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| Claude Lévi-Strauss during anthropological fieldwork in Brazil in the 1930s |
Al-Ahram Weekly, 3 - 9 Dec, 2008, Issue No. 925
The 100th birthday of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, which fell last Friday, is being taken in France as an opportunity to celebrate the work of a man who over the course of a long career refashioned French anthropology and served as intellectual godfather to a whole generation of writers and thinkers in the 1960s and 70s.
While the leading figures of that generation — Barthes in literary criticism and semiology, Althusser in Marxist theory and Lacan in psychoanalysis — have since disappeared from the intellectual landscape, and, with them, much of the attraction of their ideas, Lévi-Strauss almost alone of his generation has survived the vicissitudes of what was intellectually a particularly fertile period, his authority still intact as perhaps the greatest living anthropological theorist and a link to the kind of large-scale theory- building that was once fashionable across the humanities.
French television celebrated Lévi-Strauss’s 100th birthday last week with a series of programmes on his career, from the time he spent among the Indians of the Amazon Basin in the 1930s, from which grew his famous autobiography Tristes tropiques and much of the work on mythological systems collected in the four volumes of Mythologiques (1964 — 1971), to his work as the inspiration behind the “structuralist” theorising of the 1960s and 70s, set in motion by the publication of his book Structural Anthropology in 1958.
The Musée du quai Branly, the French capital’s recently completed museum of anthropology which opened with great fanfare in 2006, held a study day devoted to Lévi- Strauss on 28 November, the institution also serving as the repository for Lévi-Strauss’s own collection of anthropological artifacts. An international colloquium has been held in his honour at the Collège de France. All this adds up to the kind of public celebration more usually accorded to statesmen than to anthropologists, who, Lévi-Strauss writes in Tristes tropiques, tend to see their study as “a mission and a refuge.”
While part of the explanation for the continuing public interest in Lévi-Strauss and his ideas probably stems from the fact that intellectuals in France, once they have attained a certain eminence, tend to become national figures and are recognised as such by the state, it is perhaps also true that Lévi-Strauss has managed to acquire a reputation even among those who have never opened his books or have limited interest in his variety of theorising.
Tags: Althusser, Claude Lévi-Strauss, France
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