american ethnologist. an interview with claude lévi-strauss, 30 june 1982

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An Interview with Claude Lvi-Strauss, 30 June 1982Author(s): Bernadette Bucher and Claude Lvi-StraussReviewed work(s):Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 12, No. 2 (May, 1985), pp. 360-368Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/644225 .Accessed: 04/03/2013 14:44

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comments and reflections

an interview with Claude Levi-Strauss, 30 June 1982

BERNADETTE BUCHER-Fordham University

Bernadette Bucher: Originally, my intention was to ask you about your work as you may see itnow, with some distance, to judge it, so to speak, both retrospectively and in terms of its pros-pects and heritage. But I know-you told me so again a few days ago-it does not interest you,

it never did, to go back to what you already wrote. However, there is in you a sort of paradoxfrom this point of view and this is where, if you agree, I would like to start. There is on the onehand a will to always go forward, never to turn back; but on the other, each one of your bookstries to show a continuity with what precedes, between The Savage Mind and Totemism Today,or between the different volumes of the Mythologiques for instance, one senses a deep needfor continuing with a past which never seems to disappear, is never abolished, a will to buildup a unified work, as an architect, careful that each piece he separately built at different periodsof time become only one whole complex. This entails a constant presence of the past, an in-tense attention to it. It has a whole Proustian aspect. . .1

Claude Levi-Strauss: That is what I was going to say. It is a Recherche Du Temps Perdu, but itis because time is lost. This return o the past is more obvious in Naked Man, by the way. I thinkthere is a character trait here and an effort to rationalize it. The fact is that I do obliterate mypast. The older members of my family are always amazed that I should not remember anythingof my childhood or adolescence. Likewise, when I was a student I was actively involved in apolitical movement called "constructive revolution," within the socialist party, then namedSFIO. It just happened that young Ph.D. candidates got interested in it for their dissertations. Sothey came to see me, as I am one of the rare survivors of this movement. I do my best to answertheir questions. But they constantly tell me, "No, this is not possible. It is not right. Here are thedates. This is the way things happened." So then: a certain amount of personal deficiency. But,

moreover,I have an acute

feelingthat the books I

write,the lectures I

giveare events

passingthrough me and, once out, they leave me stranded, if I may say so. I am only the passageway,the transit-road of a certain number of things which, I admit, have been elaborated within me,but once gone, leave me empty.

BB: Maybe, then, we are touching a break between the unconscious, the affective part and theintellectual aspect in you, because what is striking in your work is this link with the past.

CLS: Probably because the past escapes me, hence this obsession to recuperate it.

BB: Since we are on this problem of forgetfulness, obliteration of the self, when in your work,on a different level, from an epistemological point of view, you evoke the effacement du sujet,the "illusions of subjectivity," is it that . ..

Copyright 1985 by the American Anthropological ssociation0094-0496/85/020360-09$ 1.40/1

360 american ethnologist

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CLS:Because his is the way I experience myself. I have absolutely no feeling of my personalidentity.

BB:This is strange. tmight explain your relationship with psychoanalysis. recently becameinterested n the relationship ne may see-or not see-between the unconscious as you de-scribe it through myths, and the individual, he Freudian nconscious. I know that you dis-cussed that problem everal imes. But many points still remain unanswered. For nstance, arethe laws which, according o Freud, govern he individual unconscious ompletely heteroge-neous, incompatible with those you discover n the myths of certain ocieties or in other cul-tural phenomena? This s certainly big problem.

CLS: ndeed. First f all, I certainly do not eliminate Freud. The discovery of Freud's work hasbeen essential o me from he time Iwas in my teens. Ihappened o have a schoolfriend whosefather was a psychiatrist nd very close to Marie Bonaparte. o,this small group ntroduced meto Freud n its own indirect way, rather arlier han most people at the time. Freud lwaysap-peared essential to me in that he discovered this is what will survive or a long time, if notforever) hat thinking processes which may appear otally rrational ide a form of rationalityand are understandable. his s a fundamental ule n the human ciences. We are confrontedwith a wealth of thinking modes. Our role is to discover what may lie behind as rationality.This seems to me a definite asset. Now, my reservations oward psychoanalysis re twofold:firstof all, I am not at all convinced that this discovery, pertaining o Freud's heoretical on-tribution, an really have any practical application. nother words, I am not convinced psy-choanalysis ver cured anyone.

BB:Did you ever try o be analyzed?

CLS:Never. Never, but in the society we live in, we are constantly urrounded, irded withpeople who have been or are being analyzed and that's a field of observation. This is a firstpoint. So, in Freud's work, in what remains of it, I would clearly distinguish he theoreticalaspect rom he applications. am skeptical hat here are any. On the other hand, roma meth-odological point of view, I have felt the need to react strongly gainst a rather ommon tend-ency in the human sciences whereby whenever a discipline tumbles n a problem, t turns othe next to fill in the gaps. Anthropologists o it each time they turn o psychoanalysis nd viceversa. This holds true also for other disciplines. So, I am willing to admit a third response owhat you said. I am ready o concede that what psychoanalysts nd anthropologists o is, to acertain extent, complementary; hat psychoanalysts work on individual psychology and an-thropologists n collective phenomena; hat n certain espects, heywork na parallel manner;but t would be disastrous or both of them to try o fillthe gaps neach discipline by borrowingfromeach other and that heir relations an be all the more ruitful fthey always remain learlyseparated.

BB:There s still something eft unanswered n my question, f I may ...

CLS: Surely.

BB: Let's ake, for instance, he modes of thinking xpressed n myth. Of course, myths arecollective. They belong to specific cultural groups, o a society; but these groups or societiesare made of individuals. n your opinion, can the mechanisms, or instance, he systems oftransformations hose laws you define for myths, be entirely different rom hose which op-erate otherwise, within he individuals or whom these mythsare meaningful?

CLS:Take dreams, or example. When I read The Interpretation f Dreams or the first ime, itwas a revelation o me for the reasons mentioned before. What strikes me now is that Freudexamined only a very special case of dreams, not the general case. What is most general n

comments and reflections 361



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dreams s that he mind riesas well as it can to make a more or less well organized whole outof a mass of stimulations which invade he unconscious during leep. These stimulations maybe of the kind Freud xclusively recognizes, hat s, unconscious desires. But Ithink here mayalso be many of a totally different ort. They may come from he vague perception f physio-logical disorders r more simply rom he external world. There may be many other sources.

At any rate, he problem s for the mind to make a coherent whole out of it. So, to go back toyour question, I would say yes, I think hat n this case the mind works n the same way as-Ido not like the expression "collective hinking," will tell you why in a minute-let's say inrelation o the mass of stimulations t receives from outside, from society: all the questionsraised by the universe, by cosmology, economics, social rules, and so on.

Idon't like the term "collective hinking" ecause there s no doubt hat originallymythswerecreated by individuals. One must suppose hat as far back as we can go, there must have beenone individual who told a story or the first ime. But his story s not yet a myth. Itwill becomeso only when it has been accepted by a certain collective group, ndeed made of individualminds, but

theywill

convergeo

repeatand eliminate ertain aspects of the storyonly by obey-

ing the same constraints. One of them stems rom he fact that he brain tructure nd function-ing are fundamentally he same among all men. That's a common denominator. On the otherhand, men live in a particular ociety, have certain kindsof relationships ith he natural world,and all these constraints will transform myth romwhat originallywas a dream, or somethingclose to a dream, nto a tool subservient o social life.

BB:Is this not where anthropology elates o biology? At some point is the anthropologist otforced o yield to the biologist?

CLS:This, Iwould say, is wishful hinking.At the moment, here is,no way it can be so. There

is a chasm between the two fields. We are too far off the mark and the biologistsand neuro-physiologistswill tell you they have not advanced ar enough to claim having a theory of in-tellectual activity. All we can say is that the great advances made in neurophysiology f thebrain an let us hope that n the long run, n decades or centuries, convergence will occur.

BB: Let's eave biology and psychoanalysis nd turn oward history. Here again I know youhave written a lot on the relationship etween anthropology, specially structural nthropol-ogy, and history. All I want to do is to try illing certain gaps.CLS: Fine.

BB: Right now we see anthropological esearch proliferate n areas which in the past were

mostly he sociologist's erritory: uralEuropean ocieties, urban nthropology n regionswhichpossess important istorical rchives, often going very far back in time. In this particular ase,how do you envisage the relation between fieldwork nd historical ata? nother words, s itpossible n your view to apply a form of structural nthropology o this type of fieldwork itu-ation where important istorical ocumentation xists?

CLS: tseems to me that one of the most important evelopments which occurred n the lastfew years is the rapprochement etween anthropologists nd historians. For a long time, wewere living in a situation where historians ook care of important hings and anthropologiststook care of trivia, oo insignificant o be of interest o historians. will always remember ow

during a discussionat the

great meeting "Anthropology oday,"held in New York n

1952,I

said that anthropologists ere like the "ragpickers f history" nd were collecting what histo-rians would put in their garbage can, in their dumps. This otally poisoned he rest of the dis-cussion. Later n Margaret Mead old me: "You know, here are words hat are oo emotionallyloaded o be ever pronounced: garbage' orone." Shewas quite right.But think he idea itself




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was correct. In the last 20 or 30 years historians ave learned hat all these small details heyignored, corned, otallyoverlooked, were very important nd they now include hem in theirown historical esearch. This is an important tep. The other aspect, which one may considerinversely ymmetrical, s that f historians re willing o become, so to speak, he ethnographersof past societies, anthropologists hemselvescan profit onsiderably rom t. Before,what theyexamined, he data they could gather, dealt with societies coexisting n space. Now, thanks othe historians' ew perspectives, hey can add to it another dimension, hat s to say, differentmoments of societies coming in a temporal equence. This ncreases ur research possibilitiesin almost geometrical proportion. As a result,we realize hat between so-called "primitive o-cieties" and the former imes of large-scale ocieties, here are many more similarities han onemay have supposed and for that reason research n each field can fertilize he other. For n-stance, in the last few years in the course of my work on cognatic societies, I was constantlyaware that many gaps and puzzles in ethnographic ocuments can be bridged and solved, ifnot easily, at least o a certain xtent, by looking nto what was going on in Medieval European,Eastern, r Far Eastern ocieties. That s a great rapprochement nd a preamble o your mainquestion: What can the anthropologist, specially a structural nthropologist, o in contem-porary ocieties? First f all, he or she cannot afford o bracket way history. We should neverforget hat when we study so-called primitive ocieties in the present, t is not because there san inherent virtue o synchrony; t is simply because the diachronic dimension s missing, atleast for the most part. Each ime we can avail ourselves of this diachronic dimension, eachtime we have a chance to use history, we must ook at it in the firstplace. There s, in myview,nothing more pernicious han the attitude hat prevailed not any more), with Anglo-Saxonfunctionalism, ccording owhich one had to tackle he studyof a society, a village, or a groupin a state of intellectual irginity nd was not supposed o introduce ny information hat couldhave altered he observer's andor and spontaneity. tartwith history, his is the first point. Thesecond is to keep constantly n mind hat there s no single fundamental tructure n a society,that everything n it is not structural. here are structural r structurable slands and these is-lands or islets bathe in an ocean of random phenomena not amenable o structural nalysis.Theybelong to the historian's omain, because his role is to tell us how things happened. How-ever, there s in my view no ground o say that because things happened n a certain way, theyhad o happen hisway by some internal, idden necessity.The historian's omain sessentiallycontingent. But n this ocean of contingency, of dispersed tructures, s Prigoginewould say,"there are islands which spontaneously tructure hemselves." The role of the structural n-thropologist s to spot them and study hem, but in no way can he claim to eliminate he his-

torian's pecific role. He must on the contrary e constantly ware of the limits and necessarymodesty of his procedure n relation o the ocean of uncertainty, here only historical methodcan operate.

BB: nwhat you just said, itseems to me you implicitly ccept he idea ofsome human reedom.Ifthere is no internal necessity hat things happened he way they did, by means of some de-terminism, oes it not imply hat here are areas . .

CLS:Listen, o talk about unpredictability r uncertainty oes not mean freedom at all. WhenI say, "In any historical process we cannot foresee how things will happen," t does not meanat all that hings happen hisway by a conscious human decision. Take an example Ioften give

about the origin of agriculture n the New World. We know that one of the oldest cultivatedplants o be found there is a species of squash called Lagenaria. hey are not American butcome from Africa. tmeans the beginnings of agriculture, r if not the beginnings Ioversim-plify),at least some of the earliest orms of agriculture n the New World, which to a certainextent shaped hings o come, depend upon he fact hat a certain plant went with its seeds from




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Africa o America. How did it get there? We have no idea. Maybe pirogues arrying rovisionsfromAfrica ot lost on the American hores or, more simply, quash loatedacross he Atlantic,drifting n the current. We do not know. Atany rate, t is a random phenomenon. thappened;may not have happened. Men spotted hese plants and cultivated hem. They could have ig-nored hem.

BB:I still keep in mind he criticism o often reiterated gainst tructuralism, t leastyour ormof structuralism, amely, hat t reduces man and eventually negates him. In what you just saidabout history, sense a sort of ambiguity. One could see, as I did first,and you contradictedme, a certain denial, but...

CLS:The critique s absurd. But I do not see any valorization f man in saying: n human o-cieties, things happen, ike, let's say, Brownian movements, hat s to say particles representedby individuals r societies), constantly move in various directions which nothing n their pre-vious positions can allow us to predict.

BB:So,

does the idea of a "human reedom" n the sense usedby Sartre,

orinstance,

or evenin itscurrent meaning, eem to you, in this case too, an illusion,of the same type as the illusionsof "subjectivity"? r, on the contrary, ven ifthere are forms of cultural eterminism . .

CLS: would say: neither one nor the other. It is a concept which is operational t a certainlevel of observation nd which ceases to be so at another evel. Iwould repeat a comparisonoften used. Ifyou look at a drop of water n a microscope with different evelsof magnification,at the lowest level you will see a multitude f little creatures busy eating each other, makinglove or what not. At the next level, you will no longer see them but the cells their bodies aremade of. One step further nd you will see molecules and if you still ncrease he magnification,you will eventually see atoms. At a certain evel of observation, where you see individuals,organisms hat have various relations oward ach other, I am willing o accept that he notionof freedom may be operational, or, ifwe govern hese littlecreatures, we would have the high-est interest n persuading hem they are responsible or their actions and therefore ree. It willbe the best way to control heir activities. But t losesany sortof meaning when we are no longerdealing with individuals utonly with the cells their bodies are made of or with he atoms nsidethe cells' molecules. In brief, here is no privileged evel. The fact that this type of discussionshould ever take place within he human ciences demonstrates, n my view, that hey are notreally sciences. It is inconceivable n what is called in English"hard ciences." A molecularbiologistwill never question hat what a zoologist does is interesting nd vice versa.

BB:Then, let us remain within the classification f sciences to which you devoted several ar-ticles. This is a problem which becomes more and more important, specially in the Stateswhere multi-and interdisciplinary rograms roliferate I each in one of them) and reshufflingsof departmental rganization re more requent. Atany rate, here s a renewed nterest n thisissue.Can you, at the moment, nspiteof what you just said, see a central ole oranthropology?

CLS: f I were to say a central role, I would contradict myself. Let's put it this way: frames ofreference become more profitable han others at certain periods. They change with time. Forinstance, here is no doubt that in the past few years, molecular biology has been a very prof-itable rame of reference n lifesciences. In he past halfcentury, nthropology asbeen, Ithink,a

particularly rofitable ne,but it does not mean it will remain hat

wayforever.

BB:In Structural nthropology ou said that n order o establish a consistent lassification fsciences, one should firstmake an epistemological ritique f each science. To begin with an-thropology, more specifically he history f anthropology, ow do you envisage a critical his-tory of anthropology hat would not fall into the traps of evolutionism, or instance?




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CLS: have not thought of it. You catch me unaware.

BB: I was mainly thinking of your paper on Rousseau, which is splendid, but insofar as youpresent him as the founder of the Human Sciences and the 18th century as a period of funda-mental change, one could somehow interpret his as an evolutionist iew of the history f an-

thropology.t s

paradoxical.This s what Marvin Harris

laims, amongothers.

RereadingMon-

taigne, particularly he "Apology or Raymond e Sebonde," which in my view is crucial nthe history f anthropological hought, t seems to me that his fundamental reak had alreadyoccurred n the 16th century, with Montaigne nd certainly thers, ike Bodin or instance . .

CLS:Or Rabelais.

BB:Yes. Iwonder why this aspect of Montaigne as been overlooked or so long. Everyone asread Montaigne. Rousseau read him; everyone in the 18th century read him and plunderedhim. In spite of this, historians f anthropology ontinue o place in the 18th century a breakwhich, in my view, was already accomplished n the 16th century by certain ndividuals ike

Montaigne nd maybe others.CLS:Or Rabelais, oo.

BB:Yes, Rabelais. So I am trying o understand he historians' mistake, and I was wonderingwhether you would have an opinion on this.

CLS: don't. I don't believe I have an evolutionist attitude on this point. I rather ee abruptscintillationswhich occurred at a certain ime and whose glow faded away until another cin-tillation appeared. You are quite right o say that with Montaigne, nd more generally he 16thcentury it is not very difficult o find out why: it is because of the discovery of America), herehas been a sort of explosion, the first irework f ethnological hought. Then t dwindled and,in the 18th, another one took place. I don't want to recant what I said. After all, this text onRousseau s a speech I delivered n Geneva for the 250th, if I am not mistaken, nniversary fhis birth. So what I had to show, was Rousseau's mportance. did not have to show Mon-taigne's mportance. f I had talked about Montaigne, would have shown Montaigne's ole.What remains o be said, is that anthropology as two aspects: ieldwork data (you know itbetter han anyone else as a specialist nJean de Lery nd others n the 16th century) nd criticalreflection.This squite essential n Montaigne's nd Rabelais'sworks. n he 18th century, hesetwo aspects are always present. Voyages become more requent, nd with them, ethnographicdata collecting, while moral and critical reflection ome to the forefront with Rousseau, Di-

derot,and others. But there is

somethingmore in

Montesquieu'snd Rousseau's

works,namely, hypotheses which I would call scientific or prescientific nd which, it seems to me,are more directly at the base of our present hinking. Take an example. Throughout he 19thcentury, he invention f agriculture nd animal husbandry as believed o have created a foodsurplus which in turn allowed population ncrease. Nowadays, all good specialists ake an op-posite stand. It s population ncrease which, they say, where occurring, made it impossible osurviveon hunting nd gathering nd thus mposed agriculture nd animal husbandry. hishasbeen shown in a very precise way. In New Guinea, or nstance, one can establish orrelationsbetween different ypes of agriculture from he most extensive o the most intensive) nd de-mographic ensity. Ithas also been shown in other parts f the world. The authors who do this

in a very rigorous and empirical way do not realize that it is one of Rousseau's ntuitions ohave said in the clearest way that population ncrease mposed he invention of agriculture.Thus, with Rousseau we have a number f quite dazzling ntuitions Ido not say that t had anyscientificor objective oundation) with which we agree.

BB:May I ask you now what you are interested n at the present?




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CLS: don't know. Stage-setting.Once I had a chance to make stage sets, and I never had suchfun in my life as when I was working on the stage, not only with carpenters nd painters buttechnicians as well, setting he lightings nd that sort of thing. I have a kind of repressed o-cation for manual work and if I could . . . Anyway, I am too old now and there is no chanceanything f the kind will come up, so Iwill remain n anthropologist o the end of my life.

BB:Apart rom this, you briefly poke to me about your new interest n Japan. What do youfind or are you looking or there?

CLS: find a society as different rom ours as those anthropologists tudy n South America orMelanesia, but at the same time it provides us with all the means of investigation nd reflectionwe may have in our own and even more so, since 11th- and 12th-century apanese iteratureoffers a wealth of precise information. One has to wait until Saint-Simon'sMemoires o findanything omparable t home.

BB:How does your nterest materialize? hrough rips? eadings? tudies?

CLS: Iwent twice to Japan, nce to Korea. am going back o Japan next year. So, first hroughtravels. always set as a condition or going there, n exchange or whatever am requested odo (usuallygive one or several ectures), o have the possibility f traveling nland and stayingin villages. So I am able to see more closely how people live,at least as far as not knowing helanguage does not completely block any ethnological perspective. Although learned someJapanese few years ago, without any success . . .

BB:Did you start again?

CLS: Yes, Idid.

BB:Can you speak t at all?CLS: Ican: the length and breadth f my knowledge s about en sentences. Judge or yourself.I can read he syllabaria, ut since Idon't understand hat I am reading, am no better off forit.As for ideograms, learn hem very assiduously, ut since Iam too old, Iforget hem as soonas I learn them. No, I am starting oo late, and as, fortunately, he ancient texts of Japaneseliterature ecome more and more accessible in excellent English r French ranslations, hereis an incredible mass ofethnographic nd sociologicaldocumentation. apanese cientistshavealready mined it a lot, but it may not have been sufficiently ooked at in a comparative er-spective in the lightof the last 20 or 30 years' advances made in anthropology. get a lot fromit.

BB:These last few years you have devoted your course at the College de France o complexkinship tructures. his s no doubt a return o your first research work. I heard since I am notin France during he year) hat you focused on the notion of "house" maison).As the coursehas not yet been published,2 may Iask you what you mean by that erm?

CLS: would say that t is a form of institution hat had no place in anthropological axonomy.We are used to reducing verything o preexisting ategories. Thus, we know of clans, Gens,lineages, amilies, and so on. But I have been struck by the converging estimonies f eminent

anthropologists ritingaboutAmerica as well as

Africa, tatinghat

heycan't find

anyterm n

ethnographic iterature ordescribing what heyobserve. Boassaid it long ago about he Kwak-iutl and Evans-Pritchard n almost he same terms about he Nuer, and so on. So Iasked myself:what are these institutional orms hat cannot fit in any traditional thnological ategories? ohere we are back to the rapprochement etween anthropology nd history. What strikesme isthat this unknown which ethnologists tumbled upon-historians have known well for yearsand have a noun for it-the "house," n the sense of a noble house. There s no need to go as




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far as ancient history. Reflections n noble houses were goingon among hose concerned wayup into the mid-1 th century. Ifyou look into the available memoirs by nobles, you will findthis notion, once needed to fill in a gap in ethnographic iterature the amous Kwakiutl umayMa, for instance, which Boas could not fit in the traditional ypology), s precisely he "house"as it was understood n Medieval Europe nd up to the 19th century.

BB: But what made you come back to kinship and social organization nd complete a fullcircle, as it were, from elementary o more complex kinship ystems? Are you resuming ourinitial project stated in the Elementary tructures f Kinshipwhere you say that, in order oreallyhave a genuine kinship heory, one should also discover and include complex structures?

CLS:Yes.

BB:Is it what you are aiming at, in going back to it? Areyou hoping ..

CLS:No, I don't, for the good reason that already n the Elementary tructures nd in laterworks, such as the preface o the second edition, I was fully aware of the difficulty nvolvedand of the methods o be used to complete he task. I could foresee hat one could not manageit without the help of computer cience and this is a program which is now admirably wellhandled by Francoise Heritier.3 he has precisely he competence n this ield Icompletely ackand have no better chance to acquire at my age than Japanese. So, this is a field I have com-pletely handed over to my successors, who alone are well equipped to tackle the problem.What ook me back to it is much simpler and down to earth. When someone spends 22 yearsat the Collegede France s Idid, with he marvelous reedomwhich reigns here, but he terribleservitude f having o teach a course on a completely new topic every year, I would say thatfor the first 10 or 12 years, it is no problem. One is full of new topics and ideas. But owardsthe end, all this isexhausted and one is forced hen to broach ubjects ne has no idea or notionabout. As Ihad completely eftaside the semi-complex Iwould not say complex) kinship truc-tures and an enormous iterature ad piled up on the subject whileIwas writingTheStructures,no one realized he considerable proportion f cognatic societies in the world. Everybody asa bit obsessed with unilineal ystems), o I told myself: here sall this I don't know and Ishouldget to know it. I made up these last courses not at all to bring omething o my readers, but tofill in a gap in my knowledge.

BB:Could we go back now to the time when you were in New York?You were at the NewSchool for Social Research uring and after he war, wasn't t?

CLS:No. I had been at the New School since Iarrived n NewYork,

hat s in1941 until Iwascalled back to France by the government, ightafter Paris' iberation, hat is to say during he

'44-'45 winter. Actually left the New School at the end of '44 and arrived n Paris arly 45.I went back to New York as cultural ounselor at the French Embassy nd had therefore nomore ink with the New School.

BB:Was it at that ime you were introduced o and became interested n communication he-ory?

CLS:Well, I got interested n it when Shannon's4 nd Wiener's5 work appeared. The curiousthing sthat, during everalyears, between 41 and 45, Claude Shannon nd I lived n the same

house at 51 West 11 h Street. t was a small brownstone elonging o an old Italianwho rentedstudios. Shannon was in one and I in another.

BB:Without ver meeting?

CLS:Without ver meeting, except that we had a common riend n the building and I remem-ber she told me once: "I know someone in our house who workson artificial rains." tseemedto me quite strange, but I did not take note of it.




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BB: What about your relationship with Jakobson? You speak so much of the importance ofstructural inguistics for your work. Was it really a revelation for you to read and meet Jakobsonand is it afterwards, once you had read this work or even had conversations with him, that yousought to draw its consequences for anthropology or were you already ...

CLS: Absolutely not. Let's put it this way: when I arrived in New York, I was already a struc-turalist, but like Monsieur Jourdain, without knowing it. I had never heard about structuralism,but I was at bottom a structuralist. Meeting Jakobson has been a revelation of what was in mymind in an inarticulate form, and already existed in a discipline like linguistics. What baffledme is the fact that during all these years at the Sorbonne, no one, at least among my professors,had ever said: you must read Saussure.

BB: A last and more general question: Iwonder if, retrospectively, under the impact of critiqueslaunched at you, or merely because of an internal evolution or of newly made discoveries, thereare elements in your work you would like to change or, on the contrary, if it would prompt youto reinforce your positions?

CLS: I think that of my theoretical positions as they have been formulated in my first articles, inmy first books, I have absolutely nothing to change. However, many things I wrote in the be-ginning, I would not write now, or at least, not that way. I realize many were unwise and notsufficiently grounded in facts, certain parallels between linguistics and anthropology, for in-stance. Let's say that I went a bit too far or too fast. I would now express myself more carefully,but with the same basic convictions.

notes

The nterview with Claude Levi-Strauss as conducted at the Laboratoire 'Anthropologie ocialeof theCollege de France. Dr. Bucher, n Associate Professor n the Humanities Divisionat Fordham University,has known Professor evi-Strauss or20 years, nitially s a graduate tudent n Paris, nd then as a doctoralcandidate under his supervision. he has remained s Associate Member f the Laboratoire 'Anthropol-ogie Sociale, which she continues o visit requently.

1The nterview was originally ape recorded n French. The present ext is my translation-B.B.2A summary f the course has just been published n Paroles Donn6es Levi-Strauss 984:189-241).3ProfessorHeritier ucceeded Professor evi-Strauss s Director f the Laboratoire 'Anthropologie o-

ciale at the College de France.4Shannon, n exponent of the theory of communication, was an early influence on Levi-Strauss see

Shannon nd Weaver 1950).

5SeeWiener 1948).

references cited

Levi-Strauss, laude1984 Parole Donnees. Paris: Plon.

Shannon, C., and W. Weaver1950 The Mathematical heory f Communication. rbana: University f IllinoisPress.

Wiener, N.1948 Cybernetics nd Communication n the Animal nd the Machine. Cambridge, MA:M.I.T.Press.

Received28 November 1984Accepted 22 January 985Finalversion received 25 January 985


american ethnologist. an interview with claude lévi-strauss, 30 june 1982

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