articles are essential references for social and political theories that take native societies of South America as examples of societies with low levels of material wealth and minimal political organization, and thus social forms that preceded the state and the primitive accumulation of capital – ideas in political anthropology, of which Pierre Clastres is the most notable illustration.⁹ The same can be said of the article “The Social Use of Kinship Terms among Brazilian Indians” (chapter XIII). Whereas Lévi-Strauss had partially drawn on it for his minor dissertation The Family and Social Life of the Nambikwara Indians, the article was rediscovered by Brazilian scholars in the 1990s and has become, alongside other ethnographic works of the 1940s, a central reference for one of the most important developments in recent anthropology: the reconstruction of Amerindian ontologies through the extension of the notion of affinity with the non-human world. “Initially envisioned as an internal mechanism for the constitution of local groups, affinity has since appeared as a relational dynamic that organizes extra-local relations, articulates people and groups of people beyond kinship, and finally as a language and relational schema between Self and Other, identity and difference.”¹⁰

      Finally, we can easily see how “Techniques for Happiness” (chapter VI), an amusing yet profound reflection on modern American society as Lévi-Strauss experienced it from the inside in the 1940s, did not fit into the theoretical collection he had in mind in 1957. Written in 1944 and published a year later in the journal L’Âge d’Or, it was subsequently republished in 1946 in a special issue of the journal Esprit on “Homo Americanus,” alongside contributions by American writers and thinkers (Kenneth Burke, Margaret Mead), as well as by other exiled intellectuals in the United States during the war (Georges Gurvitch, Denis de Rougemont). Its tone anticipated the more “liberated” meditations of the 1970s and 1980s (such as “New York in 1941” in The View from Afar and the texts of the posthumous collection We Are All Cannibals) but, unlike these, the 1945 article conveyed a sense of concern, even anxiety, with an ample dose of the ambivalence of all participant observation. The text is imbued with a mixture of fascination for and rejection of North American society, which was rather commonplace at the time, but with a content that was quite original. As in the horrified pages of Tristes Tropiques on South Asia, it shows the anthropologist fighting his own aversions (for the almighty imperative of social harmony, the generalized infantilization, the impossibility of solitude, etc.) and attempting to overcome them in a theoretical comparison with European societies. If his aversion here is less visceral than in the descriptions of Calcutta crowds, the text also reveals a subjectivity grappling with its own discomfort and which, in an effort to distance itself from a purely reactive (or simply condescending) form of anti-Americanism, tries to grasp as accurately as possible, through formulations that are sometimes spot on, some of the fundamental traits of North American society: the heterogeneity with itself of a society whose “skeletal structure … is still external” (“alternately amazed and appalled, it discovers itself every day from the outside”); its repudiation of the tragic dimension through a “relentless” sociability; and the ideals of a “childhood without malice,” an “adolescence without hatred” and a “humanity without rancor” – a denial of the contradictions of social life that sometimes culminates, through a kind of return of the repressed, in conflicts between communities of an inordinate violence (p. 98).¹¹

Notwithstanding his repeated homages to the country that “very probably saved his life,” and to its universities and libraries, his genuine and profound misgivings about the United States are palpable, which would be confirmed a few years later by his categorical refusal of offers from Talcott Parsons and Clyde Kluckhohn (with vigorous encouragement from Roman Jakobson) of a position at Harvard. “I knew in my bones that I belonged to the Old World, irrevocably.”¹² As with the chapters of Tristes Tropiques on Pakistan and Islam – which, although written based on notes from 1950, mention only very fleetingly the massacres and massive population displacements that followed the partition of India – the contemporary reader of “Techniques for Happiness” may also be struck by the silences and blind spots typical of the times and to the position of the observer who, even though called upon to give witness on American society, wonders about the utter estrangement between “generations, sexes and classes” but barely mentions segregation and racial conflict.¹³

      The present volume is thus intended to make available important yet often lesser known contributions, most of which were originally published in English in various journals, and many of which have become difficult to find.¹⁴ In addition to their intrinsic interest, the seventeen articles Lévi-Strauss decided to omit in 1958 represent a kind of prehistory of structural anthropology; they allow us, through a process of cross-checking, to grasp better both the theoretical project and its meaning for Claude Lévi-Strauss, the person, in the mid-1950s.

      New York, 1941–1947

But there’s more. For the present volume is not made simply of residues, of “odds and ends,” as Lévi-Strauss liked to say in English. Its coherence is not a negative one only. It is, first and foremost, shaped by a place and a time: New York in the years 1941 to 1947. The articles collected here were all written by Lévi-Strauss during his American, and we could even say New York, period, first as a Jewish refugee – a scholar in exile, saved by the rescue plan for European academics of the Rockefeller Foundation – and then as the cultural attaché