Search

After having briefly recalled the context of his meeting with Jakobson in the United States at the beginning of the 40’s, this article tries to identify what fascinated Lévi-Strauss in the recently discovered Troubetskoy and Jakobson’s phonology. Returning to the notion of phoneme makes it possible to identify, based on the instinctive notion of distinctive sound, a conception of language as a system of differences similar to Saussure’s. Such is the origin of the importance granted by Lévi-Strauss to structural oppositions which he thinks organise the kinship as well as the mythologies. Afterwards, some important results of structural analysis in anthropology are recalled (for example, a new conception of symbolism), in order to evoke the critical impact of Chomsky’s linguistics on this conception of links existing between linguistics and anthropology.

During the 1970’s the French movement known as New History innovated in this field by the choice of new subjects –death, fear, love, family … - which up to then were dealt with by anthropology. As a result, the question of the connection with the discipline ruled by Lévi-Strauss rose with new acuteness. Therefore, this article aims to analyze the relationship between this history dealing with mentalities and anthropology, and more especially with the one practised by the author of Tristes Tropiques.

In the first pages of Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss dismisses the enterprise which he decides to adopt: narrate the story of his exploration voyage and his ethnographic quest in Amazonian territories. The western tradition places at the origin of this literary range some Greek authors, with Herodotus in the first place. How can the connection between Herodotus and Lévi-Strauss be established? Why does the problem of voyage haunt Lévi-Strauss right away? What kind of echo, different, does this concept find along the first Greek prose work that has been preserved? Lévi-Strauss’s brief paper, « Herodotus in the sea of China » (1987), reveals, though it seems only a mere note, the extent of the anthropologist’s debt towards his Hellenic predecessor.