In the 1949-50 academic year, Claude Lévi-Strauss gave the Fondation Loubat lectures at the Collège de France. He was hoping to get elected to a chair there at this time, and behind the scenes various people were lobbying for this to happen. Giving a guest series of lectures could be a prelude to election, but these attempts were unsuccessful. Émile Benveniste and the psychologist Henri Piéron were among those trying to get Lévi-Strauss elected, and the idea of a chair in Comparative Sociology with him in mind was discussed at the Assemblée des Professeurs on 27 November 1949. The decision was to go for a chair in the history of Paris and the Seine département instead. No formal proposal for a chair in Comparative Sociology, much less an application by Lévi-Strauss to fill it, seems to have been produced. 

Lévi-Strauss’s Loubat lectures are generally given the title of “L’expression mythique de la structure sociale”, “The Mythic Expression of Social Structure”. This is how a notice in the Annuaire de Collège de France describes them. Lévi-Strauss had given the Collège administrator Édmond Faral the slightly longer title “L’expression mythique de la structure sociale chez les populations indigènes de l’Amérique [… among the Indigeneous Populations of America]”. Oliver Jacquot‘s brief history of the Loubat lectures gives that title too. Lévi-Strauss’s EPHE page gives a more specific focus in a description: “Analyse structurale du thème du Glouton dans la mythologie de l’Amérique du Nord [Structural Analysis of the theme of the Wolverine in North American mythology]”.

The focus on North America makes sense given the remit of the Fondation, with a concentration on a specific myth as Lévi-Strauss developed the work. However, the retrospective Annuaire de Collège de France notice reverts to the original title. The lectures were held on 5, 12, 19, and 26 January, and 2 and 9 February 1950. André Breton, the painter Max Ernst, Georges Dumézil, and Merleau-Ponty were among the audience, and it’s likely Benveniste and Piéron also attended. Lévi-Strauss was paid 30,000 francs for the course.

The more specific focus of the lectures is supported by the fullest published discussion of the lectures of which I am aware – a letter to Roman Jakobson dated 27 January 1950. The letter has only been published in French, but is part-quoted and translated in Emmanuelle Loyer’s excellent biography of Lévi-Strauss. The longer relevant passage reads:

For I am deep into mythology as well! I am currently giving the lectures of the Loubat Foundation for American Antiquities at the Collège de France, and I have chosen to focus on the theme of the wolverine [glouton] in North America, of which I am trying to provide a structural analysis. This entails studying the connections between 1) the traits of the figure (gluttony [gloutonnerie], clownishness, obscenity, scatology, cannibalism, beggary, etc.); 2) the sociological level at which it is expressed in each culture (collective behaviour, individual vocation, ritual personification, folkloric theme, mythical theme, etc.), 3) the relation between the ‘territory’ defined by these two axes and the rest of the social structure. This has yielded rather striking results, which were totally unexpected and caught me off-guard; for I am almost brought back to Engels, the Origins of the Family, etc. […] Anyway, this will be the next book I write next summer. The Arthurian cycle is part of this affair, for I am almost sure that the character of Percival developed from a figure analogous to that of the wolverine found in American rituals. 

Lévi-Strauss did not develop the lectures into the book he mentions. In the 1950s, he published his long introduction to Marcel Mauss, Tristes Tropiques, and the first volume of Structural Anthropology, as well as shorter pieces and lectures. But these particular lectures were not published. There is a discussion of the animal called the wolverine in La pensée sauvage in 1962, but nothing like as developed an argument as suggested here. That book was first translated as The Savage Mind and more recently retranslated as Wild Thought. The analysis there is in just two passages, noting that there is an uncertainty about which animal is referred to in a particular myth, indicating some aspects of its character and its regional distribution (La pensée sauvage, 67-68, 70-71; Wild Thought, 56-59, 61-62). There are also mentions of the wolverine in the Mythologiques series.

The online inventory of the fonds Claude Lévi-Strauss at the Bibliothèque nationale de France does not indicate a place where the lectures might be – the listing of Collège de France courses begins with the commencement of his chair there, while other teaching records or conferences seem to be dated and placed elsewhere. I’ve asked a couple of people who work on Lévi-Strauss and know these archives, and they have said there is no trace of the lectures. As this is almost a decade before he was elected to a chair at the Collège de France, there is also no record in the otherwise very useful Paroles données/Anthropology and Myth collection of his course summaries from the Collège and the École Pratique des Hautes Études.

There is however a file of correspondence relating to the lectures, and a brief summary, a typewritten text of about 1000 words by Lévi-Strauss, in the Collège de France archives. It expands on the points in the letter to Jakobson, and is the fullest description of the lectures that seems to exist. Two aspects of the summary are especially interesting. 

One is the geographical dimension of the analysis, ranging from the Pueblo people of the south-west United States to the north-west Pacific coast, and the Plains. The particular forms the wolverine takes in the mythologies he analyses are characterised as the Fool, Clown and Cannibal, with intermediate forms between the three types. Another interesting aspect is the importance of situating mythical thought in relation to other aspects of social life, including ritual, law, customs and psychological behaviour, stressing that myth is not an autonomous category and that different mythical tales cannot be compared without taking sociological context into account. Here the geographical aspects become significant again, as minute variations in a relatively limited area allow a more systematic comparison.

Lévi-Strauss indicates that 110-125 people attended the lectures, beyond the normal capacity of the lecture hall. It seems this summary was written for the Collège de France Annuaire, but it was not used. Instead, the Annuaire published just this very brief notice – which even manages to misspell Lévi-Strauss’s name. 

The summary Lévi-Strauss wrote was never published. At the end of 1950 Lévi-Strauss was again discussed for a possible chair in Comparative Sociology, with Benveniste taking the lead, but this too was unsuccessful. These failed bids for a chair perhaps helps to explain why he never wrote up the lectures and – at least as far as we can tell – did not even keep the manuscripts. In 1959, Lévi-Strauss was finally elected to a chair in Social Anthropology at the Collège, when Maurice Merleau-Ponty led the process for his election. He taught there for over twenty years.

References

Annuaire du Collège de France 1950.

Oliver Jacquot “La Chaire d’antiquités américaines (Fondation Loubat) du Collège de France”, Amoxcalli,2021, https://amoxcalli.hypotheses.org/36502

Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Introduction à l’oeuvre de Marcel Mauss”, in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie, Paris: PUF, 2013 [1950], ix-lii; Introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker, London: Routledge, 1987.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Paris: Plon, 1955; Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman, London: Penguin, 1992.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale, Paris: Plon, 1958; Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Broke Grundfest Schoepf, New York: Basic Books, 1963.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage, Paris: Plon, 1962; The Savage Mind, London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1966; Wild Thought, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and John Leavitt, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Paroles données, Paris: Plon, 1984; Anthropology and Myth: Lectures 1951-1982, trans. Roy Willis, Oxford: 1987.

Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon, De près et de loin suivi de «Deux ans après», Paris: Odile Jacob, 1990; Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, trans. Paula Wissing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss, Correspondance 1942-1982, eds. Emmanuelle Loyer and Patrice Maniglier, Paris: Seuil, 2018. 

Emmanuelle Loyer, Lévi-Strauss, Paris: Flammarion, 2015; Lévi-Strauss: A Biography, trans. Ninon Vinsonneau and Jonathan Magidoff, Cambridge: Polity, 2018.

Patrick Wilcken, Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory, London: Bloomsbury, 2010.

Archives

Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF 28150, Fonds Claude Lévi-Strauss

Collège de France, 24 CDF 2/3-b, 1949-50 Fondation Loubat

Collège de France, CDF 2 AP 14, Assemblée des Professeurs

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This is a revised and expanded version of a post from May 2023. It is the 32nd post of a weekly series, where I post short essays with some indications of further reading and sources, but which are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare ideas, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few shorter pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week.

The full list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here.