A Memory of Claude Lévi-Strauss

In 1974, when I was a graduate student in anthropology at Columbia University, I wanted to organize a discussion of universals with people whose ideas I wished to know more about than I thought I could get from their writings. At the time, I was working for Margaret Mead as one of her assistants at the American Museum of Natural History, so I asked her how I might go about getting my wish. She said "talk to these people and see if they'll meet." So I went to see Noam Chomsky in Cambridge, Jean Piaget in Geneva, and Jacques Monod in Paris, and they agreed; but I wondered if Levi-Strauss would because he seemed so aloof. Margaret licked her lips and laughed: "Well, that's his look, aloof and frail, but he's more playful than he lets on and he'll outlive me by thirty years if a day. Just tell him I sent you."

I ran from La Bastille to the College de France on Rue des Ecoles and up the steps to knock on his door. He opened it, saw the sweat running down my face and, asked rather coldly: "Monsieur, que'est-ce que je peux faire pour vous?" I said I was an anthropology student from America and had a bunch of questions for him. He was gracious but distant and said, "Ask two."

First, I asked him why he believed binary operators to be one of the fundamental structures of the human mind. He shrugged and sighed and then replied:

When I started there was still no science of mind.

Saussure, Marx, Mauss and music were my guides. Since then things have changed. Psychology now has something to say.

Then, I asked him why he became an anthropologist and he said:

I wanted to be a musician but having no talent I read philosophy and wanted to find out how different one human being's thoughts could be from another and how much of that difference is truly the same. In Brazil, an opportunity came to try to find out, and I am still trying.

He dabbed his nose with a handkerchief, rose from his chair in that regal, crane-like manner of his, thanked me for coming and started walking me back to the door, when I turned to him and said. "Margaret Mead te dit bonjour." His dour demeanor turned into a child's joy. "Would you like to come home to dinner with now?" he asked, with a lightness that belonged to another person, another time. I declined with some idiot excuse because I still stank from running. But I asked him if he would join the discussion with Chomsky, Piaget and the others that I had forgotten to tell him about until then. "Yes," he said kindly, "just tell me when."

At the discussion, which took place over the course of a few days at the Abbaye de Royaumont outside Paris, Lévi-Strauss sat patiently, said nothing as others spoke their piece or pontificated, or pleaded and shouted their oppositions. But his doodles of cats and other real and fantastical animals were stunning, and those he left behind were the objects of a fierce competition among some of the conference's participants, including myself. On the way to our last lunch, Noam Chomsky ─ who had dominated this conference of Nobel-prize winning biologists and world-famous mathematicians, philosophers, psychologists and anthropologists as I have never seen anyone do before or after ─ walked up to Lévi-Strauss and said in a shy sort of way: "Perhaps you remember me, when I sat in on your class at Harvard with Roman Jakobson?" Lévi-Strauss looked at Chomsky and said: "I'm sorry, but no." Those were the only words he would utter in the conference room.

In an interview the following year, Levi-Strauss was asked what recent intellectual developments he considered to be important. He said that what had transpired at Royaumont was the most significant intellectual event he had thus far encountered in the second half of the twentieth century. He also implied that his time was over: "I imagine myself in the New World with Columbus for the first time," he mused, "a symphony of sounds, of colors, of smells, of desires, and of hopes. Then I imagine myself on the moon with the astronauts, and all I see is gray, dust and barren rocks, and the earth I long for is far out of reach."

 

Comments

[amanda8]

Thank you for this memoir pearl of that time. I would like to read an entire book of bold, brash encounters with intellectual influence leaders of that time. My own brash encounter was with 80 year-old suffragist Alice Paul in 1972 when I was in my 20s. She took me in, fed me, "radicalized" me and turned me into a lobbyist for the Equal Rights Amendment. It didn't seem like much at the time-- I was too yound to realize.

Scott, write more!

[booksnmoreforyou]

Fascinating window into this, one of my intellectual heroes.

[Peatbog]

I wonder if the Bororo note his passing.

[DiogenesOfAlaska]

It's when you hear one of these anecdotes that you wish people wouldn't trust science because it's all made up... of anecdotes.

But then again, when you change the zoom you find that there's some sense to be made of what those anecdotes add up to.

They don't exactly cancel out each other, but at least there are some hints why not all meaning results from the chauvinistic imposition of order: even after controlling for that effect, some things remain worthy of study and remain to be said, and some of them even can be said without imposing new undue chauvinisms.

[Shirley Fisk]

11/7/09
11:12pm
Alexandria,VA

You should have gone to dinner with him.

[icewomancometh]

Great post. Thanks!

[sheila]

what a lucky person you are to have met and conversed with m. levi-strauss! i especially enjoy his musings on being a man out of time, as i often feel the same! thanks for the post...

[Weirdo]

Can you recommend one of these "man out of time" musings?

[floridafun]

thanks for sharing this mr atron, i really enjoyed this piece. i have had such great respect for margaret mead since i was a teen too many years ago ;-) how fortunate for you to have worked with her and had access to all the people mentioned!

[FearlessFreep]

I like his blue jeans! =)