French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the world's most important thinkers, was born 100 years ago last Friday, and France has been celebrating, writes David Tresilian in Paris 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. His influence as in some sense the leader of the structuralist movement has had something to do with this, but so too has his great longevity. The characteristic mix of anthropological theorising and more personal speculation contained in his autobiography, in English translation the "sadness of the tropics," made it an unlikely bestseller when it was first published in 1955, and it has remained in print ever since. BORN IN BRUSSELS on 28 November 1908, Lévi-Strauss never intended to become an anthropologist. According to the account he gives in Tristes tropiques, he first decided to study law, having been disillusioned with his chosen subject of philosophy by the stale intellectual exercises prescribed by his teachers at the Sorbonne in Paris. Law, however, could not satisfy his intellectual ambitions, and so he turned, almost by accident, to the then new discipline of anthropology. Unlike more established subjects, this at the time had none of the academic apparatus surrounding it that tends to give prestige to any course of study, perhaps particularly in France. Before Lévi-Strauss himself held chairs in social anthropology in the 1950s there were few, if any, such university posts in France. Without such posts and the possibilities for research and career development that go with them there could be even fewer students. Anthropology, when Lévi-Strauss first started to study it, was still trying to separate itself off from the study of pre-history and the emerging discipline of sociology, as well as from attempts to subsume it under the study of "primitive peoples", folklore, or comparative mythology. Border raids from neighbouring disciplines could still be carried out onto anthropological territory with relative impunity, and even among his teachers, Lévi-Strauss says, there was a tendency to treat the subject as a kind of elevated hobby. In Tristes tropiques, he writes that anthropological study sessions among members of the Société des amis du muséum at the Jardin des plantes in Paris could have the character of private conversations, with, usually some way into the session, the arrival of a noisy group of children with their nannies who had come to see pictures of "primitive" or exotic peoples. Nevertheless, it was in this unpropitious atmosphere that Lévi-Strauss's own interest in the subject began, migrating, perhaps bizarrely, from a boyhood craze for fossils and geology. "I have," Lévi-Strauss writes in Tristes tropiques, "a Neolithic kind of intelligence. Like native bush fires, it sometimes sets unexplored areas alight." Wandering across a limestone plateau in the south of France, he remembers coming across "two green plants of different species, each of which had chosen the most favourable soil" and at the same time glimpsing "two ammonites with unevenly intricate involutions in the rock, testifying to a gap of tens of thousands of years. Suddenly space and time become one: the living diversity of the moment juxtaposes and perpetuates the ages." It was through such experiences that "my mind was able to escape from the claustrophobic, Turkish-bath-like atmosphere in which it was imprisoned," he writes. "Once it had got out into the open air, it felt refreshed and renewed." Following an inevitable rite of passage through the French examination system, he was picked as one of the professors sent to the new University of Sao Paolo in Brazil in the early 1930s, disembarking for Rio de Janeiro via Dakar in 1935. AMONG THE MOST enchanting features of Lévi-Strauss's autobiography are the comparisons he draws between Europe and the extra-European world, deeply marked, perhaps almost entirely restructured, by European expansionism, and the gift he shows for astute and sometimes surprising observation. The account begins with a second voyage across the Atlantic in February 1941, when Lévi- Strauss, of a Jewish family, was forced to flee France on a cargo boat from Marseilles. There was no one on the vessel who was "neither a Jew nor a foreigner nor an anarchist," he writes, all on board fleeing the Nazi occupation of France. This second voyage took him, via the then French colony of Martinique and the American colony of Puerto Rico, to New York where he was able to continue work in the company of a group of European émigrés that included the philosopher Jacques Maritain and linguist Roman Jakobson. Memories of the second voyage invite comparison with the first to Brazil and also give rise to meditations on traveling and the ambiguous position of European anthropologists sent out to write up the lives of extra-European peoples. "I hate traveling and explorers," Lévi- Strauss begins by saying, partly because of the paucity of the material explorers bring back -- the "platitudes and commonplaces... miraculously transmuted into revelations by traveling some 20 thousand miles" -- and partly because of the uncomfortable lessons traveling can bring. Travel, Lévi-Strauss says, makes one aware of the impact of "a proliferating and overexcited civilisation" on a fragile world, or, as he puts it a few pages later, of "our own filth flung in the face of mankind." Anthropological travelers, whose professional concerns make them perhaps more aware of them than most, are themselves caught up in such impacts. "In 1918," Lévi-Strauss writes, "maps of the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo... showed it as being two-thirds 'unknown territory' inhabited only by Indians. By the time I arrived in 1935 there was not a single Indian left, apart from a few families who used to come to the Santos beaches to sell so-called curios." In the face of this catastrophe, the visitor turns to accounts of such people's lives written a generation or two "before contact with the white races and the resulting epidemics had reduced them to a handful of pathetic and rootless individuals." Reading such material, he is reminded of how quickly the end of a culture can come, part of what Lévi-Strauss means by the "sadness of the tropics," and also of the anthropologist's ambiguous involvement with attempts "to invest such peoples with nobility at the very time when... their destruction" is being assured. "I wished," he writes, "I had lived in the days of real journeys, when it was still possible to see the full splendour of a spectacle that had not been blighted, polluted and spoilt." Having been told that there were "no Indians left" in Brazil, Lévi-Strauss nevertheless laid the foundations of his career by conducting fieldwork first among the Guaycuru and Bororo and then among the Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib Indians. This he wrote up in the later parts of Tristes tropiques, the material gathered on these expeditions serving as the basis for his theoretical reflections once back in Paris after the Second World War. By sifting and resifting such materials Lévi- Strauss developed his characteristic view that anthropology should aim to reveal the deeper structures he thought lay behind all cultural expressions. Activities as apparently different as mythmaking and cooking, he believed, when seen in the right light could reveal themselves to be the workings out of underlying binary oppositions, such as that between the raw and the cooked, the title of one of the volumes of the Mythologiques. He set out this view in his 1958 book Structural Anthropology and elaborated it four years later in The Savage Mind. While anthropology, he wrote, has sometimes been unsure about its aim and methods, it could be placed on a secure basis through the example of linguistics, which had apparently shown how all natural languages were constructed according to a similar underlying grammar, whatever their surface differences. LEVI-STRAUSS published his last major work in the 1970s, though books continued to appear until at least the mid 1990s, and today the restless world of professional anthropology seems to have moved on. A recent tour of London bookstores revealed that only one of his books was on sale in English translation. Even at the height of his fame in the 1960s and 70s, Lévi-Strauss's brand of large-scale theorising left some people cold, with admirers like the English anthropologist Sir Edmund Leach fulminating against what he called Lévi-Strauss's cavalier manner with empirical evidence, his "whole system [seeming] to have developed into a self- fulfilling prophecy which is incapable of test." Today, according to friends and admirers such as the writer Catherine Clément, commissioned to prepare last week's French television programmes to mark his 100th birthday, Claude Lévi-Strauss has retired from any sort of public life. "He says that today he no longer lives in this world and lives instead in a sort of Buddhist state of indifference to it," she said. At one hundred years old, and with such a life behind him, it is easy to feel that this is something to which he has every right.
