"Claude L. Strauss" in the United States

Annie Cohen-Solal

‘We can’t have you use the name Lévi-Strauss. Here, your name shall be Claude L. Strauss.’ I asked why and they said, ‘The students would find it funny, because of the blue jeans.’ And so I lived in the U.S. for many years with a mutilated surname.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, De près et de loin

Many years before the "mutilation" of his name, Claude Lévi-Strauss had encountered the United States by reading American social scientists. Unlike most of the other students at the École Normale Supérieure, his intellectual interests moved outside his French environment. His concern in ethnology was largely due to his discovery of Robert Lowie’s Traité de sociologie primitive. As a young agrégé in philosophy he wanted to become an ethnologist. He was, in his own words, "fascinated by exotic curiosities." A self-described joker, sneak, and collector, he haunted the Paris flea market on Saturday mornings and enjoyed Sunday "expeditions" to the French countryside.

Lévi-Strauss had been attracted to Lowie because he was both "theorist [and] field researcher." Between the two World Wars, social studies in France were severely hampered by lack of funds and organization, and were lagging behind social studies in countries like Germany and the United States. One prominent French sociologist openly deplored "the pitiful state of the teaching of social sciences in France." Philosophy was the supreme tool of access to knowledge, even as intellectuals who had emigrated from other European countries were beginning to create a "porous frontier" between the different fields within traditional social studies—philosophy, sociology, ethnology, and psychoanalysis. Under the influence of Marcel Mauss, a great theorizer who had little field experience, ethnology was slowly establishing itself as a distinct discipline.

Under the circumstances, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s decision to move away from philosophy and embrace a related, yet nascent, discipline was bold. Even Paul Nizan, who had first introduced him to ethnology, had not dared such a move. As early as 1933, at the age of twenty-five, Lévi-Strauss had already chosen to abandon the tradition of Comte and Durkheim to pursue a new science that would legitimize his fieldwork and enable him to put it in a theoretical framework.

Equipped with this singular intellectual cast of mind, he sailed to Brazil in 1935 and "discovered the New World." When his first article on the Bororos was published in the Journal de la société des Américanistes, he would, unknowingly, attract the attention of American ethnologists—the very same ones who, a few years back, had attracted him to ethnology in the first place. This time, however, he was showing them the way. "They had begun to think that they knew enough about the Indians of North America and were looking towards the southern hemisphere. My work was coming at the right time," notes Lévi-Strauss. Indeed, Alfred Métraux and Robert Lowie were reading and taking interest in his work.

This intellectual encounter coincided with the irruption of the Second World War. In occupied France, the law of October 3, 1940 on the status of Jews excluded them from public office. Lévi-Strauss was stripped of his position as research professor at the École Normale Supérieure. Consequently, Métraux and Lowie invited him to the United States as a participant in the Rockefeller Foundation program established to save European Jewish intellectuals.

Lévi-Strauss accepted the invitation. His sojourn in the United States was to last six years, from 1941 to 1947. His experiences there proved extraordinarily diverse. "For someone who was eager for an intellectual quest," he wrote later, "a little bit of culture and intuition were all that was necessary to open, within the walls of industrialized civilization, doors that would lead to other worlds and other times." In the United States he was a little like Alice, pushing through each new door to find a New World. His adventures took the form of a play that had five distinctive acts.

Act I: Lévi-Strauss Encounters American Ethnologists

At the New School for Social Research, Lévi-Strauss was asked to teach a sociology class on contemporary Latin America in English—a subject about which he said he "knew nothing at all." His character was immediately put to the test. A practical man, he tutored himself as best he could from the available resources. At the Forty-second Street branch of the New York Public Library, he discovered "a considerable collection" in the relevant area and worked tirelessly on Peru and Argentina. "Everything I know about ethnology, I learned there," he admitted later.

Confronted by professional demands usually imposed only on established figures, Lévi-Strauss accelerated his research. In the Library of Congress and in the American Philosophical Society he found vast, unsuspected resources—"sleeping treasures," as he called them. Later, with the creation within the New School of the "French University in Exile"—which included figures like Georges Gurvitch, Jacques Soustelle, and Jean Weiller—Lévi-Strauss helped establish the Institute of Sociology. There he was able to teach in French and choose the topic of his class in ethnology.

The war proved something of a godsend for Lévi-Strauss because it catapulted him early in his career into intellectual hyperspace—from the poverty of French social sciences into the opulence of the American scientific community. There he had the opportunity to interact freely with acclaimed academics, unhindered by hierarchical barriers. In those days of exceptional intellectual activity, he was quickly and warmly welcomed by the master of American ethnology, Franz Boas, and admitted to a circle which included Robert Lowie, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Ralph Linton.

During those years, certain elements in the American intellectual world that had attracted him almost intuitively in his early reading of Lowie’s work became available to Lévi-Strauss: "In the U.S., I started to read periodicals like Scientific American, Science, and Nature," he declares today. "I didn’t understand everything, far from it, but they made a valuable contribution to my work. . . .I have always been fascinated by traditional natural sciences like zoology, botany, and geology." Between the vast libraries and the numerous publications, Lévi-Strauss was discovering little by little the range of the American scientific community. The balance between arcane scientific research and its communication to a popular audience struck him as completely novel.

Another American novelty Lévi-Strauss discovered was that the borders between disciplines seemed more distinctive and yet less rigid than in France. He was able to inquire into the outer limits of ethnology and its relationship to other scientific disciplines, such as linguistics, psychology, history, mathematics, biology, and geology. He could also engage in dialogues with many others thus constructing a vast new scientific culture. As to history, he was "shocked by Malinowsky’s positions as well as by those of a few American anthropologists." His own position was uncompromising. When he participated in the conference of American anthropologists in 1952, he deliberately provoked them: "I said that we were the scrapmongers of history and that we were scavenging for material from the trash cans of history." It was during that same time that he began a long friendship with Margaret Mead.

Act II: Encounter with Jakobson, Linguistics, and Structuralism

In 1942 Lévi-Strauss, who today likes to call himself the "Monsieur Jourdain of Structuralism," opened yet another door. "In those days," he admits, "I knew almost nothing about linguistics and had never heard of Jakobson." Indeed, he met with Jakobson in hopes of learning more about the linguistics of the languages he had encountered in Brazil. That meeting was far more important than he had expected. Beyond Jakobson's "amazing oratory gifts," Lévi-Strauss was presented with the true "revelation of structural linguistics."

This encounter had an enormous impact on Lévi-Strauss and offered him an essential key to his research. Jakobson began working on an "attempt to build a series of apparently arbitrary facts into a system." While listening to the great linguist, Lévi-Strauss was discovering that ethnology of the nineteenth century or even that of the twentieth century had been content, much like the neo-grammarians’ linguistics, "to substitute problems of a purely causal nature with problems of means and ends. Structuralism was to reveal the unvarying through variety."

During those years, Jakobson had become a guide and master to the "naive structuralist." In his lectures, the Russian linguist had offered "novel insights" which came ever closer to Lévi-Strauss’s "own conclusions," though the younger man did not yet have the audacity or the conceptual tools necessary to shape them. Their fraternity turned into intellectual complicity and a dialogue followed. As had happened with Lowie and Métraux, the work of the disciple caught the "master’s" interest: Jakobson attended Lévi-Strauss’s lectures on systems of kinship, suggested that he publish them, and encouraged what would soon become Les structures élémentaires de la parenté.

Act III: Friendship with the Surrealists

"Claude Lévi-Strauss was extremely kind and exquisitely polite. . . . He spoke little, but when he did he was precise, witty, deadpan, and sometimes even icy. He was above all a remarkable observer. He knew André Breton because they had crossed the Atlantic on the same ship. Both were extremely well-mannered, very courteous, and shared a similar type of education. They could understand and respect each other," stated Dolorès Vanetti, a friend of the New York circle of surrealists who worked with them in the Office of War Information. She said the two men came from the same intellectual tradition, shared the same tastes, the same passion for Gustave Moreau, Symbolism and neo-Symbolism, and had the same interests in the irrational. As Lévi-Strauss tells us: "I use roughly the same materials [as Breton] in order to attempt to analyze them."

United by a genuine "passion for objects," Dolorès Vanetti, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Max Ernst, André Breton, and others often visited a small antique shop on Third Avenue that sold wonderful exotic objects from the Pacific Northwest, a few of which, recalls Lévi-Strauss, "gave the impression that all the essentials of humanity’s artistic treasures could be found in New York, where samples were constantly bought and sold." The artistic community in exile in New York included Duchamp, Masson, Tanguy, Matta, and Calder. It was a congenial group where one could find "a sense. . .of intellectual excitement," a group in which Lévi-Strauss was very comfortable.

Lévi-Strauss had immediately become close friends with Max Ernst. Indeed, it was more than a friendship; it was almost osmosis. He said that the surrealists had "taught him not to be afraid of abrupt and unexpected confrontations, the kind that Max Ernst had created in his collages." Later on, the ethnologist readily conceded that he had been inspired by the artist in his work on mythology: like putting together a collage, he would assemble "the myths as if they had been images cut out of an old book." "The structuralist method," he added in 1983, had "an affinity with the formula outlined by Max Ernst in 1934."

Act IV: Discovery of the Poetics of the City

Undoubtedly, all of Lévi-Strauss’s encounters could take place harmoniously because he had created a special language out of "his" New York. The city upset his expectations, caught him off guard, and deeply moved him. He had expected an "ultramodern metropolis," but found an "aggregation of villages," and "a huge vertical and horizontal mess." Allowing himself to be carried along by its movements, contrasts, and ebbs and flows, he observed the juxtapositions of the city, from the "syndicalist" atmosphere of Greenwich Village where he lived, to the "New York aristocracy" of the Upper East Side. He loved "the incredibly complex image of modern lifestyles next to almost archaic ones," exemplified by "an Indian wearing feathered headgear and a pearl-embroidered leather coat. . .taking notes with a Parker pen in the New York Public Library." He was able to capture with rare insight the peculiar behaviors of New Yorkers such as the "brisk changes in habits of dressing," women’s customs ("In New York, women don’t wear dresses, they wear costumes"), and the whims of a few of his colleagues who lived the "illusion of the pilgrim’s life" in their country homes. He noted with humor the "deep mysteries of a subway express" with its "elliptical. . .signposts," and was able to see the paradox of American museums, at once fabulously rich and desperately poor.

In later years, remembering his New York days, he was grateful for the unlimited opportunities to conduct theoretical research. But he regretted having become a "member of the establishment." Yet in contrast to his own judgment, the observations he brought back show that the eye of the ethnologist remained as focused as ever—that New York had become his field of investigation, his gold mine.

In later writings, ranging from minute observations to comparisons with Europe, one can sense the extraordinary wealth of perceptions he gathered, as well as the diversity of the city’s expressions he was able to capture. "There I was with an image of France before the war and I kept telling myself that none of this would be possible in France, and when I came back to France, I quickly began to notice the things that were arriving, . . .such as ads for personal deodorants, which I had found so offensive. When I came back, toward the end of 1947, they were there already."

Act V: A Stint in Public Service

In Tristes tropiques, Lévi-Strauss criticized the "role of intellectual courtesan which France was gradually slipping into." He spoke from experience. After the war, he had been entrusted with an interesting mission—to succeed the archeologist Henry Seyrig as head of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States. To complete his work on family structures he needed to have access to American libraries and insisted on being sent back to New York. Louis Joxe, of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, agreed to forget that he would be a "part-time cultural counselor" and allowed him to continue his research at the Public Library.

The first of his official duties would be architectural in nature: the offices of the French Cultural Services had to be moved back into the private mansion that the French government had purchased before the war on Fifth Avenue at Seventy-fourth Street.

The previous proprietor of the mansion had been the owner of the National City Bank. We had found a large vault which I had asked a team of ex- convicts to break into: it contained all sorts of silverware, precious metals, even gold. . . . There was also a large reception room, or rather a large ballroom, with a painted ceiling and intricate woodwork, copied from a Roman palazzo. I asked Le Corbusier what to do with it. He answered, ‘Don’t touch it, it’s a fine piece of craftsmanship, let’s respect that.’ Since then, each time I’ve moved into a new house with an old room or a weird kitchen, I have kept it.

Among the political decisions Lévi-Strauss had to make during those years were the bridges he helped build between French and American social sciences. Given the pitiful state of social sciences in France before the war, Lévi-Strauss set out to restructure this field by arranging high-level meetings between French academics and the Rockefeller Foundation. Throughout 1946 and 1947, a number of exchanges took place between Pierre Auger, the head of French Universities, Charles Morazé, the secretary of the International Committee of Historical Sciences, and several officers of the Rockefeller Foundation, to work on the development of the social sciences in France. "In France. . .J. H. Willits, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, declared the problems to be huge." Indeed, the Americans were convinced that France was "the European country with the greatest opportunities for the Rockefeller Foundation’s work." Toward the end of 1949, the Foundation had voted to grant the École Pratique des Hautes Études thirty thousand dollars for three years to establish a department of "social and economic sciences." Through this grant, economics broke away from the law faculty, and sociology and history were no longer buried in the humanities. The grant gathered together what would become France’s first team of young researchers in the social sciences.

While Lévi-Strauss continued to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the city, he was also expected to entertain a variety of distinguished visitors such as Roger Caillois, Albert Camus, le Cardinal Tisserand, and Jules Romains. "All these people felt compelled, out of courtesy, to pay me a visit," he recalls with a smile. But he disliked the many administrative tensions and political skirmishes that eventually led him to resign:

There were difficulties between the cultural services of the embassy, and Ambassador Bonnet and especially his wife. Unlike them, I was working on a grand scale in a magnificent setting and in what amounted to a virtual Embassy of my own. My deputy was Anne Minor, a lawyer who had sought refuge in the United States. She worked tirelessly to ease those tensions. I tried hard to stay above the fray, and was a poor cultural counselor, as little involved as possible. Finally, there was an incident with General de Bénouville. After that, I told myself that I was ill-suited for this kind of business. I had just finished writing Les structures élémentaires de la parenté, and returned to France.

Other French intellectuals of Lévi-Strauss’s generation had a variety of experiences during the war—participation in the Résistance, exile, deportation, death. Nizan and Cavaillès were dead. Desanti and Merleau-Ponty had moved to the unoccupied zone and fought in the Résistance; Raymond Aron had gone to London. His six years in the United States had set Lévi-Strauss apart. Armed with a very diverse and innovative intellectual perspective, he came back to the French social sciences to note an even wider gap between France and the United States. Its education, organization, resources, and men were all dilapidated. Even the Durkheimian school of sociology had been decapitated. The old generation was gone.

Whatever intellectual baggage Lévi-Strauss had acquired in the United States could never have been acquired without the war. As it was, few would have been able to take advantage of this extraordinary situation. Lévi-Strauss’s intellectual character, much like his origins in the intellectual bourgeoisie, was curious, flexible, and versatile. He had both a solid understanding of his French identity and an incredible receptivity for everything new. By surrendering to the city’s organic maelstrom and achieving symbiosis with its urban chaos, he had been professor, researcher, cultural administrator, anthropologist, and collector; and he thrived on the many bridges that linked worlds as yet unconnected in France. New York had offered him a wealth of experiences and encounters and had opened up a range of possibilities.

Was it easy for Lévi-Strauss to come back to France with this American model in mind, at a time when the majority of French intellectuals’ sympathies were with the communists and stubbornly resisted everything American? Was it comfortable to be an unconventional intellectual, too idealistic for Americans, too innovative for the French, too literary for some and too erudite for others? In Paris, after the interest for structuralism had passed, he had to face its adversaries. He stated: "Educated people in France have bulimia; they have gobbled up structuralism. This rejection of structuralism was accompanied by a return to the more traditional forms of philosophy." In the United States, when criticized by some American ethnologists for his "idealism," his "mentalism," or what they called the "Lévi-Straussian truths," he would defend his work tirelessly, recalling his respect for investigative research, observation, and ethnographic inquiries, stressing the rigor of his "inductive approach" and his "patient investigations." He rejected accusations of "playing with abstract concepts disconnected from reality. . .and of following paths unfairly mistaken as being hyperintellectual." Why did he defend himself with such ardor? Could it be that he now wanted to prove that the French philosopher in him was dead?

The cross-fertilization which the American foundation fostered between American and French social sciences was largely due to the efforts of Lévi-Strauss—who also became one of its many beneficiaries. He had come back to France at the right time, when this collaboration had just begun. In the years that followed, he earned the highest accolades of French academia: he became lecturer at the École des Hautes Études, secretary general of the International Council of Social Sciences at UNESCO, professor at the Collège de France; he founded the Laboratory of Social Anthropology, and was eventually elected to the Académie Francaise. By 1960, Lévi-Strauss had become the undisputed master of French ethnology. He founded L’Homme, a publication modeled after the American Anthropologist, and had become one of the few French social scientists with a universal reach. Who else could have ventured into such daring territories as comparing Bergson’s work with Sartre’s, and meditating on metaphysics by the standards of Sioux Indians?

Had the man who returned to France in December of 1947 opened "every door giving way to other worlds and to all times"? In any event, he re-entered the French intellectual world a changed man. He felt "deep gratitude toward the United States" for "the helping hand" which had "saved his life," and the "intellectual environment and resources" that had been made available to him. He returned with a strong feeling of indebtedness. In spite of the exceptional offers which would later come from many universities, including Harvard, he chose to remain in France, happy to "renew his small bohemian existence, preferring his Saturday morning visits to the flea market to the charms of Cambridge, Massachusetts," and recovering the mutilated part of his name, to again become Claude Lévi-Strauss. Later, he would write, "I knew that every fiber in me belonged to the Old World, forever."