Claude Lévi-Strauss, l’homme qui voulait comprendre tous les hommes – Documentaire Anthropologie AT

Claude Lévi-Strauss, l’homme qui voulait comprendre tous les hommes – Documentaire Anthropologie AT

2008 is the year of
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s 100th birthday, and also the year he entered
the famous Pléiade collection. He is one of the few writers to have been
published there during his lifetime. Levi-strauss himself chose the texts
that appear in this indispensable volume. Vincent de Ben and Frédéric Keck,
along with a few others, wrote the introductions to these selected pieces. Levi Strauss is first and foremost a scholar, the
founder of structural anthropology. He never signed a petition,
but his work is political in the highest sense of the word. Either he makes us discover the history
of these so-called primitive peoples, without history, that is to say without writing,
or he arrives in the face of the diversity of cultures at a condemnation
of racism, or again by situating the exact place
of man in nature, he is an ecologist before everyone else. The book that made him famous
is Triste Tropique. This autobiographical travelogue
, commissioned in 1955, today a classic of
French literature translated into all languages, would have won the Prix Goncourt if this prize had
not been reserved for a novel rather than for a great writer,
storyteller, thinker and poet. With Look, Listen, Read!,
we can discover the man of curiosities and immense culture,
the reader of Conrad, Rousseau, Chateaubriand, the lover of painting,
art, chicks with Indian masks, the music fanatic from Ramo to Ravel,
passing through Mozart, Wagner and De Bussi. As for this film, let us first thank all
those who were able to question Claude Lévi-Strauss,
and we do not claim to do anything other than to make people want to read Lévi-Strauss. After this brief, he shows himself to be an
exceptional man, a man like every century produces only a few. Who do you think
Levi Strauss is addressing? Apart from specialists,
anthropologists, great intellectuals. Levi Strauss is someone we can
read, someone we – I was going to say we must read, but who is always interesting to read
today, even if the press headlines
to which you refer tend to present him
as a monument of the past. I think that this is
a reception of Lévi-Strauss that we try to fight against as much as possible
, because Lévi-Strauss, I think that we must read his Entry
into the Pléiade a little differently and try to preserve the
scholarly dimension, because it is very important. Levi-strauss is a scholar. And even if the texts included in this
volume are not necessarily the most difficult or the most
theoretical or the most abstract. These are still texts that are
not immediately accessible. The story of the lynx, The Wild Thought, is
not exactly a book that reads like a novel. But what is interesting
is that it remains accessible in the sense that the starting point is almost always
in the order of common experience, of general experience. In Levi Strauss’s work, reasoning very often starts
from a very accessible observation of experience. And then, gradually,
obviously, thought develops. It becomes a very, very difficult task at times. But in that sense,
he’s a scientist, if you like. He is obviously a scientist. We must not give up
on this aspect of the work. But he is also someone who does
not cut himself off from common sense. So, Lévi-Strauss is a thinker who,
in reality, is very contemporary. He had,
how can I say, very pioneering intuitions on several points. This is ecological thinking
before its time. He is someone from whom one can retain
a certain attention to objects which do not attract attention
at first hand. A certain… A quest for intelligibility behind
behaviors, conducts which, in appearance, are the most irrational. And all of this remains current,
it remains true and it will remain so, I believe. I cannot say that
I feel particularly at ease in the century in which chance brought me to be
born, and the way in which it evolves does not make me think that otherwise, I myself, my descendants will feel more at ease there than I do. I have the feeling that a world that tends
to become overpopulated, the same where it is not
yet, because the very density of the population is multiplied by the acceleration of the physical means of communication and the
intellectual means of communication, finally, means that we tend
to become more and more consumers and voracious consumers of
the riches that surround us,
whether it is the concrete riches of the universe and that we destroy by
consuming them or the intellectual riches that we absorb with an intensity, a speed much greater than we
manage to renew them. I imagine that humanity is not
entirely different from those flour cups
that grow inside a bag and begin to poison themselves
with their own toxins long before food or even
physical space runs out. We are
accustomed, through all our intellectual traditions, to a scale of relationship
between humanity and the planet which is in the process of being
radically transformed. And I am not at all convinced
that we are morally, psychologically, perhaps
even physically equipped to resist it. I believe that we are completely
outside what one can ask a man of research to say,
and he is completely deviating from the more solid reasoning that he
is trying to make, not at all about a future that he is
incapable of foreseeing, but about the much more
modest materials on which he is working and from which he is trying to extract, somewhere, that of truth. This pessimism seems to me, after all, to offer optimism its best chance, because it is on the condition of being very
pessimistic that we will become aware of the dangers which threaten us. It is only by being very
pessimistic that we will have the courage to adopt the necessary solutions
and that therefore, perhaps, we will be able to start having a certain dose of, let’s say, moderate optimism again. Are you listening to the radio? I listen to it all the time, or rather,
I play it all the time while I work. It’s a kind of friendly screen
that stands between the outside world and me. As much as a step in the corridor or
a voice on the phone bothers me, background music is
almost necessary. I would have loved to be a
composer or even a conductor. And I believe that even today, if someone told me, as in fairy tales,
that my life would be shortened by ten years or that I would die on a given date,
but that in compensation I could wish for what I would like
most, what I desired, I would say : Let me
lead the most beautiful performance that ever had
singers and I am willing to die at the last measure. I was never trained
as an ethnologist. I am a rough-and-ready ethnologist,
an improvised ethnologist who, on the one hand, because he had embarked
on a philosophical career which is a noble career, but let’s say, a
homebody, on the other hand, because my intimate tastes are,
on the contrary, inclined towards adventure and the spectacle of the world,
and seek the only terrain where these two contradictions can probably be reconciled. Concretely, you were a
philosophy professor, sorry. That’s how they say it.
That’s how we say it, yes. And you decided to go far,
well, to teach far, already. To go and teach in a country
that seemed extremely exotic to me at the time , Brazil, since
the opportunity presented itself. And naturally, being in Brazil,
to see what seemed to me to be the most foreign to myself,
the most distant, that is to say the interior, that is to say the indigenous populations. And it was basically a kind of small
university tourism that began what would later become a profession. You were a
sociology professor there? Sociology, but you know,
because at that time, in France, ethnology was not a discipline
in its own right in universities. Ethnology in France is the daughter
of sociology and in truth, it is ethnology that I began
to teach and I was keen on it essentially because teaching it
was for me the only way to learn it since I did
not know a single word of it. What I could do
was take advantage of university vacation periods to go into the field. The bororos, the caduvéos,
that was the first little expedition, three, four months in all. First among the caduvéos who were very
endearing because one could detect among them traces of customs
which were exceptionally rare and curious, since it was a
very strongly hierarchical society, with distinctions between nobles and common people, where women painted their faces with subtle decorations. They were still doing this
at the time of my visit, but nevertheless, they lived like
very poor peasants in the interior. I would like you to try,
I was going to say, to tell this story. To arrive at the arms,
you mean? Yes, from his first contacts. I’m coming back to it as if I were there. We
arrived by truck along a very bad track to a place where we were
told we would find a small village, that is to say a few straw huts
and canoeists who could take us further along the river,
to where there were only the dams. We arrived there, there
was no one there. The houses were in ruins,
yellow fever had passed through there, had decimated them. We said to ourselves:
We will never get out of this. So we went on a bit of an adventure. And then, one fine morning,
after camping on the banks as we were doing,
we saw three shapes, quite red, on the edges of the water. These were the first
water edges we saw. We made ourselves understood as best we could,
explaining that we were going to their house. One of you was talking? No, no one was talking. We managed to explain ourselves through gestures. They went ahead to
announce us. And then we landed at a place
on the verge where there were a number of Indians. A quantity, I’m not exaggerating. I’m exaggerating because there were perhaps
140 people in total in that village. But finally, a whole group was moving around
and it was them who were waiting for us. And we climbed the rod
which was very steep. And there we found ourselves right in the
presence of the village which was on the water’s edge and which was an
astonishing spectacle because the borereaux are a king’s piece for ethnologists. In this sense, they have a
very, very complicated social organization that is entirely
inscribed in the village plan. It is a large circular village with
in the middle a hut much larger than the others,
which is the Men’s House, the men’s club where single men
sleep, where married men work, because it is a matrilineal society. Family huts belong
to women and men, therefore, live with their wives. They are only at home
in their central club. In addition to this, each hut or group
of huts belongs to a particular clan in a rigorously prescribed order,
and the village is ideally divided into two halves,
which in Bororo are called the Tchera and the Tougaré,
with the rule that men from one half can only marry women
from the other half and vice versa. So a man is born in one half
in his mother’s hut, but when he gets married,
he crosses this ideal border of the village and goes to live with his
wife who is on the other side. It is a type of social organization
that is well known throughout the world. We know of many examples of this
and after all, we must recognize that marriage
is an exchange, insofar as each time a marriage has taken place,
a woman from a given family has exchanged with another family
which, itself, will give its wife to a third and so
on. So, the division into two halves is the simplest solution that
can be given to the problem. Whether it’s women who move around
or men who move around is a different choice
depending on the society. The borers, on the other hand,
choose for women to be permanent and for
men to be drunk. You also wrote: The prohibition
of incest was basically society itself. It is society itself, since
it is the prohibition for society to perpetuate itself according to the
very norms of the biological family. The biological family
is still nature, but from the moment when a family,
in order to perpetuate itself, must necessarily ally itself with
another family, whatever the rule that determines
the way in which it will ally itself with this other family, at that moment,
we are in the presence of society. This is where, I suppose,
this series of works on the rules of kinship came from. Of course, because the Bororos
constitute a society which poses in a very acute way the problem of why these
rules are so readable, so obvious. You know, moreover, when
the missionaries arrived at the beginning of the 20th century, not among these Bororos
of San Lorenzo where I was, who were relatively
when I saw them, but a little further north in other
groups, they understood very well right away that the only way to bring about the
collapse of the social organization and consequently of
religious beliefs was to prohibit the plans of traditional villages
and to force the Indians to build their huts according to a European-type plan. And that actually marked the
end of all rites and beliefs. I would not want to be unfair
to these missionaries who are Salesians and whom I love very much,
because with them, we are in this curious case of missionaries who were
converted by the Indians rather than the other way around. I mean the social organization of the
edges, their belief system, their ceremony, it’s so beautiful, so
magnificent, so sumptuous that these missionaries very quickly
understood that they couldn’t try to destroy it and that they had,
on the contrary, to contribute to its maintenance. And today,
they are fighting alongside the Indians against administrative
or governmental attempts to integrate them. You have to imagine people who live from small-scale farming, fishing, hunting, gathering and collecting,
managing to meet their needs with very little effort. Who could devote half
or three-quarters of their time to decorating themselves, to adorning themselves with the
most magnificent feathers? There were feather headdresses
that were 1.50 meters or 1.75 meters tall, weren’t there? As tall as the wearer. Adorned with necklaces,
wild animal teeth, finally, the dazzling white fangs of jaguars
, the nails of large armadillos which are like tortoiseshell, which sing, dance for hours. That, in itself, is intoxicating. We were, in a way, invaded, submerged by the richness and fantasy of a probably exceptional culture. We were in the presence of a society
that had lasted and that had been transformed over time
like any other society, but which refused to admit it
and which considered that in the plan of the village, in its organization,
it preserved the very image of the early days, that it was as the
creators had wanted it to be. In fact, the dancers in the ceremonies
each embody a mythological character. And while they embody it,
they are this mythological character who comes back to life, who is there. So it was a society
that abolished time. And after all,
what deeper nostalgia can we have than to abolish
time and live in a kind of present that is a past
constantly revived and maintained as it was dreamed of in myths
and beliefs. What is the purpose of ethnology in general? This is one of the many ways
of trying to understand man. If we want to understand man, we can,
like the philosopher, withdraw into ourselves and try
to deepen the data of consciousness. We can try to look at what,
in the manifestations of human life, is closest to us,
consider our history, from its Greco-Roman origins
to modern times, or we can try to broaden, say,
the knowledge of man to include even the most
distant societies and those which seem to us the most humble and the most miserable,
so that nothing human remains foreign to us. When Rousseau announces to his reader
the terror of those who will have the misfortune to live after you,
it is in some way our world, perhaps crueler to man than it
ever was, whose advent he announces. The world we live in imposes on each of us the imminence of fears and problems that we have grown
accustomed to thinking do not concern us. We can then ask ourselves
if the great culprit, the great culprit,
is not this humanist philosophy on which we have founded ourselves almost
entirely and exclusively, humanism constitutes
man in a separate kingdom. And as soon as we agree to draw
a border, we give ourselves the latitude to move
this border at will and to reserve the privilege of humanity to increasingly restricted portions of humanity which, for their part, will
reject into animality, we unfortunately have too many
recent historical examples present in our memory, equally ever
more extensive fractions of this same humanity. And it seems to me that there
is only one way to escape this vicious circle,
there is only one way to protect ourselves against these dangers, and
that is to consider that man is first and foremost a living and suffering being before being a thinking being, and that it is only to the extent
that each of us succeeds in preserving in his innermost being the memory,
and more than the memory, the living experience
of this identity with all that lives and therefore all that suffers, that man can be assured of never being treated as an animal by his fellow men, because he will have extended the notion of fellow man to all that lives
and which therefore possesses an imprescriptible right to commiseration. Were n’t ethnologists,
before anyone else, the first ecologists? I think that’s true. And this is true because they are in the school
of people who are themselves ecologists, who have succeeded,
at the cost of all sorts of practices that we judge superstitious and with
a little disdain, but in maintaining a balance with the natural environment. You know, when among these peoples
that we study, like those of South America and also of North America,
there are beliefs in a master of animals
who jealously watches over the hunting methods and who is known to send
supernatural punishments to the one or those who kill more
than is strictly necessary. When, in order to pick the smallest
medicinal plant, it is necessary to first make offerings to the spirit of this
plant, all this requires maintaining measured relationships with nature. Some peoples even have this belief
that the capital of life which is at the disposal of beings makes a mass
and that consequently, each time one takes too much
from a species, one must pay for it at the expense of one’s own. Like at a banker’s where your
account goes into the red. All this, of course,
strikes the ethnologist and shows him how much of a way, I would say sensible for man to live and to behave
and to consider himself not as we have done,
I would almost say since the Old Testament and the New and since
the Renaissance too, as the lords and masters
of creation, but as a part of this creation
that we must respect, since what we destroy will
never be replaced and that we must transmit as we knew
it to our descendants. That’s a great lesson. I would almost say that this is the greatest
lesson that the ethnologist can learn from his profession. Do you think you have
a chance of being heard? That man renounces being
the Lord of creation? Do you believe it?
No. Quite frankly,
I don’t believe it and that’s why I ‘m not optimistic and I don’t feel
very comfortable in the society or civilization where I live. As a child, I painted, drew, even tried to compose music
and play I don’t know how many instruments,
making exotic collections in the most diverse fields. And if, finally,
it was on philosophy that I found myself centered, I would say,
with all respect for the philosophers, that it was probably because it was the path which seemed to me to offer me the least practical difficulties,
for the very simple reason that I was obliged to earn my living as quickly as
possible and that therefore the career of professor was one of those
which naturally opened up to a young bourgeois intellectual such as I was. My father and two of my uncles were
painters, that is to say, my mother and two of her sisters had married painters and
I was born and raised in artists’ studios. Not an academic environment at all. Not an academic environment at all,
most certainly. I had pencils
and paintbrushes at the same time as I was learning to read and write. During the war of 1914-1918,
I was raised in the house of my maternal grandfather,
who was Grand Rabbi of Versailles. But all the women, if I may say so,
were gathered there, since the men were mobilized,
and neither my parents nor my uncles and aunts had the slightest religious feeling,
and all that was asked of us was to observe a certain number of formalities out of consideration for my grandfather. But we were stuffed with
ham sandwiches behind his back. And that’s to say that religion
counted for very little in this environment, and my grandfather himself was an
extremely tolerant man, and as long as appearances are
kept, I don’t think he attached much
importance to what was actually happening in his house. My father was above all a portrait painter and
passionate about the great masters of the past. His god was Maurice Quentin de la Tour. He did a lot of pastels himself
and obviously he was n’t in touch with his time. Did you start
worrying about earning a living quite early on? Yes, because the end of the month was
always very difficult at home and painting certainly couldn’t be
enough to keep the pot boiling, so we did all
sorts of little jobs at home in which I participated. Fabrics and velvets were printed with patterns engraved in linoleum. I myself had the experience of designing
patterns and engraving them myself. And then we sprinkled everything with
variously colored metal flakes. It made for very rich things. Lanterns were made in the
Japanese style, and small half- lacquered tables in the Chinese style. My father was a great DIY enthusiast
and it was he who gave me the taste and technique for DIY. The only time there was a bit
of pomp at home was during the
Colonial Exhibition, around 1930-1931, I don’t remember,
when my father received a very large order for the Madagascar pavilion. And so, at that time,
a little money came into the house and my parents bought for 5,000
francs at the time, I think, a small mansion in the Cébènes,
which was admittedly in ruins and in which we never did anything
but camp, but which played a very big role in my existence
because I was a teenager. And that’s when I had
the revelation of what a country that was still largely wild could be like. I still have a
very dazzling future of night ascents of the Égoual , starting at 9:00 p.m.,
continuing in the moonlight, ending in the refuge,
at the summit with the road workers who were working on the road,
and then the descent the next morning. We were passionate
about geology at that time. We were looking for routes outside
of any preconceived idea, that is to say, solely determined,
for example, by the contact between two geological layers that we could
locate on the map, but which did not correspond to any path
and which had to be followed at all costs. It was a point of honor,
even if it meant crossing thorn bushes, climbing
walls, and trespassing. All these teenage years were
years of extreme dilatancy, if I may say so. Everything interested me,
too many things interested me. I was doing philosophy,
which interested me, of course. There are probably very few areas
of intellectual activity that have attracted me, that have seduced me and towards which,
at one time or another, I thought I would move. I was introduced to Freud or introduced
to reading Freud when I was in philosophy class
by the father of my classmates, who was himself a psychiatrist,
his name was Doctor Marcel Nathan, and who was a
friend of Marie Bonaparte, and who had, with Marie Bonaparte,
contributed to making Freud known in France. And it was also one of the great
intellectual revelations of my life. Insofar as
Freud taught me that even what appeared under
the most irrational, absurd, and shocking appearances
could conceal a secret rationality. And here, again,
as with the geology we were talking about earlier,
I believe there is a striking parallel between this type of attitude towards the facts and the one I was later to experience with ethnology. But during this period we are
talking about, what occupied me most was certainly politics. I was
introduced to socialism by a young Belgian socialist who has since
had an important career and is now dead. But he was still young at that
time, met on vacation. It was he who made me read Marx,
who made me read Engels and
who brought me not only to militant socialism, which occupied me a lot during
my student years, but also at the very beginning as a professor.
If I remember correctly, I was even a candidate for the General Council once,
and a car accident occurred on the second or third day
of the campaign, when, incidentally, I was driving a car
for the first time in my life. It was a lemon skin monkey. This puts us back extremely far. This aborted this nascent political career
which, who knows, might have continued without it. The contact I had with sociology
during my years at the Sorbonne did not leave me with very great memories
and I am ashamed of it in retrospect, since I could have heard Fraiseur,
who came to give a lecture at the Sorbonne. I remember very well when
I was preparing for the agrégation, but I didn’t even have
the curiosity to go and hear him. Sociology only interested me from
a political angle, that is to say, through what I knew of it
from reading Marx and the Marxists. He says that when he went to Brazil,
he was in revolt against the socialist metaphysics of Durkheim and the Durkemians. This is where, indeed,
the intellectual link with his socialist commitment must be made. There was something
in Durkheim’s sociological thought that he felt was untenable
and that consisted in fact of wanting to unite individuals around an
ideal or a thought of organization that was a little too coherent. So the experience of the field,
that’s why it has a decisive role, shakes up his socialist convictions, leads him to experience a radical otherness, one could say,
both in his body and in his thoughts. So, there is indeed a great
revolt against this Hurkemian thought. I started reading
ethnographic literature, particularly certain
English or American authors, and finally, Loewi Malinovski, and there, all of a sudden,
I had the feeling of finding myself in contact with a lived reality. This was not the ethnology that was taught at the Sorbonne, or rather, it was not taught,
but of which we had vague glimpses at the Sorbonne through certain
reports by Durkheim or Lévy-Brûle. And you know, I would like to come back
immediately to these impressions of youth. They were completely false. I was completely wrong.
And today, I fully appreciate the importance of a
thought like Durkheim’s for ethnological theory and even
for the practice of ethnography in the field. But I didn’t see all this. And it was on the contrary the bookish side of so-called primitive life, glimpsed through
authors who themselves only glimpsed it through other authors and so
on, which repelled me, which did not carry that kind of
spark that comes from contact with something
where one has lived, that one has known oneself. And it was the English
and American authors who were essentially field authors
who made me experience this. The first shock was that of Robert Lawrie’s Treatise on Primitive Sociology, Primitive Society,
which I later came to know well during my American years,
but where, suddenly, I had the feeling that I was
in the presence of something that existed, of human experiences such as the author
had directly experienced them and such as I myself, if I became an ethnologist, would
come to feel them. Lévi-Strauss’s stay in Brazil had
a decentralizing role that would continue to influence all of his thinking. On the ground in Brazil,
there are still two experiences, because they are two separate trips. The first experience
is that of the village of Ouro. It is a very organized village. This was the perfect example
for a sociologist from URC-Mia. Levi-strauss said: It was too complicated.
That’s interesting. This means that with URKAM’s concepts,
we understand the social organization of the Boreros, but we feel that
much more is happening. And here, he will need Marx
to understand the relationship between an egalitarian ideological narrative
and a completely unequal social structure , which is what makes
Boros rituals so splendid. And then, the second experience,
in 1938, was that of the Nambiquara. There are others, there
are other tribes that he visited. The Nambiquara are
not at all a Durca-like organization, but they are an organization that is in the
process of disintegrating. It was therefore necessary to try to find
an angle of attack, a way of approaching their life,
which was much less a description of techniques or a description
of institutions, since all of that had been reduced to its simplest expression,
which tried to understand what a human society could be,
reduced as a society, itself, to its simplest expression. What is a
minimal society? In short, it was a problem
of a similar kind, except that it was experimental rather than
ideological, to the one Rousseau had posed
when writing The Essay on the Origin of Inequality or the Social Contract,
namely what are the minimal conditions from which one can
say that a human society exists. I stayed with the Noms de Bicouara
and not even with the same group, several Noms de Miquara groups,
but without ever living more than two, three months with a specific group. We are sometimes accused of evaluating
man and trampling on humanism. And I believe that, on the contrary,
from the deep springs of ethnological research, it is an act of faith in the universality of human reason. Shortly
after the start of the real war or the end of the phoney war,
I found myself sent to the Maginot Line, on the
Belgian-Luxembourg border. I had absolutely nothing
to do but walk around the countryside. I believe that it was
at that moment, finally, one day, when I was lying in the grass
and looking at flowers and in particular a ball
of dandelion, that I became, what I did not yet know how to call myself
the structuralist, by thinking about the laws of organization which I
necessarily had to preside over an arrangement as complex, harmonious and subtle as the one I was contemplating and which I could not
imagine could result from a series of accumulated chances. When I found myself
demobilized in the Montpellier region, I had nothing more pressing than to
want to go and get my post in Paris. And at that moment
the Vichy racial laws arrived and I found myself dismissed
without imagining at all the risks I could run, either by returning to Paris,
or even by remaining in France. Some American masters,
Robert Lowe first and foremost, who at that time was very interested
in South American ethnology, had been interested in some of the very
first works that I had published. And that’s how I got
an invitation to teach at the New School for
Social Research as part of a very general plan to
rescue European academics and scholars that was funded
by the Roquefeuilère Foundation, and my only problem was to leave
France to go to New York. I was on the quays of Marseille
where I had gone to wander. There was an emigrant ship
that was due to leave. It was the only way I could find
to leave France for the United States. Among the passengers is André Breton. Yes, André Breton, whom I didn’t know
at all because surrealism had had a very profound impact on my adolescence. But finally, names like Breton,
Aragon or others, were in a sort of pantheon. I never imagined that I would
ever get close to these great figures. André Breton was on this boat
and I learned about it completely by chance, when I got off at the Casablanca stopover. He was right in front of me and he gave
his name to the purser when he handed over his passport. It’s like the sky has
fallen on my head, I must say. He had, you say, a very great sense, as
we know, of objects as you were able to verify personally. Yes, we lived in New York between 1941 and 1945 in a very close friendship, running around together,
museums and antique shops. And I owe him a lot in terms
of knowledge and especially appreciation of objects. I have never seen him make a mistake
about an object, however exotic and unusual. And when I say mistaken,
I don’t just mean mistaken about its authenticity, but even
about its quality as an object. He had an almost
divining sense about it. It was because of the friendship I had formed
with André Breton that I met all the surrealists who were also refugees there: Max Ernst, Tanguy, Masson and a few others. And I formed with them, during
his first years of exile in the United States,
a sort of small society very ardent, very curious
about the art of the American Indians, in which there was very little interest
at that time in the United States. The curiosity was only to be
scenographic, that of course Indian objects were collected,
but as documents and not at all as works of art. And I think that if a kind of turning point
occurred at that time, it is a little bit due to our stay
in the United States. In the United States, in New York,
I felt very much like a student,
since my years of fieldwork had been vitiated by the fact
that I had, at that time, no real ethnological training. And everything I know about ethnology,
or what I think I know, I learned during those years
in New York and during the whole days spent one after the other
in the New York Public Library, where I read ethnology
from morning until night. But I read it of course, already from a perspective which was the one I had felt emerging
in the reflections I mentioned of a botanical nature on the Maginot Line. It was certainly meeting
Roman Jacobson that first revealed to me what linguistics was and then
what structural linguistics was. What linguistics was, that is
to say, a discipline which most certainly falls within the human sciences,
but which, alone among all the human sciences, has reached
and had already reached a degree of rigor which makes it comparable
to that which can be found in more advanced sciences. And structural linguistics
in particular, since it was
the first to demonstrate, in the field of human phenomena,
the fertility and effectiveness of explanatory models which consist
of having, as a whole, a principle of explanation that no part of this whole could provide by itself. This is the origin of the notion of structure. And this is the origin
of the notion of structure. I would say that whenever we
pose a problem, whenever we try
to think, we have at least virtually at our disposal
the totality of possible experiences. And consequently,
we risk being drowned in a kind of magma, of dust, of phenomena which would confront us with an immense disorder if we did not make a kind of bet, namely that all these phenomena, I mean the way in which hundreds
or thousands of societies have each given their particular solution
to one of the problems of human life, whether it is marriage,
whether it is the law, whether it is technology, whether it is
religious rites or magical practices and so on. Our only chance of being able to master all
this is to understand that each solution provided
by one of these companies expresses in a particular language
something that is common to all. At the
beginning of time, there were only two men: Kanabororiowé
and Kitana Ryō-we. There were no women yet. One day, Kanabororiowé
put out Kitana Ryō-we’s foot. The leg began to swell. It swelled so much that the calf finally
split to free the first woman. Kitana Ryō-we married this woman and the
Yano mamis began to multiply. To understand what a myth is,
it is not enough to listen to a story which, in general, tells you the most arbitrary events, the most extravagant sequences. A myth tells you things
that have neither head nor tail, but that it was necessary to treat the myth as,
say, an observer from a distant planet when all humanity had
disappeared from the surface of the Earth, would try to understand
why a musical score, an orchestral score,
that he would find in our libraries, cannot be read in the same way
as a novel? That is, you can’t follow
the staves from left to right and from top to bottom, because you end up
with something that doesn’t make any sense. He will be able to understand something about his
score only from the moment he understands
that the score is indeed read from left to right,
but that all the staves which were superimposed are read simultaneously and that therefore events which, in the story told by the myth,
occur at times extremely far from each other, are in
reality intended to be superimposed. That is, not the myths among themselves,
but the events within a myth. This is a new problem. The events within
the myths, certainly. And then, when you’ve already done this
work on a particular myth, the myths between them you can
superimpose on each other. As long as the myth of a
given population tells or tries to solve, let ‘s say, the same problem as that
of the neighboring population, but it does so by different means. If you want to find out what
the myth of population A and the myth of population B have in common, you
have to write them one above the other again and find out which
vertical columns the events coincide in. If you take a case that is very familiar to a viewer, the myth of Oedipus, I’m not going to look for an American myth
because it would have to be recounted and it would be extremely far away,
the fact that Oedipus’s father is called Laios, which means lame. That his grandfather was called Abdacus,
which means who walks crookedly, that Oedipus himself had a name which
means swollen foot, all of this is one and the same meaning. And although these
indications are given to you at different times in the story,
you will only be able to understand them if you slide these different
sequences in such a way that these three data points align on the
same vertical column. Exactly like in an
orchestral score where the music only takes on meaning, only becomes
itself, from the moment you hear at the same time what is written
in a vertical column. And you won’t get anywhere if you try
to follow, as we do when we listen to a myth,
if you try to follow the flow of the instruments, carry after carry. So it is on this very
profound analogy, and for which I believe we can give the reason,
but on this very profound analogy between mythical thought and
musical composition, that all my analyses are based and that I tried to bring to light
by giving, not to my chapters, because chapter,
that could not work, but to my different pieces,
if you like, which make up the book, titles borrowed from
musical vocabulary like fugue, sonata, symphony, etc., and which, I believe,
corresponds to something very real and very profound. At first, there is
a feeling of incomprehension when reading the texts of Levi Strauss,
because at the same time, we feel that he is talking about societies that
interest us, that are located very far from our own,
that offer us a detour to think about our own. And at the same time,
he talks about it with such refined intellectual tools
that we have the impression of not always understanding what is happening. Refined can have several meanings. What does that mean in the case you are
talking about, in the case of Levi Strauss? It has both an aesthetic meaning, because it implements a very important literary, musical and
pictorial culture. And at the same time, it is refined in the sense
of intellectual virtuosity. That is to say, there are
logical, linguistic, mathematical tools that we did not have at the outset. So, in fact, there is a kind of double
learning when we read Levi Strauss, because there is learning about
the thinking of the societies he talks about. These societies,
mainly Amerindian, but also African and
Oceanian societies, which he uses because he works as an anthropologist. But there is also an apprenticeship in one’s
scientific and aesthetic culture, and the two mutually illuminate each other. And that’s what makes it
an exciting learning experience, because at the start, you arrive with
little knowledge and you come out rich with lots of experiences. And Vistraus, his career
actually began in the 1930s, and his return from the United States in 1947,
1948, where these works which were recognized
in the United States were not in France. He applied to the Collège de France
in 1949 and 1950, failing both times, and it was there that he wrote: Sad
in a moment of crisis, of personal crisis, of intellectual crisis. The only position,
the only flesh that has been found, is a flesh of
religious studies without writing. And it was Tristotropique that
brought him the recognition that he had not had until then. After Triste Tropique and especially
the election to the Collège de France in 1959, tributes followed tributes,
honorary doctorates, honorary doctorates. Recognition is
no longer in doubt at that point. The origin of Triste Tropique, in my mind, was a When I returned from my last expedition and from Brazil,
it was at the beginning of 1939, so I had a few months to try
to reintegrate myself into French life before the war and the mobilization. These few months,
I wanted to use them. I had decided to use them
to write a novel. A novel called Triste Tropique. That was the title. Then, after 50 pages,
I realized that I was playing a very, very bad Conrad,
for whom I had shown great admiration, and that I was
not cut out for that. So I gave up. And when many years later, in
1954, Jean Mallory asked me to write a book
for his very young collection, Terre humaine, which was in its infancy,
I wrote this one, which is not a novel,
but where as a souvenir, I kept the title of what it could have
been, that is to say Triste Tampique, and only the three or four pages
of the novel which seemed to me to be able to be saved, these are
the pages printed in italics which are called Un coucher de soleil. This was the beginning of the novel. Yes, but precisely, this
sunset which has remained famous. That’s right, these pages. These pages prove that you know how to
write admirably, to tell stories in detail. I don’t have enough imagination. I don’t know how to invent,
I don’t know how to create characters. But how?
What is an ethnologist? It’s definitely someone who creates
characters too, they seem to be alive. He goes into details,
he looks for them, he puts them in. I would say that he creates them, alas,
because he reinvents them. But in the end, that’s not what he
wants to do. He would like to be as exact
and authentic as possible and he would like to copy his models. You know, it’s a book that I wrote,
I would almost say in exasperation and horror.
Ah good ? Yes, that’s not at all what
I wanted to do. I wanted to do
science, if you like. And
Triste Tropique was written in four months like a kind of pinceum that
I absolutely had to get rid of because I didn’t want to talk
about myself, I didn’t want to tell little stories,
little details of travel. And at the same time,
I am obliged to note, in retrospect,
that there is in Triste Tropique a certain which is
perhaps greater than in our objective works,
insofar as what I have done is to reintegrate the observer
into the object of his observation. It’s a book written with these lenses,
called Fish Eye, I think, which show not only what’s in
front of, but what’s behind the camera. So, it is not an objective account of my ethnological experiences, it is a account of myself
living these ethnological experiences, and therefore with a lot of things that I would never have allowed myself to write in a work with scientific ambition. But the exasperation is not
felt at all. Absolutely not. It feels like this kind of fury
with which I wrote it and which made the first edition really
full of every possible and imaginable mistake, even the Portuguese words
that I used, since it took place largely in Brazil, I
had written them in phonetic writing. I hadn’t even
bothered with the dictionary. Levi-strauss has a
complicated relationship with Tristotropique. I think what bothers him
about Tristotropique isn’t so much the book itself,
but rather the success it has had. And in the success that Tristotropique had,
there are dimensions that bother Lévi-Strauss. There is a third-world,
political dimension, with which he has no sympathy. And there is also a
reading of Tristotropique which consists of saying Tristotropique is proof of
the inadequacy of the rationalist, dry, etc. scientific approach. And so, we often read tristotropic
as a kind of return of sensitivity that would have been
repressed by scientific work. And Lévi-Strauss was
completely opposed to that. Because one of the major themes of his
work is the continuity between sensory experience
and intelligible experience. I think there is a kind of embarrassment on his part
regarding the reception of tristotropique. But not in relation to the book.
It’s not a book he regrets. This isn’t a
difficult book to read. No, this one is
n’t difficult to read. Although there are a few
passages that are a little… Not technical,
but a little abstract. But no, it’s not
a difficult book at all, it’s a book that… There is a pleasure in reading
in the sentence, in the prose of Triste Tropie, which is still evident. Levi-Strauss is a great phraser,
a great prose writer, let’s say. The important thing, once again,
is not to conceive of this quality of stylist as a sort of supplement to
the soul or as compensation for the dryness of science. We must try to hold everything together,
both intellectual and rationalist ambition on the one hand,
and on the other hand, yes, quite simply, the beauty of the sentence. His work on
Native American myths made him aware of the importance
of environmental beings for the social
and political thought of these societies. So, I have the impression from reading that
in the first part of his career, he was much more interested in
the social phenomenon as such, including the organization. For example, what catches his attention
in the Tristotropic are the cities, the social organization,
the construction of the village Bururo, the organization of San Paolo. And when he’s in New York,
he has this idea that New York is like a big forest where the
skyscrapers are like trees. So, I think in retrospect, he
understood his experience of cities through his experience of the environment. But I believe that wild thinking was
a tipping point for him in his understanding of the social. It appeared to me that what I called
savage thought, both in the elaboration of the great
mythological explanations and in the construction of rites,
had at its disposal precisely because of this effort or this acceptance, more exactly, of the universe as a given, as a given which was immediately present
in the very elements provided to the sensibility, and
consequently had to construct its interpretations
with these ready-made materials. While the engineer or the scientist,
and the engineer using the knowledge or conquests
of the scientist, does not cease to pierce this envelope of the apparent world
to reach another world from behind, then from behind still
another world and so on. The progress of science, in fact,
consisted only of reaching successive levels, increasingly
secret planes where the explanation was found, the reason for the plane
that was being grasped. So instead of this search
for ever deeper penetration, there is an effort to construct
explanations with materials that are available and that are
available in limited numbers. I mean, however many
animal species or plant species there are, they are finite in number. However numerous the data of sensitivity may be, it is the colors of leaves or flowers or stones
that constitute a certain natural universe, the particular world
in which a society lives, and that like the tinkerer, consequently,
who also finds in his workshop or in his attic or in his drawers,
a certain number of objects or debris of objects that are ready-
made, and each time he sets himself a new problem and wants to
make a construction, a machine or anything,
he takes up his elements and arranges them differently to arrive at this result
that savage thought proceeded in this tinkering manner. This reflection proceeded from a
truly intellectual appetite, a desire to understand intellectually the things of the universe which in no way yielded in its ardor and its
demands to those of modern science, although, naturally, the results
were quite different. To fully understand Lévi-Strauss,
one must understand the notion of intellectual pleasure. In Lévi-Strauss, there is a pleasure
in intellectual inquiry. DIY is not
a renunciation of rationality. It’s a way to
prioritize data. That is to say, Levi Strauss,
this is how he begins the cycle of mythological works. It starts from a myth that is chosen
arbitrarily, why this one rather than another? And in fact, from this myth,
he will put it in parallel, compare it, show the different variations
between this myth and myths from other populations. So, there is a way, the collage
or the rapprochements at the start, indeed, they can
seem arbitrary. Sometimes, no doubt, it doesn’t work. But it’s a way for Levi Strauss to
start by, once again, giving priority to data. And from there,
we see what we can do. There is indeed a
tinkering dimension in Lévi-Strauss, but that doesn’t mean there is no
rationality, it doesn’t mean there is no architecture. The problem is
that it is always suspect, when you are an anthropologist, to project
the categories or criteria of your own civilization
onto ethnographic material. So, the best way to get rid of it
is to start from ethnographic material, that is to say from data
that has been collected, from the reception of rites, myths, etc. Levi-strauss says that a lot. He says in my work on myths: It is
not I who thinks the myths, but the myths which think themselves in me
and which arrange themselves in me according to their organization. There is this idea that we must let
the material unfold and that the anthropologist, the ecologist, is
never anything other than the place and the occasion for this process of bringing to light the underlying intelligibility which governs these myths or these rites. It was the caillemante who once possessed the jump
and carried it in his mouth. He carried it that big
between his jaws. Kassari We and his wife
lived in the forest. Mireille Homea too and his wife. The toads coexisted in the river. At that time,
they ate their food raw. And while they were eating, you could hear
the food crunching under their teeth. It was really very hard. The caillemant looked at them and laughed
to see them eating their raw food. I would
say that what I tried to do was describe
the discourse of American mythology. How would we achieve this? I would say that it is through a kind of
total immersion in mythological material
and that during this whole period during which mythologies were incubated
and which goes far beyond the one for which I really
wrote, because there were all sorts of attempted experiments of which my
seminars at the École des Hautes Études sometimes keep track. But it was about letting oneself be completely
and totally penetrated by the material of the myths. The myths existed more than I did
during this whole period. And I can say that during the entire duration
of the mythologies, I worked every day
without interruption, that I did not know what a Saturday or a
Sunday was, or what the complete leisure of vacation was, above all,
not to lose the thread, not to lose contact with this mythical material. To arrive at an understanding of
how the content, in its smallest details,
can have structural properties. What I tried to understand
was whether, behind this kind of monstrous chaos
of contradictory customs, it was possible to reach certain
simple and few principles from which it would be possible to deduce
one from the other. Why is it that men have devoted so much of their time to inventing and repeating themselves
and listening with delight to stories that have neither head nor tail? Probably because they
provided them with regulatory principles and by trying to dismantle
myths as one might dismantle clockwork mechanisms,
to understand how they are made, we see that there is a resemblance and a difference between mythical thought and scientific thought. The similarity
is that, like science, myths seek to explain;
the difference is that instead of seeking to explain,
so to speak, piecemeal, as science does,
which resorts to certain types of explanations in the physical order,
certain types of explanations in the biological order, still others in the
psychological order, and so on, myth is a type of explanation
that seeks to explain everything at once, that seeks to identify a scheme
of articulation that accounts for the totality of a society’s experience. From its relationship with the world,
and when I mean the world, it is the starry sky above us,
and then the plants that grow, the animals that live there, the climate
that reigns and so on, and then the social order itself as
this society conceives it, as it lives it and as it has created it. The clucking man continues to laugh,
and he continues to laugh so well that he lets out the fire. The bird Yorikitirami takes it
and flies away with it, flying above the ancestors. The ancestor, Kana Boriwe, sets off in pursuit and the bird sets fire. The forest caught fire and the ancestors
enclosed the fire in a wood. Thanks to fire,
when they wanted to eat meat, they could cook it. Thanks to the fire that
came to them from the river. Myths seem to me to be very, very beautiful objects that we never tire of contemplating, of handling, and we never tire of trying to understand why we find them beautiful. And perhaps if I have
devoted so long to the study of myths, it is with the hope that by succeeding in dismantling these aesthetically admirable objects, we could contribute in
some way to understanding what the feeling of beauty is and why we
have the impression that a painting, a poem or a landscape is beautiful. Even today,
in some almost unknown places in Paris, we can find
ways of doing things and traditions that have hardly changed for a century. This day, for example, in the spring of 74,
when we have to try on these accessories for the next academician. Strange and perhaps vain preparations,
for those who forget their meaning. One of the great things about French Caledonia, in my eyes
, is that it is one of the rare institutions
in France that has been able to preserve and conserve,
and even at certain moments in its history, enrich or modify a ritual. Because it is something that every
society needs to survive and perpetuate itself. And
one of the reasons for the respect I feel for the academy,
the pleasure, the satisfaction I can experience in being part of it,
is to tell myself that I am one of those who will try to preserve in France one of the very rare rituals that have not yet succumbed to all the
demolition efforts that have followed one another over the centuries. I feel a little less uncomfortable,
but I can’t say I feel uncomfortable. You are good, sir. But even that which you find admirable
and respectable, I know your colleagues find derisory. They probably
don’t have an ethnological mind. I don’t see why I would find
ridiculous in my society what fascinates and excites me
in different societies. It is therefore by being
passionate about the customs and rules that prevail elsewhere in other countries
that he is preparing to receive from his own country a supreme consecration,
with all the meticulousness in the pageantry that such a ceremony requires. Also, for the neophyte, there is
the patience and effort that one must demonstrate when preparing to receive
initiation, to join an illustrious brotherhood. Are you ready for June? I’ll have to practice
wearing it first. It’s a matter of attitude. Yes. What a strange feeling? Heat, stifling.
Is that all? Yes. You have to be harnessed
like a horse, yes. I understand, but seeing you harnessed
as you say, what an impression… Behind this impression of warmth,
etc., does she have another one or not? I like it. I think men should have
dressed much more cheerfully than they do. After all, this is one of the rare occasions
in our civilization when a man can
dress like a woman. What is very striking
about Lévi-Strauss is a thought that unfolds by embracing ever
more varied and ever more numerous objects, but always remaining
very faithful to itself. Look, listen, read. When Lévi-Strauss studies or writes
about Rameau or Poussin, it is not at all the stroll of a
man of taste who decides after having studied kinship systems
or mythological systems. He is not someone who,
after having done this, would come out of inclination to talk about the great works
of his own culture. It is a way for him to integrate
his works of great scholarly culture into his thinking , but without cutting them off from
primitive art, so to speak. And besides, that’s what’s very
striking about Look, Listen, Read. This is because we often think of Look,
Listen, Read as a return of Levi Strauss to his
own civilization, a return to the sure values of high culture. And in reality, if we read
Look, Listen, Read, it is a book which, indeed,
talks about Rameau, Proust, Poussin, Rimbaud, but it is also a book
which discusses the place of the creator among the Tsimshian, sculpture, etc. So, there is, if you like,
the knowledge of the anthropologist and not cut off from the experience of the honest man,
from the experience of the amateur. And this kind of text, on Rameau,
on Poussin, does not at all allow us to bring Lévi Strauss back to good classicism.
Isn’t that it? No, that’s the reading we
did when the book came out. That is to say, we read it
as a kind of return. And I think that it is a reading,
first of all, which is not very interesting, but above all which is unfaithful to the text,
which is unfaithful to the thought of Lévi-Strauss. Because the interest
of anthropology is precisely that it allows us to think
at the same time about our own cultural productions and to compare them in a well-founded way with the cultural productions of
the most forgotten, or the most disdained,
or the most distant, or the most exotic populations, in quotation marks. And if we only retain the dimension of return from
Lévi-Strauss’s final work on Poussin and Rameau ,
then we lose this comparison which is in fact, despite everything,
what makes the identity of anthropology as a discipline. I cannot, or only with great difficulty,
perceive myself as an individual, as a person, as a self,
but rather as the place where, in a transitory way,
certain things happen. And what I wrote
was probably me at the time I wrote it, but immediately
afterward, it was no longer me. It’s like water that has passed
through a sieve and escapes me completely. Besides, practically, I cannot
recover the memories of my past. I don’t mean to say I don’t have any. I have images here and there,
but it’s very difficult for me to know what happened
before or what happened after. Besides,
it happened to me some time ago that a student
who was doing his thesis came to see me about
certain events in the socialist movement with which I had been
associated during my student years. I made a big effort to
explain it to him and all the time he kept saying to me: No,
what you’re telling me isn’t true. He would quote me dates and what I
told him was after, was before and so on. I was experiencing very cruelly
this total lack of identity, this lack of identity from which I suffer. I understand that the work of the ethnologist, even in his office, which consists of trying to make it
the place where foreign thoughts can unfold, can encourage
or strengthen this attitude. But I think much more that it is
because I am like that, because of this particularity
or this infirmity of my nature, that I perhaps experience a
particular facility or predilection for making myself the place which seems almost
passive to me, since I do not control what is happening, the almost passive place of phenomena which do not belong to my own existence, to my own history,
to my environment or to my society. Did
Levi-Strauss find anything? Can we talk about
discovery in the field of… Yes, we can talk about discovery,
particularly in the field of the anthropology of kinship,
if you like. Lévi-Strauss’s conclusions
on the elementary structures of kinship are contested,
refined, perhaps rectified, etc. But the proof of the discovery status
of this work is that today, one cannot do kinship studies
without taking into account Levi Strauss. We can of course
expand, develop a reflection based on Levi Strauss,
but we cannot do without it, we cannot do without it. It has, for the moment,
and it must be said for the moment, because it is indeed a science. So there is nothing to
suggest that a new epistemological model will not one day
emerge and replace this one. But the fact remains that,
for the moment, we cannot do without his contribution both
in terms of kinship and in terms of myths. Levi Strauss takes us by the hand,
because through the pleasure that we can conquer, this intellectual pleasure,
he shows us the way, if only through the pleasure that we
take in reading his analyses, in discovering the culture that is his. The experience of Lévi-Strauss
is a constant pleasure in following such an intelligent thinker, and
much greater pleasures come from moments of intense understanding
or intellectual short circuits where we really see what is happening. Who can afford it? It is within the reach of the patient reader. In any case, when you have
2000 pages of Lévi-Strauss at home, it’s because you want to take a little
time to withdraw from the pressing news and then have a little more intelligence.

« Comprendre l’homme à travers les hommes » : plongez dans la pensée visionnaire de Claude Lévi-Strauss, entre philosophie, ethnologie et poésie. 👋 + de documentaires histoire 👉 http://bit.ly/3lqyFpY 🙏 Abonnez vous !

00:00 Introduction – Claude Lévi-Strauss, l’homme et le regard
03:45 Une jeunesse entre art, musique et philosophie
08:12 L’aventure brésilienne et la découverte des Bororo
14:55 L’anthropologie comme science humaine
21:30 Structuralisme et musique des mythes
28:40 Tristes Tropiques : un tournant littéraire
35:20 Penser l’écologie avant l’heure
41:00 Héritage, postérité et humanisme critique

Ce documentaire retrace l’itinéraire intellectuel de l’auteur de Tristes Tropiques et de La pensée sauvage, anthropologue et fondateur de l’anthropologie structurale en France, à travers des morceaux choisis de nombreux entretiens filmés accordés par Claude Lévi-Strauss depuis les années 60. Un portrait lumineux, polyphonique et musical, à l’image de l’œuvre qui l’a inspiré. S’ouvrant sur la dénonciation précoce des dérives de la société consumériste par Claude Lévi-Strauss, ce film retrace l’itinéraire intellectuel qui le mena de la philosophie à l’anthropologie, de l’amour de la musique au structuralisme. Il nous emmène avec fluidité de son enfance à sa maturité de chercheur, des sommets des Cévennes aux rives de l’Amazone, d’une partition d’orchestre à la structure des mythes, de la Grèce antique aux Bororo. Ce récit, à la fois chronologique et thématique, donne à voir la vitalité et la beauté de l’œuvre pour communiquer l’envie de s’y plonger.

👉 A voir également sur Notre Histoire :
Pierre Joxe, de la rue aux hautes sphères du pouvoir https://youtu.be/ZJ5gwRnKgcE
Chocolat Poulain : L’incroyable histoire de celui qui a révolutionné le chocolat https://youtu.be/xh6LCcv8GL8
Nicolas Sarkozy, de Neuilly à l’Élysée : l’obsession du pouvoir https://youtu.be/q84O7gGYh5Q

“CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS PAR LUI-MEME”
Réalisé par Pierre-André Boutang et Annie Chevallay
Tous droits réservés

#ClaudeLeviStrauss #Anthropologie #DocumentaireHistoire #Philosophie #TristesTropiques #Structuralisme #notrehistoire