The Ethnic Ethnographer: Judaism in Tristes Tropiques

Abstract

FIRST CONCEIVED IN 1939 and finally written in 1954-55, Tristes Tropiques ranks as one of the most powerful accounts of modernity in light of the experience of the Second World War. It is also, among Claude Levi-Strauss's writings, the work that most directly engages the issue of the anthropologist's ethnicity. He begins the story of his research travels with a voyage that he describes as extraordinarily symbolic of the future (23): his escape from Vichy France in 1941. Inverting chronology, Levi-Strauss uses his flight from Nazi genocide to introduce his earlier transatlantic voyages, when he pursued his ethnographic research in Brazil among the scattered remnants of societies victimized by several centuries of oppression and neglect. Levi-Strauss thus marks his Jewish background at the opening of his book, which closes with an extended account of the history of religions. In the final two chapters, Levi-Strauss paints a broad picture of the cultural history of the West in terms of the relations between Christianity and its neighbors, Islam and Buddhism. He says nothing at all, however, about Judaism, even though the terms of his argument would logically entail a discussion of the religious roots of Islam and Christianity. Why has he setJudaism as the frame-tale for his work, only to collapse the frame in his conclusion? As Levi-Strauss's opening makes clear, he has no wish to rehearse the defensive cosmopolitanism of a Franz Boas, who aligned himself with a general German cultural heritage rather than a particularistic Jewish paternity. Speaking to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1908, the year of LeviStrauss's birth, Boas actually referred to types distinct from our own when he discussed the recent influx of Eastern European Jews into the United States.2 By contrast, in the dramatic opening chapters of his book, Levi-Strauss pointedly uses his flight from Vichy France to introduce the story of his formation as an ethnographer. The link is actually somewhat tenuous: invited to spend the war teaching at the New School in New York but unable to get a visa, Levi-Strauss uses his ethnographic research as a ruse: he claims to be returning to Brazil to continue his fieldwork. This ploy fails, leading him to a desperate conversation