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

Author:Patrick Wilcken [Wilcken, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographies & Memoirs, Professionals & Academics, Social Scientists & Psychologists, History, Americas, South America, Brazil, Politics & Social Sciences, Anthropology, Cultural
ISBN: 1594202737
Amazon: B0043EV54O
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2010-10-07T04:00:00+00:00

7

Memoir

A man lives two existences. Until the age of forty-five he absorbs the elements surrounding him. Then, all of a sudden, it’s over; he doesn’t absorb anything more. Thereafter he lives the duplicate of his first existence, and tries to tally the succeeding days with the rhythms and the odours of his earlier active life.

PIERRE MAC ORLAN1

THE FRENCH EMPIRE, which had been in limbo through the occupation, had begun to unravel at the end of the Second World War. From the late 1940s on, there was unrest in Morocco, Cameroon, Madagascar and Algeria, with growing Vietminh resistance in French Indochina. In 1954, at Dien Bien Phu, a basin sunk into the hills of the modern-day Vietnamese-Laotian border, the French Empire went into retreat. After parachuting thousands of men in to secure a dilapidated Japanese-built airstrip, the French Expeditionary Forces were humiliatingly overpowered by Ho Chi Minh’s army—pounded by artillery from the high ground and reduced to trench warfare in the jungle valleys. Months after losing Indochina, France faced rebellion in her North African départements . The National Liberation Front maquisards (guerrillas) launched attacks across Algeria, beginning the traumatic and drawn-out loss of what was then seen as an integral part of France itself. By the mid-1950s the colonial paradigm, which had shaped not just geopolitical arrangements, but French attitudes and culture, was beginning to fall apart.

Postwar France was gripped by a renewed sense of pathos and disillusionment, but it was coupled with a growing interest in the non-Western cultures then emerging from beneath the imperial boot. Anthropologists became well-placed witnesses to this moment of revelation. Their field sites were at the margins of collapsing empires; the people they studied, after years relegated to bit parts in colonial sagas, were finding their voice. Culturally, the world was bending back on itself, rediscovering its own diversity, as one by one the imperial blocks began to disaggregate. The renaming of Lévi-Strauss’s chair was symbolic of the shifting sensibilities. When he took up the post it was called Religions of Uncivilized Peoples (Religions des peuples non civilisés), a title that became less and less tenable. On several occasions Lévi-Strauss remembered having his interpretations challenged by the “uncivilized” people themselves—African students studying at the Sorbonne. He eventually succeeded in modernizing the chair’s title to Comparative Religions of Peoples without Writing (Religions comparées des peuples sans écriture)—a firmer, more scientific designation, less likely to offend.

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