Lecture | Patchwork: Tribal Cultures

The talk, ‘Patchwork: Tribal Cultures between the Literary Canon and Popular Culture. On Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss’, should interest staff and students working in a range of areas in the humanities and the social sciences, particularly anthropology, cultural theory and literature.

Dr Lanni is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of French. He has previously served as Assistant Professor in Francophone Literatures and Cultures at Columbia University in Paris and Middlebury College, Vermont, and was a Research Fellow at Université de Paris-IV, Sorbonne.

His teaching and research interests include the interdisciplinary relations between literature, anthropology and culture, and he has published widely on Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment literature, on travel literature and on the France-Africa interface.

Abstract for the talk

In 1955, Lévi-Strauss published Tristes tropiques with Plon, in the series ‘Terre humaine’, directed by Jean Malaurie. The choice of publisher and series was significant.

Through the series ‘Terre humaine’, Jean Malaurie wanted to create a space for studies that other fora might have considered singular, as much in the topic and form as in style and tonality.

And indeed in its structure, in its writing, ‘Tristes tropiques’ refers to a multiplicity of genres without belonging to one in particular, avoiding all of them.

It is also a book that draws its materials from ways of thinking of numerous and various cultures: from Inca cosmogonies to Maori eschatologies; from different literary traditions ranging from travel writings and the essay form to Symbolist poetry and the modern novel; from different schools of thinking, ranging the Chicago School or the Oxbridgian School to structuralism; and from different cultural traditions: from primitive cultures to popular culture.

To Clifford Geertz, the advent of structuralism in the field ‘has done rather more to alter anthropology’s sense of itself than its sense of its subject.’ With its investment in diverse disciplines, structuralism brought a ‘sensation of intellectual importance’ and other disciplines are in return more anthropology-referenced.

To Geertz, ‘what is most striking, however, in all of this is that, using the word in its uncensorious sense, it was an essentially rhetorical accomplishment. It was not the odd facts or the even odder explanations Lévi-Strauss brought forth that made of him […] an intellectual hero. It was the mode of discourse he invented to display those facts and fram those explanations.’

But is ‘Tristes tropiques’ only a rhetorical accomplishment? What fictions are developed? Which facts does Lévi-Strauss establish? Which truths does he present?

If Tristes tropiques resists taxonomies while referring to them at the same time, isn’t it because its construction follows a logic that is not generic but inscribed in a triple relation going from one “me” to several “me”(s), from these “me”(s) to an elsewhere and elsewhere(s), and to the other and to others?

In what ways does Tristes tropiques arise from the confrontation, in a double synchronic and diachronic perspective, of a ‘me’ with itself and an other ‘me’, with an ‘elsewhere’ and elsewhere(s), with the ‘other’ and ‘others’? In this seminar, we shall talk about these confrontations and their effects in ‘Tristes tropiques’.