ANNIE COHEN-SOLAL
255
of American anthropologists in
1952,
he deliberately provoked them: "I
said that we were the scrapmongers of history and that we were scav–
enging for material from the trash cans of history."
It
was during that
same time that he began a long friendship with Margaret Mead.
Act II: Encounter with Jakobson, Linguistics, and Structuralism
IN
1942
LEVI-STRAUSS, who today likes to call himself the "Monsieur
Jourdain of Structuralism," opened yet another door. "In those days,"
he admits, "I knew almost nothing about linguistics and had never
heard of Jakobson." Indeed, he met with Jakobson in hopes of learning
more about the linguistics of the languages he had encountered in Brazil.
That meeting was far more important than he had expected. Beyond
Jakobson's "amazing oratory gifts," Levi-Strauss was presented with
the true" revelation of structural linguistics. "
This encounter had an enormous impact on Levi-Strauss and offered
him an essential key to his research. Jakobson began working on an
"attempt to build a series of apparently arbitrary facts into a system."
While listening to the great linguist, Levi-Strauss was discovering that
ethnology of the nineteenth century or even that of the twentieth cen–
tury had been content, much like the neo-grammarians' linguistics, "to
substitute problems of a purely causal nature with problems of means
and ends. Structuralism was
to
reveal the
unvarying
through variety."
During those years, Jakobson had become a guide and master to the
"naive structuralist." In his lectures, the Russian linguist had offered
"novel insights" which came ever closer to Levi-Strauss's "own conclu–
sions," though the younger man did not yet have the audacity or the
conceptual tools necessary to shape them. Their fraternity turned into
intellectual complicity and a dialogue followed. As had happened with
Lowie and Metraux, the work of the disciple caught the "master's"
interest: Jakobson attended Levi-Strauss's lectures on
systems of kin–
ship,
suggested that he publish them, and encouraged what would soon
become
Les structures eLementaires de La parente.
Act III: Friendship with the Surrealists
"CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS was extremely kind and exquisitely polite... . He
spoke little, but when he did he was precise, witty, deadpan, and some–
times even icy. He was above all a remarkable observer. He knew Andre
Breton because they had crossed the Atlantic on the same ship. Both
were extremely well-mannered, very courteous, and shared a similar
