Lvi-Strauss Interviewed, Part 1 Author(s): Didier Eribon Reviewed work(s): Source: Anthropology Today, Vol. 4, No. 5 (Oct.

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1. As we go to press, it (Times,21 is reported that Britain September) and the USA have now also protestedto the Romanian Editor. Government.

of Romanianshave been moved into the Szekler capital Tirgu Mures (Marosvah6ly in Hungarian) in order to change it into a Romanian town. Similar efforts are being made to transformthe Transylvaniancapital Cluj (Kolozsvar), where Hungariansnow account for only one-third of the population. Even non-Romaniangeographicaland personalnames are now forbidden. A forced ideological industrialization programme,announced to the world by Ceausescu in a speech on 3 March, which replaces villages with industrialsocieties in miniature,is one of the weapons used to assist in the assimilation of national ethnic minorities. When villages are destroyed, an area loses its local characteristics, since the concrete tower blocks which replace them can be found anywhere, and the inhabitantsare not necessarily rehousedin the same area. Communities are sometimes dispersed. Thus architecture also becomes a political weapon since, as Gavin Stamp points out, it is easier to control an urbanized semiproletariatliving in flats; the peasants are cut off from their homes and from the land. In the spring of last year, Romania publicly attached Hungaryfor 're-establishingHorthy's fascist and chauvinistic thesis'. The reference was to A History of Transylvania in three volumes, which had just been published. Zoltan Szasz, one of the co-editors, believes the criticism was an attemptto raise nationalistic sentiment and to divert attentionfrom the economic decline of Romania. Thus according to the latest information, Kolozsvzar and Brasov, two large cities, are virtually unlit at night, and there was a typhoid epidemic in Brasov in Spring 1987, due to the city's polluted sewers. The Hungarian authorities, for their part, have responded by breaking the traditional silence regarding the problems of their minority in Romania. On 20 August, the 950th anniversaryof the death of St Stephen, founder of Hungary, Imre Pozsgay of the Hungarian Politburo criticized Romanian policies as 'incomprehensible and idiotic' and 'a shame to socialism'. Matyas Szuros, Secretaryof the CentralCommittee,has denounced Romania's actions on Radio Budapest and Isvan Nemeskuirty writes in Hungarian Quarterly:'This situation has become so distressing that the Romanian government may sooner or later be accused of ... de-

liberate cultural genocide and forcible assimilation.' The Hungarianauthoritieshave permittedand reported public demonstrationssuch as that which took place in Budapest on 27 June 1988, which included a march to the Romanian Embassy. Ceausescu responded by closing the HungarianConsulatein Cluj. The conclusion of the InternationalHelsinki Federation for Human Rights Report S.O.S. Transylvaniais that the Hungarianminority in Romania is the victim of suppressionaimed at assimilation:
The rights of the Hungarianminorityin Romania, the most numerous national minority in Europe, are assured not only by the Helsinki Accords and the UN Conventions,but also by the Romanianconstitution,bilateralagreementsbetween Hungaryand Romania, and the Treaty of Paris after the last World War. Because of this, the fate of the Hungarians in Romania is not simply a domestic Romanian matter.

The Economist, in a recent issue, points out that West Germany, whose own ethnic minority in Romania is badly affected, is the only western country to have objected publicly.1 This is disgraceful. Anthropologists, ethnologists and folklorists must speak out if our governmentswill not. The Economist believes that international ridicule of Ceausescu, known for his vanity, might have some effect in slowing down the process. And Ceausescu is no longer young. Amnesty International has found that its campaigns of letter-writingand peaceful demonstrations have been effective in securing the release of prisonersof conscience in many cases. Meanwhile the destructioncontinues. In the last few years 10,000 ethnic Hungarianshave fled from Romania to their motherland,the first time that one communist country has accepted refugees on this scale from another. Last year Hungarysigned a western resolutionon minority rights at the Human Rights Conference in Vienna. In the words of Laszl6 CardinalPaskai, Archbishop of Esztergom and Primate of HungarianCatholics: 'These villages are not just small settlements of relatively few people. They also constitute an integral part of a country. They are homes of unique national values and of folk culture.' VenetiaNewall

interviewed Levi-Strauss
by Didier Eribon - Part 1
We are pleased to publish here two extracts in English translationfrom De Pres et de Loin (a further two extracts will be published in our December issue), to markthe 80th birthdayof Claude Levi-Strausson 28 Novembernext. This is an interviewin bookform prepared by Didier Eribon, a journalist with Le Nouvel Observateur, published at 89F by Editions Odile Jacob, Paris, who have kindly granted us permission to

D.E. Was your family very much involved with the arts? C.L.-S. Yes, this was quite atavistic! My greatgrandfather, the father of my mother's father, was called Isaac Strauss. Born in 1906 in Strasbourg, he 'made it' very young in Paris. He was a violinist and had got together a little orchestra.He played a part in making the music of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and some others better known. In Paris, he worked with Berlioz, who mentions him in his memoirs; and also with Offenbach, for whom he wrote some of his famous quadrilles. We knew Offenbach by heart in my family; his music lulled my whole childhood. Strauss became conductor for court balls at the end of the reign of Louis-Philippe. Then under Napoleon III, organizerof the Casino at Vichy, which he ran for a

long time. Afterwards,he succeeded Musard in charge of balls at the Op6ra.He was at the same time a sort of Cousin Pons, with a passion for antiques, in which he traded. D.E. Did your family keep any of them? C.L.-S. There was a large collection of Jewish antiquities which is now in the Mus6e de Cluny. A number of objects which passed through his hands were acquired by benefactors who gave them to the Louvre. Whateverremainedwas sold on his death or sharedout between his daughters. The remainder was looted by the Germans during the Occupation. I still have a few pieces of d6bris: such as the bracelet that Napoleon III offered my great-grandmother to thank her for hospitality at the Villa Strauss in Vichy. This Villa Strauss, where the emperor stayed, still exists. It has become a
5

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reproducethe extracts. spent Levi-Strauss most of his childhoodin Paris in the 16th arrondissement. Thefirst extract,fromchapter1, 'D'Offenbach a Marx', describeshisfamily We then background. jump to part of Chapter 16, 'Raceet politique', whichfocuses on the in which controversy became Levi-Strauss involvedin the 1970s as an eminentsocial and anthropologist influentialintellectual. In the two concluding extractsto be published in December,we have first a glimpse of New York Levi-Strauss's period during the Second WorldWar,and secondly a discussion of the structureand plan of Mythologiques, Le'vi-Strauss's ambitious four-volumework on the analysis of South Americanand North AmericanIndian myth. De Pres et de Loin can be strongly recommended as a whole.. The threefinal chapterscover Le'vi-Strauss's thoughts on literature,painting and music. ClaudeLevi-Strauss was Professor at the College de France from 1959 to 1982, and since then has been Honorary Professor. His many honoursinclude membershipof the AcademieFran(aise since 1973 and HonoraryFellowship of the RAI,which also awarded him the Huxley MemorialMedal in 1965. The translationof these extracts is by JonathanBenthall. ? Editions Odile Jacob, September1988.

I don't rememberexactly, but it has bar or a restaurant, kept the name. D.E. Was the memory of that past transmittedinto family tradition? C.L.-S. Certainly,for it was the family's most glorious period: they were near the throne! My great-grandfather used to visit Princesse Mathilde. My paternal family lived amid memories of the Second Empire. They also stayed close to it; as a child, I saw with my own eyes EmpressEug6nie. D.E. You have told me that your father was a painter. C.L.-S. Yes, and two of my uncles as well. Prosperdied a ruined ous to start with, my paternalgrandfather man. So that one of his sons - he had four boys and a girl - had to work very hardto help his family. My fatherwas placed in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales. At the beginning of his active life, he startedto work at the Stock Exchange in a humble capacity. There he got to know Kahnweiler[dealerfor the leading cubists] and they became friends. As soon as he could, he turnedto painting which he had been passionately fond of since childhood. My father and my mother were first cousins. In Bayonne [where Levi-Strauss'smotherwas broughtup] my mother's eldest sister marrieda painterwho had his hour of celebrity, Henry Caro- Delvaille; anothersister marrieda painter,Gabriel Roby, who was Basque. For him, life was even more difficult than for my father:his health was fragile and he died young. Was it on account of their family relationshipor because of connections between painters that my parents got to know each other?I don't know. In any case, my motherwas living in Paris before her marriage,for some of the time with the Caro-Delvaille family. She learnt shorthandtyping so as to become a secretary. D.E. Your father did not earn much money in his careeras a painter. C.L.-S. Less and less, as the tastes of the public changed. D.E. So your childhood was not that of a son of the Parisianbourgeoisie? C.L.-S. It was, as regardsculture, for we lived in an artistic milieu; my childhood was very rich intellectually. But we contendedwith materialdifficulties. D.E. Do you have precise memories of this? C.L.-S. I rememberthe panics that could sometimes arise when there were no more commissions. Then my father,who was a great handyman,invented all sorts of little crafts for himself. At one time, the household embarkedon printingfabrics. We engraved linoleum-blocks, we coated solids with a paste that was spread onto velvet so that multi-coloured metallic powders, scattered on top of it, would stick. D.E. And you took part in these activities? C.L.-S. I even created the patterns! There was another period when my fathermade little tables in imitation lacquer in the Chinese style. He also made lamps with inexpensive Japanese prints stuck onto the glass. Anything was all right so as to pay the monthly bills. D.E. Have you kept some picturesby him? C.L.-S. Few, because as a result of the plundering that went on, my parents were left with nothing at the end of the war; not even a bed... D.E. You have spoken of the collection of Jewish Had your antiquitiesbuilt up by your great-grandfather. parentsmaintaineda religious commitment? C.L.-S. My parents were complete unbelievers. But

my mother, the daughterof a rabbi, had grown up in a differentatmosphere. D.E. Did you know your grandfather, the rabbi? C.L.-S. Very well. I lived in his house during the first war. My mother and sisters had settled down there with their children while their husbandswere on active
service.

D.E. Apart from the short period when you lived with your grandfather,you were brought up in a nonreligious atmosphere,but the Jewish traditionwas perhaps presentthere in spite of everything? C.L.-S. Not without hitches. My paternal grandmotherwas still a practisingJew. However, on that side there lay dormanta touch of madness which showed itself sometimes tragically, sometimes comically. One brotherof my father's, obsessed with biblical exegesis and not quite right in the head, committed suicide; that was when I was three. Well before my birth, another brotherof my father's had himself ordained as a priest to take revenge on his parents as a result of a quarrel. For a time, the family counted among its number an Abbe L6vi... I rememberhim much later, a junior employee of the gas company, always in his best bib and tucker,with a blond curled-upmoustache, smugly satisfied with his person and his condition. On my mother's side, my grandfather the rabbiwas a holy man of a self-effacing disposition, in whose house one observed the rites scrupulously.Three or four years running, I attended all the festivals. As for his wife, even their daughtersdoubted that she had the faith. At Bayonne, she had them schooled in the convent because it was the best establishment.The elder daughter preparedfor Sevres [an Ecole Normale Sup6rieurefor women] or even went there (I'm not sure which any more) at a time when orthodox people in the provinces thought that S6vriennes were she-devils. The rabbi's wife had broad ideas! Although unbelievers,my parentsstill remainedclose to the Jewish traditionof their childhoods. They didn't celebrate the festivals, but they spoke about them. At Versailles, I was put through my barmizvah, without any reasons being invoked other than not causing offence to my grandfather. D.E. You've never been worried by religious feelings? C.L.-S. If by religion you mean a relationshipwith a personalGod, never.
Below: an extractfrom chapter 16, 'Race et Politique' D.E. In 1952, with the text entitled Race et histoire,

you left the perspective of pure social anthropologyto position yourself at the level that can be called 'political', which touched in any case directly on contemporary problems. C.L.-S. It was a commission. I don't think I would have writtenthat work myself on my own initiative. D.E. How did this commission arise? C.L.-S. UNESCO asked a number of authors to write a series of booklets on the racial question: Michel Leiris was one, I was another... D.E. There you affirm the diversity of cultures, you put in question the idea of progress, and you proclaim the necessity of 'coalition' between cultures... C.L.-S. In general, I was seeking a way to reconcile the notion of progress with culturalrelativism. The notion of progress implies the idea that certaincultures, at given times or in given places, are superior to others, because they have produced works which those others have shown themselves incapableof. And culturalrela-

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Claude Levi-Strauss, photographedrecently by Louis Monier.

in Claude Le'vi-Strauss Oxfordto receive an honorarydoctorate, 6 June 1964.

own text again. D.E. What was most shocking in 'Race and culture' was perhapsthe idea which you advanced, that cultures want to oppose one another. C.L.-S. At the end of Race and history, I emphasized a paradox. It is the difference between cultures which makes their meeting fertile. Now this interaction brings about progressive homogenization: the benefits ~~~~~~1 which cultures draw from these contacts derive to a great extent from their qualitative separation,but in the course of their exchanges, these separationsdiminish to the point of disappearing.Is that not what we are witnessing today? By the way, this idea that during their evolution cultures tend towards a growing entropy which results from their mixing - presented in a text which you said just now had become a classic of antiracism, and that delights me - comes in a straightline tivism, which is one of the bases of anthropological from Gobineau, though he is denounced as a father of thought - at least in my generation and the one before racism. Which goes to show the disorder in people's it (for it is challenged by some people today) - con- minds at the presenttime. tends that there can be no absolute criterionfor judging The views of Gobineau have, moreover, a very modone culture as superior to another. I tried to shift the em tinge, for he realized that little islands of order can problem's centre of gravity. form, by means of the effect that he called - and this is If at certain times and in certain places, some cul- very modern too - 'a correlation in the different parts tures 'move' while others 'don't move', this is not, I of the structure'.He gave examples. These successful said, because of the superiorityof the former, but be- equilibria between mixtures contribute, as he saw, to cause historical or geographicalcircumstanceshave en- militate against a decline which he saw as irreversible. gendered a collaborationbetween cultures that are not What can be concluded from that, except that it is unequal (nothing permits such an evaluation)but differ- desirable for cultures to maintain their diversity or for ent. They begin to move by borrowing from one an- them to be renewed in their diversity? Only - and this other or by seeking to oppose one another. They fer- is what my second text pointed out - one must agree to tilize or stimulate one another mutually; Whereas at pay the price: that is to say, that cultures attached to other periods or in other places, cultureswhich stay iso- their own respective life-styles and value-systems keep lated, as if in a closed world of their own, experience a an eye on their particularities: and that this disposition stationarylife. is healthy, not at all pathological as some would have D.E. This text has become a classic of anti-racism, us believe. Each culture develops thanks to its exand is even read in secondary schools. Is it in reaction changes with other cultures. But each one must put up against this vulgate that you prepareda second text in a certain resistance, otherwise very quickly it would 1971, this time entitled 'Race et culture'? have no more to exchange which belonged to it specifiC.L.-S. That also arose from a UNESCO com- cally. Absence of and excess of communication are mission, for a solemn conference designed to inaugur- both dangerous. ate an international year of struggle against racism. D.E. How do you explain that your 1952 text was so D.E. You have said about what happened,'This'text successful and not the second? caused a scandal and that was its aim!' C.L.-S. The first was published as a little book; the C.L.-S. Which was perhaps a little strong... One other, a lecture, has never appearedon its own. And if thing is certain: it did make a scandal, in UNESCO in the first was judged orthodox but the second book not, any case. Twenty years after Race et histoire, they I cannot help it: they form a whole. I would add that asked me to speak again about racism, probablyexpect- the second text, where I tried to introduce the concluing that I would repeat what I had already said. I don't sions of population genetics, is more difficult to read. like to repeat myself, and above all, many things had Already now with Race and history, every year schoolhappenedduringthose twenty years, one of them being, children come to see me, write to me or telephone me as far as I was concerned, a growing annoyance pro- saying 'We have an essay to write and we understand voked by periodic displays of good feelings, as if that nothing!' alone could be enough. D.E. What would you do if UNESCO were to ask It seemed to me on the contraryfirst that racial con- you today for a new lecture on the same subject? flicts could only get worse, and second that, in the C.L.-S. There's no danger! minds of the public, a confusion was being created D.E. But newspapers and the radio often ask your aroundnotions such as racism and anti-racism;and that advice on the question of racism and on the whole you by dint of widening them in an ill- considered way, refuse to reply... people were feeding racism instead of weakening it. C.L.-S. I don't want to reply because, in this field, D.E. You were speaking this time of the differences there is total confusion, and because whatever I say that separate and oppose cultures. Which ran against will, I know in advance, be misinterpreted. the grain of your earlier speech. As a social anthropologist,I am convinced that racist C.L.-S. Not at all. People didn't read the earliertext, theories are both monstrousand absurd.But in making or only half of it. One critic, writing I think in L'Huma- the notion of racism commonplace, in applying it at nite [the French Communist newspaper], wanted to random,people empty it of content and risk ending up prove that I had changed my position, and he quoted a at a result which is the opposite of what they want. For long passage from 'Race and culture' in support. Ac- what is racism? A precise doctrine, which can be tually, this passage had already appearedin Race and summed up in four points. First, that a correlationexists history. As it seemed well phrased to me, I used my between genetic heritage on the one hand and intellece:i

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tual aptitudesand moral dispositions on the other. Second: that this heritage on which the aptitudes and dispositions are held to depend is common to all the members of certain human groups. Third: that these groups called 'races' can be hierarchized in terms of the quality of their genetic heritage. Fourth:that these differences authorize those 'races' held to be superior to command and exploit others, maybe to destroy them. The theory and the practice are indefensible for a number of reasons which, following other authorsor at the same time as them, I set out in 'Race and culture' with as much vigour as in Race and Histoiy. The problem of relationships between cultures is situated on another level. D.E. So that, in your eyes, hostility felt by one culture towardsanotheris not racism? C.L.-S. Yes it is, if it is active hostility. Nothing can authorizeone culture to destroy or even to oppress another. Such negation of other people has inevitably to rely on transcendentreasons: those of racism, or equivalent reasons. But it is a fact which has always existed that cultures, while respecting one another, can feel more or less affinity with one another. That is a norm of human behaviour. In denouncing it as racist, one risks playing the enemy's game, for many naive people will say to themselves 'Well, if that is racism, I am a racist'. You know how attractedI am by Japan. If in Paris, in the underground,I see a couple that seems to be Japanese, I will look at them with interest and sympathy, ready to do them a service. Is that racism?

D.E. If you look at them with sympathy, no; but if you had told me 'I look at them with hatred' I would have replied, yes. C.L.-S. And yet, I based my reaction on physical appearance,behaviour, the sound of the language. In daily life, everyone does the same to place an unknown person on the geographic map... A lot of hypocrisy would be needed to try and outlaw this kind of approximation. D.E. Are there physical appearanceswhich generate antipathyin you? C.L.-S. You mean ethnic types? No, certainly not. They all include sub-types, some of which seem attractive to us, others not. In some Indian communities in Brazil, I felt surrounded by beautiful individuals;others seemed to offer me the spectacle of a degraded humanity. The Nambikwara women seemed to me in general more beautiful than the men; the opposite was the case with the Bororo. Making such judgments, we apply the canons of our culture. But the only valid canons in the circumstancesare those of the people concerned. In the same way, I belong to a culture which has a distinctive life-style and value-system, so that very different culturesdo not attractme automatically. D.E. You don't like them? C.L.-S. That would be saying too much. If I study them as a social anthropologist,I do it with all the objectivity and indeed all the empathy of which I am capable. That doesnit prevent certainculturesfrom hitting it off less easily than others with my own.

Engendering knowledge
The politics of ethnography(Part 1 - to be concluded)
Ethnography A poem written by R.D. Laing captures the mood of the postmodemist,reflexive era:
The theoretical and descriptive idiom of much research in social science adopts a stance of apparent 'objective' neutrality. But we have seen how deceptive this can be. The choice of syntax and vocabularyis a political act ibes the manner in which facts' that defines and circunmscr are to be experienced. Indeed, in a sense it goes further and even creates thefac ts that are studied The 'data' (given) of research are not so much given as taken out of a constantlyelusive matrixof happenings. rather than data. We should speak of capta The quantativelyinterchangeablegrist that goes into the mills of reliability studies and rating scales is the expression of a processing that we do on r-eality not the expression 1973) of the processes of reality. (in Weaver

PAT CAPLAN
This article is based on the second Audrey RichardsMemorial Lecturedelivered at Rhodes House, QAford, on 18 May. We are publishing it in two parts, of which the second, largely concerned with anthropologyand feminism, will appear in the December issue. Dr Caplan started by saying that Audrey Richards(1899-1984) had been a 'livingproof for women studentsof her generation that 'womencould be and were good anthropologists'.She mentionedRichards's presidential address to the African Studies Association in 1967, which recalled what it 8

Within anthropology,much attention is currentlyfo-

cused upon ethnographyand definitions of it as a form of knowledge. Roy Ellen suggests that it has many meanings - at one and the same time, it is something we do/study/use/read/and write (1984:7). Ethnography lies at the boundary of two systems of meaning and raises the question, how do we translateanotherculture through the vehicle of our own language? This in turn takes us back to the oft-debatedquestion - what is culture itself? Increasingly, it has been seen as manufactured, both by informants and anthropologists,and in the process, as contested. The protagonistsin this contest are the ethnographer,the subjects/informants,and the audience/reader.I shall deal with each of these in turn. How do we represent another culture - can we? Archivist, transshould we? What is the ethnographer? lator, midwife, writer of fiction, trickster,bricoleur, inquisitor, and intellectual tourist (see various contributors to Clifford 1986) are just some of the recent suggestions. The standard monograph which has characterized British and American social anthropologyfor so many years has come in for some heavy criticism. Aside from the fact that, as many have pointed out, it is usually extremely boring, it also fails to include the observer in its analysis: the ethnographerappears briefly in the preface, as if to establish the authorityand credibility of having actually 'been there', but then promptly disappearsfrom the main text. This means that his or

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