Читать книгу Structural Anthropology Zero - Claude Lévi Strauss, Claude Levi-Strauss - Страница 11

Lévi-Strauss’s political speculations in those years dealt essentially with two themes. First, the issue of the articulation of individuals and the group, which in liberal democracies needed to be rethought, maintaining an equal distance from both class and national affiliation – the former because it reflected the failures of the Soviet model and the latter because the recent past had shown it could find expression only in aggression and lead to war. A close reading of his articles of the time shows that, while he was not necessarily aware of it, Lévi-Strauss’s analyses resonated with other contemporary publications in English, especially those developing the notions of “social citizenship” and the welfare state, with a view to maintaining the link between individual and community in mass democracies.²⁷ From the example of Nambikwara society, in which the chief’s generosity is the essential instrument of his power, Lévi-Strauss retained that the group is linked to its chief (in himself devoid of any authority or power of coercion) by a relation of reciprocity that creates obligations for both, the “refusal to give” being analogous to the “confidence motion” presented by governments in parliamentary systems. Power is thus a matter not simply of consent (an affiliation with Rousseau that will be strongly reaffirmed in Tristes Tropiques) but of the consent of the group as a group (and not as a collection of individuals). Lévi-Strauss concluded in particular that “the interpretation of the State conceived as a security system, recently revived by discussions of a national insurance scheme (such as the Beveridge plan and others), is not a modern development. It is a return to the fundamental nature of social and political organization” (p. 130).²⁸ Even if they might appear quite distant, Lévi-Strauss’s 1940s observations on the United States are not unrelated to these concerns. The title “Techniques for Happiness” – beyond its touch of European irony with regard to a society that seemed devoted entirely to the material and psychological satisfaction of the individual, itself considered as an adult child – also conveys a keen interest in the “social techniques” deployed to suppress conflict and create a “civilization in which both masses and elites find satisfaction.” In the same way as the Nambikwara community, contemporary America represented an “original” and “fertile” sociological experiment, which Europeans “would do well to closely monitor” (p. 99).

The second focus of Lévi-Strauss’s political reflections had to do not so much with the relationship of the individual to the group as with that of groups with one another. The two concerns are linked since – and, in this respect, the articles are artifacts of their times – they originate in a conviction, shared by many contemporary thinkers, that the nation-state model had become obsolete. Lévi-Strauss was thus determined to contribute to the reinvention of international relations, at a moment when the road to federalism seemed an inevitability, following the examples of the United States and the USSR, as well as Brazil and Mexico. Here, again, reciprocity appears as the first principle, even when it would seem belied by relations of subordination between the groups under consideration (p. 134). At the international level, this principle not only linked societies to one another via bilateral services but also each of them to the ensemble they formed together, for humanity was not an abstract reality whose unity could be ensured by principles but a “a set of concrete groups between which a constant balance must be found between competition and aggression, through pre-defined mechanisms for buffering the extreme forms that may arise in either direction” (p. 147).

When he wrote these lines, Lévi-Strauss was a cultural attaché, and it is very likely that they bear the mark of his exchanges with Henri Laugier (thanks to whom he had obtained that position), himself the Under Secretary-General of the brand-new United Nations, to whose founding he had contributed. In “The Foreign Policy of a Primitive Society,” the ability of Amerindians to recognize rivers as “international waterways” and the strategies they developed to settle rivalries “in a no doubt hostile yet not overly dangerous manner” thus served as models. In the same vein, his description of the “industrial and commercial specializations” of the Xingu tribes is a discreet call for a form of international division of labor, facilitated by diplomats whose role would be similar to the multilingual mediators that were found in each of the villages. It is probably the Nambikwara conception of territory that offered the most fertile ground for contemporary political thought, since Amerindians entirely severed the notion of territory from that of land and thus paved the way for an immaterial definition of community whose unity was no longer determined by borders but by shared values: “For us, the Nambikwara territory covers a specific land area; it is a space bounded by borders. For them, this reality appears as different as the X-ray image of a body would from the image of that same body seen by the naked eye. Territory is nothing in and of itself; it is reduced to a set of modalities, to a system of situations and values that would appear meaningless to a foreigner and might well even go unnoticed” (pp. 143–4).

Rereading these texts of the 1940s, it is clear that the theory of exchange that would be mobilized in The Elementary Structures of Kinship – first for its heuristic value and ability to account for highly varied situations – had deep political resonance with very concrete implications. It also shows that, in Lévi-Strauss’s eyes, the role of social science had little to do with the one it would eventually come to play in the heyday of structuralist theory, during which, against his will, his name was regularly invoked as a figure of authority in the most varied domains, and those furthest from anthropology. Nor was his position that of an intellectual in the Sartrean sense of the term: his reflections on the links between war and trade do not fit within that philosophical tradition that has had much to say on the question, from Machiavelli to Benjamin Constant, via Hobbes and Montesquieu. It is indeed as an expert that the anthropologist felt licenced to offer political commentary – i.e. because he was a specialist of the comparison between societies, and because his expertise was anchored in an experience of the Amerindians of the Brazilian plateau and not in the mastery of philosophical notions and traditions. Indeed, in his view, this is one of the distinctive features of French anthropology, characterized by a collaboration between sociology and anthropology, whereas in other countries the former – which “calls for people accepting the social order” – is opposed to the latter – as “a haven for individuals poorly integrated into their own surroundings” (p. 36). “Modern sociology was born for the purpose of rebuilding French society after the destruction wrought first by the French Revolution and later by the Prussian War. But, behind Comte and Durkheim, there are Diderot, Rousseau and Montaigne” (p. 36). It would therefore be a mistake to draw a distinction, among French social scientists, between anthropologists who took over social criticism (Montaigne, Rousseau) and sociologists who sought to inspire legislative and governmental decisions (Comte, Durkheim). The applied approach of the latter was never cut off from the fundamental approach of the former, and the articles of the 1940s seek to maintain the link between theoretical argumentation and political initiative. They represent a similar kind of recourse, after a period of troubles, to “social philosophy.” In much the same way as Durkheimian philosophy had set out both to study the phenomenon of the social and to rebuild French society after the war of 1870, the Lévi-Strauss of the 1940s hoped to contribute (alongside others) to national and international political renewal in the aftermath of world war. And, here again, expertise was a matter of circumstance and position: that of an exiled Jewish scholar, himself situated between several worlds, just as the indigenous mediators whose praises he sang and who were able “to speak all the languages” of the Brazilian plateau (p. 142).