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But there’s more. For the present volume is not made simply of residues, of “odds and ends,” as Lévi-Strauss liked to say in English. Its coherence is not a negative one only. It is, first and foremost, shaped by a place and a time: New York in the years 1941 to 1947. The articles collected here were all written by Lévi-Strauss during his American, and we could even say New York, period, first as a Jewish refugee – a scholar in exile, saved by the rescue plan for European academics of the Rockefeller Foundation – and then as the cultural attaché of the French embassy. They were published between 1942 and 1949 – i.e. before The Elementary Structures of Kinship, whose publication marks a felicitous chronological milestone: it dates (superficially but conveniently) the beginning of structuralism, as well as for Lévi-Strauss himself the moment of definitive return to France and national reintegration through the dissertation ritual and the obtention of a research position at the French national research center (CNRS), even if, in both his personal and professional life, the late 1940s and early 1950s were a troubled period.

These seventeen articles thus reflect a biographical and historical turning point. They reveal the young anthropologist honing his skills and finding his way in American anthropology – a discipline that was older and more established than in France – as a South America specialist, and more specifically of the “lowlands,” thus called to distinguish the region from the great Andean civilizations that had garnered most of the attention of researchers on South America until the 1930s. This volume includes five ethnographic articles, three of which are drawn from the major six-volume work Handbook of South American Indians, edited by Julian H. Steward (a publication that, as recently as 2001, and despite its shortcomings, Lévi-Strauss did not consider to have been made obsolete by more recent work).¹⁵ These articles provide an ample rejoinder to the reproach, often made of Lévi-Strauss, that the philosopher by training had a “theoretical bias” and that his approach to native peoples was overly abstract and lacked empirical grounding.

In these articles of the 1940s, Lévi-Strauss appears, on the contrary, as a meticulous ethnographer, not at all a theoretician. Coming from philosophy, via sociology, he now wrote as an expert on the tribes of the Brazilian plateau, at a time when the discipline was focused mostly on questions of tribal identification, of mapping territory and describing practices, from a diffusionist perspective, or at least a perspective informed by the history of South American migration and settlement. Indeed, Lévi-Strauss appears very much as a typical anthropologist of his time: he has read all of the existing literature, but his fieldwork experience is limited (a few weeks with the Bororo and the Nambikwara, later recounted in Tristes Tropiques). Yet the tributes he paid to Bronisław Malinowski, and even more so to Curt Nimuendajú (chapters I and V) – both accomplished fieldworkers on whom he lavished praise – show that he laid great store by prolonged ethnographic work. Indeed, he sensed that such stays – long, solitary periods of “immersion” in the society under study – would become the norm in the discipline, rightly announcing that, “in the future, anthropological works will probably be classified as ‘pre-Malinowskian’ or ‘post-Malinowskian,’ according to the degree to which the author shall have committed himself personally” (p. 64). It remains the case, however, that Lévi-Strauss himself (who, by his own admission, considered himself to be “a library man, not a fieldworker”)¹⁶ earned his stripes as an ethnographer through a different and older model of fieldwork – i.e. group expeditions, focused primarily on information gathering, that spent only a few days with the populations – that is reflected in his contributions to the Handbook, which all conform to the same model. In these texts, as well as in his first article of 1936 on the Bororo Indians (which had drawn Robert Lowie’s attention and led indirectly to his participation in the Rockefeller Foundation rescue operation), the intention is first and foremost descriptive, even when first-hand; it focuses on empirical data (material culture, technologies, life stages), and only very brief reflections on social organization or religious or magical forms. The articles’ value lies in the informed distillations they offer of intermittent and heterogeneous sources, often separated by decades, if not centuries.

There is also a strong dimension of initiation in this work for the young French anthropologist, joining a group project in the discipline at a time when taking ethnographic censuses and inventories remained the chief concern of American anthropology, with a prevailing sense of urgency concerning populations threatened by demographic and cultural collapse. Julian H. Steward himself conceived of the Handbook as a form of applied anthropology designed to integrate traditional native communities into the new nation-states of the continent. These texts show the degree to which he had assimilated the dominant issues of American anthropology at the time; for that reason, the terminology is sometimes obsolete, especially in the use of the then common notion of “cultural level” and “level of culture,” which referred to the degree of complexity of social organization and to the more or less rudimentary character of the material culture under study. Lévi-Strauss would later abandon these kinds of formulations because of the evolutionist connotations they retained, even among American anthropologists keen to steer clear of any evolutionism.

This experience of integration into a foreign disciplinary project had the effect above all of leading Lévi-Strauss – erstwhile professor of sociology at the University of São Paulo, sent to Brazil by the Durkheimian Célestin Bouglé – to take stock of the theoretical tradition from whence he came. Many of the articles in the present volume thus try to situate the French social science tradition, and to determine its particularity, in relation to other national traditions. There is no better example of this than the rigorous literature review “French Sociology” (chapter I), written at the request of Georges Gurvitch for a book that was first published in English under the title Twentieth Century Sociology. In this extended study, dedicated to Marcel Mauss, Lévi-Strauss presents the major lights of the discipline, as well as a few figures outside the mainstream, before proceeding to a detailed discussion of Durkheim’s work, astutely demonstrating the ways in which it constantly vacillates between a “historical perspective” and a “functional perspective,” between the search for primary facts devoid of explanatory value and a social theory that sets ends for itself but cuts itself off from empirical observation. This wavering, as Lévi-Strauss goes on to explain, is based on an implicit assumption of discontinuity between “the psychological and sociological perspectives,” between the analysis of representations and that of institutions. It was to be Mauss’s undertaking to resolve this dilemma by making symbolic activity not the result but a condition of social life, thus restoring continuity between individual consciousness, group representations and social organization. Lévi-Strauss then delves into his core argument – i.e. a response to the critique levelled at French sociology by the great American anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, who accused it of lacking methodological rigor and of being overly abstract and insufficiently attuned to the concrete realities of fieldwork. This recurring accusation on the part of American anthropologists since the 1920s and continuing to the present day – indeed, Lévi-Strauss himself would become one of its chief targets – clearly exercised the young anthropologist who was about to take up a diplomatic posting and to play a more active role in the “cultural influence” of a country that had not yet fully emerged from war (he was writing in late 1944 or very early 1945). Lévi-Strauss first concedes to Kroeber that the “philosophical ancestry” of the Année Sociologique group led its members to neglect fieldwork, but only so as better to point out that the resulting deficiency was about to be remedied: “The next generation of French sociologists, who reached maturity around 1930, has, over the last fifteen years, almost entirely – but no doubt temporarily – given up theoretical work in order to make up for this shortcoming” (p. 50). In support of this claim, he cites the recent ethnographic work of Marcel Griaule, Michel Leiris, Jacques Soustelle, Alfred Métraux, Roger Bastide, Georges Devereux and Denise Paulme, as well as his own.

Lévi-Strauss turns his attention above all to Kroeber’s critique of Mauss, a critique which he considered full of “misunderstandings” but that “raised essential questions” and prompted him to mount a forceful theoretical clarification. Kroeber’s argument is classic: he reproached Durkheim and Mauss for using categories, such as those of “suicide” and “gift,” that were neither indigenous notions nor rigorous concepts on which to base a scientific argument. Lévi-Strauss replied that, unless one is prepared to give up on scientific study as a matter of principle, one had to begin somewhere, with what was given to observation. But he also made clear that these categories were not in any way the end point of the analysis and that, on the contrary, they gradually disappeared from the study. Indeed, they served only to access a deeper level of reality that could not be reached through simple observation but whose explanatory value was greater – the integration of the individual to the group in the case of suicide, the demand for reciprocity in the case of gifting. Against Kroeber, who denied to anthropology the status of a real science, and against American cultural anthropology more broadly, Lévi-Strauss thus reaffirmed the validity of Durkheimian methodological principles (“For our part, we remain convinced that social facts must be studied as things,” he would still write in 1948 (p. 85) – it was the atomistic and mechanistic conception of these “things” that he found wanting in Durkheim), as well as the ambition, at once explanatory and universalist, of anthropology.¹⁷ This article (as well as other articles from the period) also expresses for the first time one of Lévi-Strauss’s deep concerns, namely the fear that the otherwise legitimate critique of nineteenth-century evolutionism might reduce anthropology to a mere compilation of monograph studies void of any comparative horizon or universal claim: “Are we condemned, like new Danaids, endlessly to fill the sieve-like basket of anthropological science, vainly pouring monograph after monograph, without ever being able to collect a substance with a richer and denser value?” (p. 117). In retrospect, this was to be the main benefit of his prolonged stay in the United States, which made him aware of the rut in which the discipline could get stuck: aimless accumulation. Thus, with an ambition, intelligence and capacity for hard work bordering on madness, he took it upon himself to pull anthropology out of this rut and to infuse it once again with the mission of achieving “a truth endowed with general validity” (p. 117).

There are two points to be made here. First, that many of these articles initially appear anecdotal but in fact represent occasions for more robust theoretical reflection; and, second, this reflection is itself directly linked to Lévi-Strauss’s own condition of exile at the time he was writing them. At first glance, many of the pieces gathered here – historical overviews, reviews and tributes – appear not to be making any argument. However, even the tribute to Malinowski makes no secret of Lévi-Strauss’s “serious doubts” with regard to the former’s theoretical work, paving the way for “History and Anthropology” (the first chapter of Structural Anthropology). His critique of Malinowskian functionalism and its tautological character grew stronger over the years (see chapters I and V, in particular). The unexpected, and seemingly curious, rehabilitation of Edward Westermarck (chapter III) can be seen in a similar light. The Finnish sociologist’s attempts to account for the prohibition of incest in his 1891 work The History of Human Marriage had indeed already been largely discredited, especially by Durkheim and, more broadly, by the critics of nineteenth-century British evolutionism. But in his obituary written in 1945, six years after Westermarck’s death (the war accounting for the delay), Lévi-Strauss reviews the criticisms raised by the work only to highlight its merits (its theoretical ambition and erudition, its “insistence on a sociology that could furnish a comprehensive explanation,” the link maintained between sociology and psychology, its “dissatisfaction with historical and local explanation”) and, more importantly, to reformulate the question in a way that was to play a decisive role in his subsequent work: “At the root of the prohibition of incest lies neither the physiological link of kinship, nor the psychological link of proximity, but the fraternal or paternal link, in its exclusively institutional dimension” (p. 72). In other words, the moral rule that prohibits incest finds its source and explanation in an entirely social imperative – we are thus getting very close to the sensational reversal that later opened The Elementary Structures of Kinship and its reading of the incest taboo not as a prohibition but as an obligation to exogamy.

In the same way, technical or anecdotal pieces such as “On Dual Organization in South America” (chapter XIV) or “The Name of the Nambikwara” (chapter IV) provide occasions for theoretical clarification, whether on the historicity of forms of social organization (and the status of the historical hypothesis in anthropology) or on the question of the naming of native tribes, which is often a false problem threatening to engulf anthropology in sterile academic disputes. At first glance, the title of “Reciprocity and Hierarchy” (chapter IX) may appear somewhat misleading, but, beyond the detailed discussions of the terms used to designate the other moieties in Bororo communities, what is at stake is the persistent principle of reciprocity at the root of social life, even when relations of subordination would appear to prevail.

It is in the book reviews that Lévi-Strauss’s dialogue with American anthropology is most vigorously pursued. The five reviews (chapter V) included here are all little known and yet of far-reaching significance (and continuing relevance, seventy years after they were first published). Written for L’Année Sociologique (a journal founded by Durkheim, whose publication had just resumed after the war), they all focus on works published in the United States – Lévi-Strauss acting as emissary for an American anthropological tradition that was still largely unknown in France. Two of the reviews had indeed already been published in English, but the French adaptations that Lévi-Strauss submitted were often less restrained than the original versions and provided him with an opportunity to launch more forceful attacks on what he saw as the dead ends being pursued by anglophone anthropology – be it functionalism and its “providentialist” tendencies or the American school about to claim the name “culture and personality,” which outrageously simplified the relationship between individual psychology and culture and accorded far too much importance to native autobiographies.

In still more incisive fashion, he targeted the so-called “acculturation” studies that were beginning to develop in the United States, which focused on the transformation of native societies that were losing their former ways of life under the influence of a dominant modern civilization. Lévi-Strauss strongly disapproved of the ecumenical functionalist premise that led these groups threatened with demographic and cultural collapse to be considered as objects comparable to traditional societies, on the grounds that they were “functioning” communities. The tone is both pessimistic – Lévi Strauss draws a particularly grim picture of these degraded societies, which is not sparing of individuals – and accusatory – for the relationship of equivalence according to which “all human community is a sociological object, simply by virtue of the fact that it exists” (p. 89), which appears as epistemological tolerance and axiological neutrality, serves in fact to mask the violence of the confrontation; he sees in it an attempt on the part of a civilization to deny responsibility for having imposed on others paths that were not of their own choosing. We can see two forms of history emerging here: on the one hand, a history of borrowings and exchanges between societies and of their development under mutual influence; and, on the other, an external history of destruction, a tragic chronicle of the annihilation of ancient social forms by an exorbitant Western civilization. The first can constitute an object of scientific inquiry and is essential for the anthropologist; the second is a function only of the power imbalances at play and the hubris of a devastating modernity with respect to other cultures, as well as to a natural world it is irreparably defiling.

However, what is most important to understand is that this body of work was profoundly shaped by Lévi-Strauss’s expatriation and the particularity of his New York experience during the war years and the years immediately afterwards.¹⁸ Indeed, what all these texts have in common is that they were written either in exile or over the course of a diplomatic career, which, although brief and repeatedly minimized by Lévi-Strauss in subsequent interviews, was far from idle,¹⁹ yet constantly subject to a dynamic of double-estrangement with regard to the intellectual traditions of both home and host country. These years were also ones of professionalization and, more generally, of a reconfiguring of Lévi-Strauss’s intellectual and social identity – as well as of his private life, having separated from his first wife on the eve of World War II. This process was aided by his family connections in New York, which facilitated his integration and made it possible for him to circulate between different heterogeneous worlds,²⁰ as well as his extraordinary capacity for hard work, which enabled him to digest the entirety of the anthropological literature contained in the New York Public Library and to become proficient in the English language (with his local aunt’s help) and so, very early on, to write his first articles in English.²¹ In this respect, his experience of exile is entirely distinct from that of other, older intellectuals, such as Georges Gurvitch, not to mention André Breton, with whom Lévi-Strauss spent time in New York, and who made it a point of honour to speak only in French.²² Enjoined, as it were, by his position as a foreigner, with an uncertain status and professional future (he had not yet defended his dissertation), Lévi-Strauss was forced to determine his own intellectual tradition and to hone his own ideas. And herein lies another reason for collecting these articles: not only as tribute to a singular individual experience and historical moment but also as testimony and lesson on the historical and sociological conditions of intellectual invention.