One Hundred Years of Fortitude

“Living history.” The concept had always seemed to me a rather empty one: a hollow phrase, to be invoked only by nostalgic museum retrospectives, ghostwritten memoirs by former first ladies, and parents straining to persuade the kiddies that Grandpa’s still worth talking to. (“Ignore the drool, he can tell you all about Iwo Jima!”)

A moment during a history lecture freshman spring, however, convinced me that this cynical take required revision. In the midst of an involved foray into the thickets of semiotic schemata, the professor paused to question the class: Did we know that the French founder of structural anthropology was—remarkably—still alive? A rapid bout of mental math assuring us that this was in fact possible, the statement made quite an impact. In a sea of Saussures and Sartres, the mausoleum of dead white men that European intellectual history inevitably erects, the bespectacled ethnographer’s continued existence traced out an impressively unbroken line from the heyday of 1950s social research to what had until then looked to us like a totally distinct present.

Claude Lévi-Strauss passed away at last a little over a week ago, eleven months after his 100th birthday. In France, his death has been marked by all the mourning one would expect for a national legend, with the president and foreign minister offering up grief-filled tributes to a “visionary” and “humanist.” Here in the U.S., media reactions have been more muted: a faithful reflection of our general domestic indifference toward the intricacies of Gallic theory. (That the anthropologist shares his name with the most American of institutions, a denim manufacturer, lends his fate something of a surreal twist; a Google image search intersperses pictures of primitive art with links to purchase boot-cut flares.) Yet Lévi-Strauss deserves a moment of genuine recognition and remembrance—his life, if perhaps not completely successful in the ways he would have hoped, suggests the rich possibilities open to a perpetually questing mind.

It’s true that in many ways, Lévi-Strauss was the artifact of a much different world. His great legacy is structuralism, the idea that universal patterns of thought—most notably, the desire to create myths—underlie all human activities. Though that take may not be in vogue today (even in the ‘70s, one Cambridge University professor wrote that “despite his immense prestige, the critics among his professional colleagues greatly outnumber the disciples”), there’s something to admire in the impulse to see everything as intimately connected. Not least among the view’s merits was the respect it generated amidst the cold stone and rarified air of mid-century academia for cultures not one’s own.

Despite numerous expeditions to study peoples as foreign as the Nambikwara tribe of São Paulo or the policy apparatchik of Washington D.C., though, Lévi-Strauss himself remained consummately European. “Every man carries within himself a world made up of all that he has seen and loved; and it is to this world that he returns incessantly, though he may pass through and seem to inhabit a world quite foreign to it,” wrote Chateaubriand a century earlier, an author whose "Voyage en Italie" Lévi-Strauss had read and quoted.

Such self-consciousness is on clearest display in Lévi-Strauss’ lovely travelogue-cum-memoir Tristes Tropiques. Indeed, Lévi-Strauss’ own work can be divided into two categories: Tristes Tropiques, and everything else. Cherished as a formative influence by many established anthropologists, the slim volume sets down in pearlescent prose all the bittersweet joys of the profession, absent in Lévi-Strauss’ more detached volumes of scholarship. This elegiac tone evolved into outright pessimism as he grew older; in one of his last interviews he flatly states that “the world on which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world that I like.” Part of this had to do with the ascendance of Derrida & Co., who gradually replaced his universalizing tendencies with their more fragmentary perspectives. In a sense, Lévi-Strauss lived out the greatest tragedy that can befall a philosopher: that of surviving long enough to watch his own ideas crack.

Yet his sense of wonder never abated. Describing his first brush with Anglo-American anthropology after a cloistered education at the Sorbonne, Lévi-Strauss wrote that: “My mind escaped from the closed circuit, which was what the practice of academic philosophy amounted to: made free of the open air, it breathed deeply and took on new strength. Like a townsman let loose in the mountains, I made myself drunk with the open spaces, and my astonished eye could hardly take in the wealth and variety of the scene.” Until the very end of his life, he battled base functionalist explanations for society in favor of grander, more overarching constructions.

In the end, Lévi-Strauss is best immortalized by the title of one of his greatest books, “La Pensée Sauvage.” “Pensée” translates literally as “thought,” but in its secondary meaning it can also signify a kind of flower. Lévi-Strauss combined both of these ideas in his own person—the unruly directions in which his thought bloomed speaking to a consuming intellect at once exquisitely savage and fiercely beautiful.

Jessica A. Sequeira ’11, a Crimson associate editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House.