Against Interpretation Read online

  This coolness of tone—combined with a great intelligence and subtlety about motives—makes Manhood an attractive book in a fairly familiar sense. To its other qualities, though, we may react with impatience, for they violate many preconceptions. Apart from the brilliant prefatory essay, Manhood meanders, circles, and doubles back; there is no reason for it to end where it does; such types of insight are interminable. The book has no movement or direction and provides no consummation or climax. Manhood is another of those very modern books which are fully intelligible only as part of the project of a life: we are to take the book as an action, giving on to other actions. This type of literature, item by item, rather than retrospectively viewed as part of a body of work, is often hermetic and opaque, sometimes boring. Now, it is not hard to make out a defense for hermeticism and opaqueness as a possible condition for literary works of an extreme density. But what about boredom? Can that ever be justified? I think it can, sometimes. (Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not.) We should acknowledge certain uses of boredom as one of the most creative stylistic features of modern literature—as the conventionally ugly and messy have already become essential resources of modern painting, and silence (since Webern) a positive, structural element in contemporary music.

  [1964]

  The paradox is irresoluble: the less one culture communicates with another, the less likely they are to be corrupted, one by the other; but on the other hand, the less likely it is, in such conditions, that the respective emissaries of these cultures will be able to seize the richness and significance of their diversity. The alternative is inescapable: either I am a traveller in ancient times, and faced with a prodigious spectacle which would be almost entirely unintelligible to me and might, indeed, provoke me to mockery or disgust; or I am a traveller of my own day, hastening in search of a vanished reality. In either case I am the loser … for today, as I go groaning among the shadows, I miss, inevitably, the spectacle that is now taking shape.

  from Tristes Tropiques

  The anthropologist as hero

  MOST serious thought in our time struggles with the feeling of homelessness. The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo. And the only way to cure this spiritual nausea seems to be, at least initially, to exacerbate it. Modern thought is pledged to a kind of applied Hegelianism: seeking its Self in its Other. Europe seeks itself in the exotic—in Asia, in the Middle East, among pre-literate peoples, in a mythic America; a fatigued rationality seeks itself in the impersonal energies of sexual ecstasy or drugs; consciousness seeks its meaning in unconsciousness; humanistic problems seek their oblivion in scientific “value neutrality” and quantification. The “other” is experienced as a harsh purification of “self.” But at the same time the “self” is busily colonizing all strange domains of experience. Modern sensibility moves between two seemingly contradictory but actually related impulses: surrender to the exotic, the strange, the other; and the domestication of the exotic, chiefly through science.

  Although philosophers have contributed to the statement and understanding of this intellectual homelessness—and, in my opinion, only those modern philosophers who do so have an urgent claim on our interest—it is mainly poets, novelists, a few painters who have lived this tortured spiritual impulse, in willed derangement and in self-imposed exile and in compulsive travel. But there are other professions whose conditions of life have been made to bear witness to this vertiginous modern attraction to the alien. Conrad in his fiction, and T. E. Lawrence, Saint-Exupéry, Montherlant among others in their lives as well as their writing, created the métier of the adventurer as a spiritual vocation. Thirty-five years ago, Malraux chose the profession of the archaeologist, and went to Asia. And, more recently, Claude Lévi-Strauss has invented the profession of the anthropologist as a total occupation, one involving a spiritual commitment like that of the creative artist or the adventurer or the psychoanalyst.

  Unlike the writers mentioned above, Lévi-Strauss is not a man of letters. Most of his writings are scholarly, and he has always been associated with the academic world. At present, since 1960, he holds a very grand academic post, the newly created chair of social anthropology at the Collège de France, and heads a large and richly endowed research institute. But his academic eminence and ability to dispense patronage are scarcely adequate measures of the formidable position he occupies in French intellectual life today. In France, where there is more awareness of the adventure, the risk involved in intelligence, a man can be both a specialist and the subject of general and intelligent interest and controversy. Hardly a month passes in France without a major article in some serious literary journal, or an important public lecture, extolling or attacking the ideas and influence of Lévi-Strauss. Apart from the tireless Sartre and the virtually silent Malraux, he is the most interesting intellectual “figure” in France today.

  So far, Lévi-Strauss is hardly known in this country. A collection of previously scattered essays on the methods and concepts of anthropology, brought out in 1958 and entitled Anthropologie Structurale, and his Le Totémisme Aujourd’hui (1962) have been translated in the last year. Still to appear are another collection of essays, more philosophical in character, entitled La Pensée Sauvage (1962); a book published by UNESCO in 1952 called Race et Histoire; and the brilliant work on the kinship systems of primitives, Les Structures Élémentaires de la Parenté (1949).7 Some of these writings presuppose more familiarity with anthropological literature and with the concepts of linguistics, sociology, and psychology than the ordinary cultivated reader has. But it would be a great pity if Lévi-Strauss’ work, when it is all translated, were to find no more than a specialist audience in this country. For Lévi-Strauss has assembled, from the vantage point of anthropology, one of the few interesting and possible intellectual positions—in the most general sense of that phrase. And one of his books is a masterpiece. I mean the incomparable Tristes Tropiques, a book that became a bestseller when published in France in 1955, but when translated into English and brought out here in 1961 was shamefully ignored. Tristes Tropiques is one of the great books of our century. It is rigorous, subtle, and bold in thought. It is beautifully written. And, like all great books, it bears an absolutely personal stamp; it speaks with a human voice.

  Ostensibly Tristes Tropiques is the record, or memoir rather, written over fifteen years after the event, of the author’s experience in the “field.” Anthropologists are fond of likening field research to the puberty ordeal which confers status upon members of certain primitive societies. Lévi-Strauss’ ordeal was in Brazil, before the Second World War. Born in 1908 and of the intellectual generation and circle which included Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, and Paul Nizan, he studied philosophy in the late twenties, and, like them, taught for a while in a provincial lycée. Dissatisfied with philosophy he soon gave up his teaching post, returned to Paris to study law, then began the study of anthropology, and in 1935 went to São Paulo as Professor of Anthropology. From 1935 to 1939, during the long university vacations from November to March and for one period of more than a year, Lévi-Strauss lived among Indian tribes in the interior of Brazil. Tristes Tropiques offers a record of his encounters with these tribes—the nomadic, missionary-murdering Nambikwara, the Tupi-Kawahib whom no white man had ever seen before, the materially splendid Bororo, the ceremonious Caduveo who produce huge amounts of abstract painting and sculpture. But the greatness of Tristes Tropiques lies not simply in this sensitive reportage, but in the way Lévi-Strauss uses his experience—to reflect on the nature of landscape, on the meaning of physical hardship, on the city in the Old World and the New, on the idea of travel, on sunsets, on modernity, on the connection between literacy and power. The key to the book is Chapter Six, “How I Became an Anthropologist,” where Lévi-Strauss finds in the history of his own choice a case study
of the unique spiritual hazards to which the anthropologist subjects himself. Tristes Tropiques is an intensely personal book. Like Montaigne’s Essays and Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, it is an intellectual autobiography, an exemplary personal history in which a whole view of the human situation, an entire sensibility, is elaborated.

  The profoundly intelligent sympathy which informs Tristes Tropiques makes other memoirs about life among pre-literate peoples seem ill-at-ease, defensive, provincial. Yet sympathy is modulated throughout by a hard-won impassivity. In her autobiography Simone de Beauvoir recalls Lévi-Strauss as a young philosophy student-teacher expounding “in his detached voice, and with a deadpan expression … the folly of the passions.” Not for nothing is Tristes Tropiques prefaced by a motto from Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. Lévi-Strauss’ aim is very much like that of Lucretius, the Graecophile Roman who urged the study of the natural sciences as a mode of ethical psychotherapy. The aim of Lucretius was not independent scientific knowledge, but the reduction of emotional anxiety. Lucretius saw man as torn between the pleasure of sex and the pain of emotional loss, tormented by superstitions inspired by religion, haunted by the fear of bodily decay and death. He recommended scientific knowledge, which teaches intelligent detachment, equanimity. Scientific knowledge is, for Lucretius, a mode of psychological gracefulness. It is a way of learning to let go.

  Lévi-Strauss sees man with a Lucretian pessimism, and a Lucretian feeling for knowledge as both consolation and necessary disenchantment. But for him the demon is history—not the body or the appetites. The past, with its mysteriously harmonious structures, is broken and crumbling before our eyes. Hence, the tropics are tristes. There were nearly twenty thousand of the naked, indigent, nomadic, handsome Nambikwaras in 1915, when they were first visited by white missionaries; when Lévi-Strauss arrived in 1938 there were no more than two thousand of them; today they are miserable, ugly, syphilitic, and almost extinct. Hopefully, anthropology brings a reduction of historical anxiety. It is interesting that Lévi-Strauss describes himself as an ardent student of Marx since the age of seventeen (“Rarely do I tackle a problem in sociology or ethnology without having first set my mind in motion by reperusal of a page or two from the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte or the Critique of Political Economy”) and that many of Lévi-Strauss’ students are reported to be former Marxists, come as it were to lay their piety at the altar of the past since it cannot be offered to the future. Anthropology is necrology. “Let’s go and study the primitives,” say Lévi-Strauss and his pupils, “before they disappear.”

  It is strange to think of these ex-Marxists—philosophical optimists if ever such have existed—submitting to the melancholy spectacle of the crumbling prehistoric past. They have moved not only from optimism to pessimism, but from certainty to systematic doubt. For, according to Lévi-Strauss, research in the field, “where every ethnological career begins, is the mother and nursemaid of doubt, the philosophical attitude par excellence.” In Lévi-Strauss’ program for the practicing anthropologist in Structural Anthropology, the Cartesian method of doubt is installed as a permanent agnosticism. “This ‘anthropological doubt’ consists not merely in knowing that one knows nothing but in resolutely exposing what one knows, even one’s own ignorance, to the insults and denials inflicted on one’s dearest ideas and habits by those ideas and habits which may contradict them to the highest degree.”

  To be an anthropologist is thus to adopt a very ingenious stance vis-à-vis one’s own doubts, one’s own intellectual uncertainties. Lévi-Strauss makes it clear that for him this is an eminently philosophical stance. At the same time, anthropology reconciles a number of divergent personal claims. It is one of the rare intellectual vocations which do not demand a sacrifice of one’s manhood. Courage, love of adventure, and physical hardiness—as well as brains—are called upon. It also offers a solution to that distressing by-product of intelligence, alienation. Anthropology conquers the estranging function of the intellect by institutionalizing it. For the anthropologist, the world is professionally divided into “home” and “out there,” the domestic and the exotic, the urban academic world and the tropics. The anthropologist is not simply a neutral observer. He is a man in control of, and even consciously exploiting, his own intellectual alienation. A technique de dépaysement, Lévi-Strauss calls his profession in Structural Anthropology. He takes for granted the philistine formulas of modern scientific “value neutrality.” What he does is to offer an exquisite, aristocratic version of this neutrality. The anthropologist in the field becomes the very model of the 20th century consciousness: a “critic at home” but a “conformist elsewhere.” Lévi-Strauss acknowledges that this paradoxical spiritual state makes it impossible for the anthropologist to be a citizen. The anthropologist, so far as his own country is concerned, is sterilized politically. He cannot seek power, he can only be a critical dissenting voice. Lévi-Strauss himself, although in the most generic and very French way a man of the Left (he signed the famous Manifesto of the 121, which recommended civil disobedience in France in protest against the Algerian War), is by French standards an apolitical man. Anthropology, in Lévi-Strauss’ conception, is a technique of political disengagement; and the anthropologist’s vocation requires the assumption of a profound detachment. “Never can he feel himself ‘at home’ anywhere; he will always be, psychologically speaking, an amputee.”

  Certainly the earliest visitors to pre-literate peoples were far from being detached. The original field workers in what was then called ethnology were missionaries, bent on redeeming the savage from his follies and making him over into a civilized Christian. To cover the bosoms of the women, put pants on the men, and send them all to Sunday school to mumble the gospel was the aim of an army of stony-eyed spinsters from Yorkshire and rawboned farmers’ sons from the American Midwest. Then there were the secular humanists—impartial, respectful, hands-off observers who did not come to sell Christ to the savages but to preach “reason,” “tolerance,” and “cultural pluralism” to the bourgeois literary public back home. And back home there were the great consumers of anthropological data, building rationalist world views, like Frazer and Spencer and Robertson Smith and Freud. But always anthropology has struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject. The horror of the primitive (naïvely expressed by Frazer and Lévy-Bruhl) is never far from the anthropologist’s consciousness. Lévi-Strauss marks the furthest reach of the conquering of the aversion. The anthropologist in the manner of Lévi-Strauss is a new breed altogether. He is not, like recent generations of American anthropologists, simply a modest data-collecting “observer.” Nor does he have any axe—Christian, rationalist, Freudian, or otherwise—to grind. Essentially he is engaged in saving his own soul, by a curious and ambitious act of intellectual catharsis.

  The anthropologist—and herein lies his essential difference, according to Lévi-Strauss, from the sociologist—is an eye-witness. “It is sheer illusion that anthropology can be taught purely theoretically.” (One wonders why a Max Weber writing about ancient Judaism or Confucian China is permissible, if a Frazer describing scapegoat rituals among the Tagbanua tribe in the Philippines is not.) Why? Because anthropology, for Lévi-Strauss, is an intensely personal kind of intellectual discipline, like psychoanalysis. A spell in the field is the exact equivalent of the training analysis undergone by candidate psychoanalysts. The purpose of field work, Lévi-Strauss writes, is to “create that psychological revolution which marks the decisive turning point in the training of the anthropologist.” And no written tests, but only the judgment of “experienced members of the profession” who have undergone the same psychological ordeal, can determine “if and when” a candidate anthropologist “has, as a result of field work, accomplished that inner revolution that will really make him into a new man.”

  However, it must be emphasized that this literary-sounding conception of the anthropologist’s calling—the twice-born spiritual adventure, pledged to a systematic déracinem
ent—is complemented in most of Lévi-Strauss’ writings by an insistence on the most unliterary techniques of analysis and research. His important essay on myth in Structural Anthropology outlines a technique for analyzing and recording the elements of myths so that these can be processed by a computer. European contributions to what in America are called the “social sciences” are in exceedingly low repute in this country, for their insufficient empirical documentation, for their “humanist” weakness for covert culture criticism, for their refusal to embrace the techniques of quantification as an essential tool of research. Lévi-Strauss’ essays in Structural Anthropology certainly escape these strictures. Indeed, far from disdaining the American fondness for precise quantitative measurement of traditional problems, Lévi-Strauss finds it not sophisticated or methodologically rigorous enough. Somewhat at the expense of the French school (Durkheim, Mauss, and their followers) to whom he is closely allied, Lévi-Strauss pays lavish tribute throughout the essays in Structural Anthropology to the work of American anthropologists—particularly Lowie, Boas, and Kroeber.8 But his nearest affinity is to the more avant-garde methodologies of economics, neurology, linguistics, and game theory. For Lévi-Strauss, there is no doubt that anthropology must be a science, rather than a humanistic study. The question is only how. “For centuries,” he writes, “the humanities and the social sciences have resigned themselves to contemplate the world of the natural and exact sciences as a kind of paradise which they will never enter.” But recently, a doorway to paradise has been opened by the linguists, like Roman Jakobson and his school. Linguists now know how to reformulate their problems so that they can “have a machine built by an engineer and make a kind of experiment, completely similar to a natural-science experiment,” which will tell them “if the hypothesis is worthwhile or not.” Linguists—as well as economists and game theorists—have shown the anthropologist “a way to get out of the confusion resulting from too much acquaintance and familiarity with concrete data.”