Tabula rasa
These texts of the 1940s, which Lévi-Strauss later chose to set aside, offer a window onto an emerging structuralism, a perspective that rejects seeing it as nothing more than an intellectual fad of the 1960s, as some facile and superficial accounts would have it. Structuralism can thus be viewed as a European movement that was born in the United States, in response to a crisis in functionalism and to the deadlock of American nominalism, which rejected the idea of comparing cultural entities on the grounds that each was irreducible and singular. The teachers and researchers of the École Libre des Hautes Études did not all become structuralists. Yet these exiled intellectuals, many of whom were Jewish, shared a common commitment to a comparative approach. The specifically structuralist project within this general orientation was thus to restore an epistemological status to intercultural comparison.23 These articles also show that the genesis of structuralism was by no means a linear process. The birth of structural anthropology is too often presented as a kind of “accession,” the crowning moment of a glorious sequence that begins with Lévi-Strauss’s lack of peer recognition upon returning to France (he was twice rejected by the Collège de France, in 1949 and 1950, and The Elementary Structures of Kinship initially met with a lukewarm response), followed by the publication of Tristes Tropiques in 1955 and that of Structural Anthropology in 1958, and culminating finally in his election to the Collège de France in 1959. However, returning to these older texts helps us to understand that this sequence did not result from the intrinsic power of structuralist theory, ultimately prevailing over all obstacles and opposition. It was, instead, made possible by a work of reconstruction, selection and “repression,” undertaken by Lévi-Strauss himself, in relation to certain aspects of his own thought. One essential dimension of his writing, in particular, was excised, namely any role for political commitment in anthropological reflection – a concern that was indeed to disappear entirely from the anthropologist’s work from Structural Anthropology onward. This is perhaps the most original and striking aspect of the articles collected in this volume.
We now know that political activism played a major part in the life of the young Lévi-Strauss. A member of the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO) at age eighteen, then secretary of the Groupe d’Études Socialistes from 1927, he founded the Révolution Constructive group in 1931, together with ten of his agrégation classmates, to give the party a new intellectual face. While serving as assistant to SFIO deputy Georges Monnet in 1930, he ran unsuccessfully for local office in the town of Mont-de-Marsan, to whose secondary school he had been appointed as a teacher in 1933. The image of Lévi-Strauss as a melancholy anthropologist withdrawn from the world and devoted to the study of vanished civilizations is thus a later construction. The work of intellectual history that, in the 1980s and 1990s, rediscovered the political commitments of his youth did not radically transform his public image. Lévi-Strauss himself dated the end of his political “career” to his unsuccessful electoral run, which he jokingly attributed to a car accident.24 The Citroën he had bought for the campaign ended up in a ditch, which seemed in retrospect to have marked a turning point: indeed, only a few months later, Lévi-Strauss was sent to teach sociology in Brazil, where he would launch a career in anthropology that had no links with his earlier political ambitions. Yet a careful reading of his 1940s writings shows that, far from having given up on his “political illusions,” well into his adulthood, Lévi-Strauss did not separate his scholarly work from his political thinking, in which he was already anticipating the post-war context, as confirmed by his activities in circles associated with the École Libre des Hautes Études as well as in international intellectual networks. His early return to France – the war was not yet over – and his subsequent appointment as cultural attaché show that he had been identified by the Gaullist political machine as a reliable man.
It is through a few incidental remarks that this political dimension is first revealed. For instance, the teleological bent he perceived in Durkheim paradoxically places the founder of sociology together with the reactionary Louis de Bonald. Hence the worried observation: “Obviously, any social order could take such a doctrine as a pretext for crushing individual thought and spontaneity” (p. 56). And yet: “All moral, social and intellectual progress has made its first appearance as a revolt of the individual against the group” (p. 56). This was yet another reason for rejecting Malinowski’s functionalism, which indeed retained from Durkheim only the all-powerful group and thereby appeared as a “system of interpretation … which makes it dangerously possible to justify any regime whatsoever” (p. 64). The critique is epistemological (functionalism leads to circular assertions), but the forcefulness of its tone is due to the potential political consequences of the challenged thesis. Conversely, Westermarck is rehabilitated for theoretical reasons, yet his analytical rigor “confers on his work a critical and politically engaged quality of which he was fully aware.” “In his view, moral evolution had a meaning: it was going to bring humanity closer to an ideal of liberalism and rationalism, to free it from its errors and prejudices. … He considered the relativist critique to be an instrument of spiritual emancipation” (p. 75).
More generally, the circumstances in which these texts were written reveal that they were often part of a collective process of political reflection. Indeed, “The Theory of Power in a Primitive Society” (chapter VIII), which was first published in English in 1944, was originally part of a series of “lectures” on “modern political doctrines” given at the École Libre des Hautes Études, which included presentations on human rights, on the various conceptions of the state, and on the political thought of Louis de Bonald and Charles Maurras. As the jurist Boris Mirkine-Guetzévitch pointed out in the foreword to the publication of these contributions, the series was originally intended as the continuation of another series, on the end of the French Third Republic and its supplantation by the Vichy regime, insisting on the urgent need for scholars from various disciplines to work together and to collaborate in confronting the problems of the day. In the same way, “The Foreign Policy of a Primitive Society” (chapter X) was initially published in the journal Politique etrangère, which, beginning in the 1930s, distinguished itself in condemning the delusions of the economic and international policies of Nazi Germany. Suspended in 1939, it had just started publishing again in 1949 when Lévi-Strauss contributed his article, which appeared alongside studies on “the refugee problem,” “the United States, the USSR and the Chinese problem,” and the position of a soon to be divided Germany. The originality of Lévi-Strauss’s article does not lie in the description, already published elsewhere, of the exchanges between Nambikwara bands observed on the Brazilian plateau in August and September of 1938 (to be found in part seven of Tristes Tropiques). As the end of the article makes clear, the point was to take the Nambikwara’s “foreign policy” as a model because this community “represents one of the most elementary forms of social life” and can thus serve as the basis for a more general reflection on the relations between foreign groups.25 The ambition of this article – which, on the face of it, describes only the particular situation of the Amerindians of Mato Grosso – lies in a desire to contribute to the reconfiguration of international relations in a world devastated by a second world war and soon to enter into a cold one.
The article is thus filled with statements that spoke to the reader of 1949 in ways that are probably not as clear to us today. This is true of the final lines that condemn the naïve optimism of “our current preoccupations, which would have us think about human problems