Academic Autobiography (2b)—Tristes Tropiques

One year ago on Round and Square (28 September 2011)—Seinfeld Ethnography: The Alliance.
Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Academic Autobiography"

[a] Tropiques RF

Click here for the other posts in this Round and Square series on Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques:

Tristes 1          Tristes 2          Tristes 3          Tristes 4          Tristes 5          Tristes 6

II—Origins 
          Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; 

          everything degenerates in the hands of man. —Rousseau[1] 

Each stage in mankind’s religious development, writes Lévi-Strauss, represents a regression from that which preceded it. For Lévi-Strauss this regression can be seen everywhere—from the cities of the New World to modern painting. “Man never creates anything truly great except at the beginning:

          In whatever field it may be, only the first initiative is wholly valid. The 
          succeeding ones are characterized by hesitation and regret, and try to 
          recover, fragment by fragment, ground that has already been left behind…  
          The grandeur inseparable from beginnings is so undeniable that even 
          mistakes, provided they are new creations, can still overwhelm us with 
          their beauty.[2]

Lévi-Strauss’s attitude toward “nature” and “origins” often quite closely resemble those of his distant mentor, Jean Jacques Rousseau—“Rousseau, the most anthropological of the philosophes…Rousseau our master, our brother, to whom we have behaved with such ingratitude but to whom every page of this book could have been dedicated, had the homage been worthy of his memory:

          We shall emerge from the contradiction inherent in the anthropologist’s 
          position only by repeating, on our own account, the procedure that allowed 
          Rousseau to move on from the ruins left by the Discours sur l’origine de 
          l’inégalité to the ample structure of Le contrat social, the secret of which is 
          revealed in the Emile.[3]

[b] Gymnastics RF

Lévi-Strauss’s boredom with the tired “mental gymnastics” of Sorbonne philosophy—“not so much a system of discovering what was true and what false as of understanding how mankind gradually overcame certain contradictions”—and his predilection for geology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism, culminating in his choice of anthropology as a vocation, are a part of this desire to get to the solid foundation of matters.

For Lévi-Strauss, geology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism can be reduced to a common thread. Knowing a thing requires going beyond the sensory data that lie before us (and that includes, for academics, books and records) to achieve a deeper level of understanding. One cannot perceive, unless one is taught to see in a different way, the series of upheavals that have created a particular landscape; the clues are buried in an out layer that may not only mask, but positively deform the deeper structures.

          Every landscape appears first of all as a vast chaos, which leaves one 
          free to choose the meaning one wants to give it. But, over and above the 
          various agricultural considerations, geographical irregularities, and the 
          various accidents of history and prehistory, the most majestic meaning of 
          all is surely that which precedes, commands, and, to a large extent, 
          explains the others…  The sole aim of this contrariness is to recapture the 
          master-meaning, which may be obscure but of which each of the others is 
          a partial or distorted transposition.[4]

[c] Structure RF

With the case of the landscape, as with Rousseau’s desire to see a life free from the encumbrances of social institutions, it is necessary, if one is to gain real insight, to go beyond the surface to the origin of a thing, to see it in its unadulterated state. Only then is it possible, echoing the quotations above, to move to the “ample structure” of deep understanding. One cannot know the Christian West without retracing the development of its thought. But even then one hasn’t grasped the origin. One must, just as Rousseau did two hundred years earlier, “set facts aside” at times to gain a better knowledge of a thing’s true nature.

          Following Rousseau, and in what I consider to be a definitive manner, 
          Marx established that social science is no more founded on the basis of 
          events than physics is founded on sense data: the object is to construct a 
          model and to study its property and its different reactions in laboratory 
          conditions…  At a different level of reality, Marxism seemed to me to 
          proceed in the same manner as geology and psychoanalysis…  All three 
          demonstrate that understanding consists of reducing one type of reality to 
          another; that the true reality is never the most obvious; and that the nature 
          of truth is already indicated by the care it takes to remain elusive.[5]

For cultural anthropologists, the search for origins is problematic; they operate, to some extent, at the intersection of their own and other societies. It is difficult enough to retrace the steps of development in each, but to reintegrate that knowledge into a new set of principles, a new way of knowing, is forbiddingly complex. It is necessary for them to gain release from the constraints of their own societies.

          Anthropology affords me intellectual satisfaction: as a form of history, 
          linking up opposite ends with world history and my own history, it thus 
          reveals the rationale common to both. In proposing to study mankind, 
          anthropology frees me from doubt, since it examines those differences 
          and changes in mankind that have a meaning for all men, and excludes 
          those peculiar to a particular civilization, which dissolve into nothingness 
          under the gaze of the outside observer.[6]

The predicament of the anthropologist between his own society and those he studies is analogous, for Lévi-Strauss, to that of Western society itself in relation to its neighbors. Gaining receptivity, for Lévi-Strauss is not merely a matter of attuning our minds; it is necessary to free ourselves—physically and intellectually—from our environment. We are, writes Lévi-Strauss, free in relation to others.

          We thus put ourselves in a position to embark on the second stage, 
          which consists in using all societies—without adopting features of any 
          one of them—to elucidate principles of social life that we can apply in 
          reforming our own customs and not those of foreign societies: through 
          the operation of a prerogative that is the reverse of the one just mentioned, 
          the society we belong to is the only society we are in a position to transform 
          without any risk of destroying it, since the changes being introduced by us, 
          are coming from within the society itself.[7]

[d] Comparison RF

It was Rousseau, writes Lévi-Strauss, “who taught us that, after demolishing all forms of social organization, we can still discover the principles that will allow us to construct.”  We need, however, if this is to be successful, to find the “unshakable basis of human society.”

To this quest, anthropological comparison can contribute in two ways. It shows that the basis is not to be discovered in our civilization: of all known societies ours is no doubt the one most remote from it. At the same time, by bringing out the characteristics common to the majority of human societies, it helps us to postulate a type, of which no society is the faithful realization, but which indicates the direction the investigation ought to follow…

Lévi-Strauss continues: 

          Natural man did not precede society, nor is he outside it. Our task is to 
          rediscover his form as it is immanent in the social state, mankind being 
          inconceivable outside society; this means working out a program of the 
          experiments that “would be necessary in order to arrive at a knowledge 
          of natural man” and determine the “means whereby these experiments 
          can be made within society.”  But the model—this is Rousseau’s solution—
          is eternal and universal.[8]

The oft-noted “quest structure” of Tristes tropiques—leaving the stale intellectuality of the French academy for the lush vegetation of the Brazilian interior, journeying ever more deeply through the layers of human (d)evolution, and returning, finally to that same France with a deeper understanding of the West’s relationship to the rest of humanity—becomes clearer when we read with knowledge of Lévi-Strauss as social critic and reformer. The anthropologist is, indeed, caught between two civilizations. Like travelers before him, he has an effect on both, whether he wants it or not. For the anthropologist, “less able to ignore his own civilization and dissociate himself from its faults in that his very existence is incomprehensible except as an attempt at redemption,” the need to study other societies takes on added urgency and much greater importance: he is the symbol (and perhaps the vehicle), writes Lévi-Strauss, of atonement.

More on precisely this (how does anthropology provide a vehicle for redemption?) tomorrow.

See you then.   

Click here for the other posts in this Round and Square series on Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques:

Tristes 1          Tristes 2          Tristes 3          Tristes 4          Tristes 5          Tristes 6

[e] River RF

Notes 
[1] Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile [Translated by Allan Bloom] (New York: The Free Press, 1973), 1.
[2] Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropique [Translated by John and Doreen Weightman] (New York: Penguin Classics, 2012), 57.
[3] Tristes Tropiques, 57.
[4] Tristes Tropiques,58.
[5] Tristes Tropiques,392.
[6] Tristes Tropiques,390-391.
[7] Tristes Tropiques, 392. 
[8] Tristes Tropiques, 389.

Bibliography

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques [Translated by John and Doreen Weightman]. New York: Penguin Classics, 2012.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques. Emile [Translated by Allan Bloom]. New York: The Free Press, 1973.