Similarly, the long presentation of “French Sociology” (chapter I) must also have seemed outdated to Lévi-Strauss, superseded by his Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, published in 1950.7
We were thus left with a loss, which the present collection seeks to remedy. A loss because the final selection effectively excluded many insights – such as, for example, certain passages of “The Theory of Power in a Primitive Society” (chapter VIII), on which Lévi-Strauss amply drew in Tristes Tropiques, yet whose remarkable final considerations on the notion of “natural power” were left out; or, to take another example, the very dense discussion of Durkheim’s work found in “French Sociology” but that did not find its way into the 1950 study on the work of Mauss – itself an important and difficult article, the much discussed “bible of structuralism,” into which the 1945 text on Durkheim provides much insight.8 But a loss also because Lévi-Strauss’s selection left out articles that did not fit with the theoretical project of Structural Anthropology yet played a major role in the development of other ideas outside the scope of structuralism. This is the case for both “War and Trade among the Indians of South America” (chapter VII), as well as “The Theory of Power in a Primitive Society.” Both of these articles are essential references for social and political theories that take native societies of South America as examples of societies with low levels of material wealth and minimal political organization, and thus social forms that preceded the state and the primitive accumulation of capital – ideas in political anthropology, of which Pierre Clastres is the most notable illustration.9 The same can be said of the article “The Social Use of Kinship Terms among Brazilian Indians” (chapter XIII). Whereas Lévi-Strauss had partially drawn on it for his minor dissertation The Family and Social Life of the Nambikwara Indians, the article was rediscovered by Brazilian scholars in the 1990s and has become, alongside other ethnographic works of the 1940s, a central reference for one of the most important developments in recent anthropology: the reconstruction of Amerindian ontologies through the extension of the notion of affinity with the non-human world. “Initially envisioned as an internal mechanism for the constitution of local groups, affinity has since appeared as a relational dynamic that organizes extra-local relations, articulates people and groups of people beyond kinship, and finally as a language and relational schema between Self and Other, identity and difference.”10
Finally, we can easily see how “Techniques for Happiness” (chapter VI), an amusing yet profound reflection on modern American society as Lévi-Strauss experienced it from the inside in the 1940s, did not fit into the theoretical collection he had in mind in 1957. Written in 1944 and published a year later in the journal L’Âge d’Or, it was subsequently republished in 1946 in a special issue of the journal Esprit on “Homo Americanus,” alongside contributions by American writers and thinkers (Kenneth Burke, Margaret Mead), as well as by other exiled intellectuals in the United States during the war (Georges Gurvitch, Denis de Rougemont). Its tone anticipated the more “liberated” meditations of the 1970s and 1980s (such as “New York in 1941” in The View from Afar and the texts of the posthumous collection We Are All Cannibals) but, unlike these, the 1945 article conveyed a sense of concern, even anxiety, with an ample dose of the ambivalence of all participant observation. The text is imbued with a mixture of fascination for and rejection of North American society, which was rather commonplace at the time, but with a content that was quite original. As in the horrified pages of Tristes Tropiques on South Asia, it shows the anthropologist fighting his own aversions (for the almighty imperative of social harmony, the generalized infantilization, the impossibility of solitude, etc.) and attempting to overcome them in a theoretical comparison with European societies. If his aversion here is less visceral than in the descriptions of Calcutta crowds, the text also reveals a subjectivity grappling with its own discomfort and which, in an effort to distance itself from a purely reactive (or simply condescending) form of anti-Americanism, tries to grasp as accurately as possible, through formulations that are sometimes spot on, some of the fundamental traits of North American society: the heterogeneity with itself of a society whose “skeletal structure … is still external” (“alternately amazed and appalled, it discovers itself every day from the outside”); its repudiation of the tragic dimension through a “relentless” sociability; and the ideals of a “childhood without malice,” an “adolescence without hatred” and a “humanity without rancor” – a denial of the contradictions of social life that sometimes culminates, through a kind of return of the repressed, in conflicts between communities of an inordinate violence (p. 98).11
Notwithstanding his repeated homages to the country that “very probably saved his life,” and to its universities and libraries, his genuine and profound misgivings about the United States are palpable, which would be confirmed a few years later by his categorical refusal of offers from Talcott Parsons and Clyde Kluckhohn (with vigorous encouragement from Roman Jakobson) of a position at Harvard. “I knew in my bones that I belonged to the Old World, irrevocably.”12 As with the chapters of Tristes Tropiques on Pakistan and Islam – which, although written based on notes from 1950, mention only very fleetingly the massacres and massive population displacements that followed the partition of India – the contemporary reader of “Techniques for Happiness” may also be struck by the silences and blind spots typical of the times and to the position of the observer who, even though called upon to give witness on American society, wonders about the utter estrangement between “generations, sexes and classes” but barely mentions segregation and racial conflict.13
The present volume is thus intended to make available important yet often lesser known contributions, most of which were originally published in English in various journals, and many of which have become difficult to find.14 In addition to their intrinsic interest, the seventeen articles Lévi-Strauss decided to omit in 1958 represent a kind of prehistory of structural anthropology; they allow us, through a process of cross-checking, to grasp better both the theoretical project and its meaning for Claude Lévi-Strauss, the person, in the mid-1950s.
New York, 1941–1947
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
