ANNIE COHEN-SOLAL
"Claude L. Strauss" in the United States
'We can't have you use the name Levi-Strauss. Here, your name
shall be Claude
L.
Strauss.' I asked why and they said, 'The stu–
dents would find it funny, because of the blue jeans.' And so I
lived in the U.S. for many years with a mutilated urname.
Claude Levi-Strauss,
De pres et de loin
M
ANY YEARS BEFORE
the "mutilation" of his name, Claude
Levi-Strauss had encountered the United States by reading
American social scientists . Unlike most of the other students
at the Ecole Normale Superieure, his intellectual interests moved outside
his French environment. His concern in ethnology was largely due to his
discovery of Robert Lowie's
Traite de socioiogie primitive.
As a young
agrege
in philosophy he wanted to become an ethnologist. He was, in
his own words, "fascinated by exotic curiosities." A self-described joker,
sneak, and collector, he haunted the Paris flea market on Saturday
mornings and enjoyed Sunday "expeditions" to the French countryside.
Levi-Strauss had been attracted to Lowie because he was both
"theorist [and] field researcher." Between the two World Wars, social
studies in France were severely hampered by lack of funds and organiza–
tion, and were lagging behind social studies in countries like Germany
and the United States. One prominent French sociologist openly deplored
"the pitiful state of the teaching of social sciences in France." Philosophy
was the supreme tool of access
to
knowledge, even as intellectuals who
had emigrated from other European countries were beginning
to
create a
"porous frontier" between the different fields within traditional social
studies-philosophy, sociology, ethnology, and psychoanalysis. Under the
influence of Marcel Mauss, a great theorizer who had little field experi–
ence, ethnology was slowly establishing itself as a distinct discipline.
Under the circumstances, Claude Levi-Strauss's decision
to
move
away from philosophy and embrace a related, yet nascent, discipline
