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

canoes and jungle campsites. The skinned carcass of a seven-meter boa constrictor stretches out across one plate, a dozen snake fetuses, its stillborn progeny, spilled out over the earth. “It took a lot of shooting,” Lévi-Strauss recalled, “since these animals are impervious to body wounds and have to be hit in the head.” 2 It all has the feel of some grand nineteenth-century scientific expedition.
    The effect is doubly disjointed. Following the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski’s famous fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands off the coast of New Guinea, where he had studied ritual exchange across the archipelago, ethnography had already become strongly associated with solitary cultural immersion. By the 1930s, images from the field were more likely to show a single tent pitched within striking distance of a tribe, a trestle table strewn with notebooks, a rucksack with provisions, possibly some recording equipment stuffed into a satchel. The anthropologist’s lonely vigil was expected to yield worthwhile results only after years of assimilation. In contrast, Lévi-Strauss’s team clocked up more than a thousand kilometers, rarely pausing for more than a few weeks in any one place. His expedition would end up being one of the last ventures of its kind—an antiquated journey across a forgotten corner of Brazil.
    Toward the end of 1938 the party broke up, Castro Faria traveling down the Amazon for Rio de Janeiro, Vellard and Lévi-Strauss taking a small steamship up the Madeira River, then boarding an amphibious plane for Cochabamba in Bolivia. 3 It had been at best a patchy experience. His field notes, now held at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, have a disorganized feel to them. Lévi-Strauss interspersed lists of basic vocabulary of different indigenous groups, confusing kin diagrams, illustrations of weaving techniques, and drawings of animals, faces and spears, along with inventories of the enormous quantities of provisions needed to sustain the expedition. 4
    Added to a brief, earlier spell of fieldwork among the Caduveo and the Bororo farther to the south, the trip had initiated Lévi-Strauss as an anthropologist, but in a peculiarly diffuse way. Instead of the in-depth analysis of a single group, Lévi-Strauss had briefly surveyed half a dozen different indigenous cultures, dotted across the Brazilian interior. That this should have been the starting point for his career was perhaps appropriate. From the fragments—an arabesque painted on a weathered Caduveo cheek, the Mundé’s igloo-shaped forest huts, the ritual flute songs of the Nambikwara—Lévi-Strauss built a body of work that reflected not so much the intricacies of a single tribe, but features common to all culture.
    The great irony was that his nineteenth-century-style expedition ended up being the handmaiden to one of the most avant-garde bodies of work in the humanities. In his memoir recounting the journey, Tristes Tropiques (1955), written a decade and a half after his experiences in Brazil, Lévi-Strauss put the then emerging discipline of anthropology on the map. From the scraps of his field notes, he pieced together a self-portrait of the anthropologist at midcentury: a cerebral pioneer on a quest to leave the confines of Western culture in order to know another world, another way of being; an outsider condemned to roam the cultural borderlands, forever restless, damaged (“ psychologiquement mutilé ” 5 ) by chronic feelings of rootless-ness; a forlorn traveler surveying the cultural ruins at the edge of European expansion. At the same time, he wrote of a new theoretical approach. The motley groups of Nambikwara, loitering around derelict telegraph stations, scrounging trinkets and leftovers from missionaries, the barely sustainable forest settlements, the heat, the dust—all this somehow crystallized into a highly stylized image of indigenous culture. The model was called structuralism—an approach that sought to uncover