Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory by Patrick Wilcken

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    First published in 2010 by The Penguin Press,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
     
Copyright © Patrick Wilcken, 2010
    All rights reserved
     
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
    Wilcken, Patrick.
Claude Levi-Strauss : the poet in the laboratory / Patrick Wilcken.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
    eISBN : 978-1-101-44422-1
    1. Lévi-Strauss, Claude 2. Anthropologists—France—Biography.
3. Anthropologists—Brazil—Biogrpahy. 4. Structural anthropology. I. Title.
GN21.L4W55 2010
301.092—dc22
[B]
2010017301
     

     

     
     
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For Andreia and Sophia

Introduction
     
    Some people might ask whether I haven’t been guided by a kind of quixotism throughout my career . . . an obsessive desire to find the past behind the present. If perchance someone some day were to care to understand my personality, I offer him that key.
    CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS 1
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    IN 1938, on the eve of his thirtieth birthday, Claude Lévi-Strauss was in Brazil, leading a mule train along the remains of a telegraph line. Its lopsided poles, rusted wires and porcelain adapters were strung out across the rugged scrublands of northwestern Mato Grosso state, on the fringes of the Amazon Basin. Bearded and sunburned, dressed in soiled dungarees, a colonial-style sun hat and high leather boots, Lévi-Strauss was heading an ethnographic expedition to study the Nambikwara—a loose designation for the nomadic groups who roamed the plateau, naked but for nose feathers, bracelets and waistbands. Farther up the line, as scrub turned to jungle and the team switched to canoes, Lévi-Strauss encountered other tribes encamped in rain-forest clearings—the survivors of the Arawak, Carib and Tupi cultures. He worked alongside a team of experts, including his first wife, Dina, the tropical-medicine specialist Dr. Jean Vellard, and a Brazilian anthropologist, Luiz de Castro Faria, on a mission that has become as celebrated as it is controversial.
    Photographs from Lévi-Strauss’s fieldwork look dated even for their era. Pack animals heaving crates of equipment through the wilderness, men in pith helmets mingling with virtually naked tribesmen, the exchanging of beads and lengths of cloth for bows, arrows and ritual objects, laden-down