La vie familiale et sociale des indiens Nambikwara

First edition, printed in small numbers, of this offprint from the “Journal de la Société des Américanistes”. No deluxe issue printed. Skilful restauration to cover.

Rare presentation copy signed by Claude Lévi-Strauss to Simone de Beauvoir: “Cet humble aspect de la malédiction féminine, en amical hommage de Claude Lévi-Strauss” (“this humble aspect of the feminine curse, in friendly homage”) on the upper cover. This fieldwork study of the Nambikwara from Lévi-Strauss’ 1938 ethnographic expedition directly influenced Beauvoir, who quoted it in her essay La Vieillesse [Old Age] (Gallimard, 1970).

A very rare copy, complete with all 7 photographs at rear.

Beauvoir spent her life giving voice to the “feminine curse” evoked in Lévi-Strauss’s inscription: from their very first meeting at a preparatory course for the Agrégation at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly in 1929, Beauvoir was the sole woman in a class of men. She described the young Lévi-Strauss in her celebrated Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée: “[his] impassivity rather intimidated me, but he used to turn it to good advantage, and I thought it very funny when, in his detached voice, and with a dead-pan expression, he expounded to our audience the folly of the passions.” (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, translated by James Kirkup, Cleveland, World Pub. Co, 1972, p. 313.)

Lévi-Strauss himself recalled this encounter in the preface to La Pensée sauvage and in a conversation with Didier Eribon: “I still remember Simone de Beauvoir from that time: a young woman with a fresh, rosy complexion, like a country girl. She had a certain apple-like quality about her […]”.

Much had changed, however, when Lévi-Strauss met Beauvoir and Sartre again in New York in 1947. They were at the height of their fame while Lévi-Strauss worked as a cultural attaché at the French Embassy in Washington DC.

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Upon his return to Paris in 1948, initially to a job as associate director of the Musée de l’Homme, Lévi-Strauss famously let Beauvoir read a draft copy of his major thesis Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (The Elementary Structures of Kinship). Published the following year by the Presses Universitaires de France, Les Structures élementaires developed his celebrated model of alliance, the exchange of women, and marriage rules. It is very likely that on the same occasion Lévi-Strauss also offered her this copy of his minor thesis, whose findings had greatly contributed to Les Structures élémentaires and later informed Tristes Tropiques, which includes episodes from the ethnographic expedition.

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Thanks to this gift, the Nambikwara took their place in Beauvoir’s vast array of documentary sources. Twenty years later, she directly referenced this study by Lévi-Strauss in the preamble of La Vieillesse:

“Lévi-Strauss says that the Nambikwara Indians have a single word that means ‘young and beautiful’ and another that means ‘old and ugly’. When we look at the image of our own future provided by the old we do not believe it: an absurd inner voice whispers that that will never happen to us — when that happens it will no longer be ourselves that it happens to.” (Old Age, translated by Patrick O’Brian, London, Deutsch, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972)

This inscription provides an essential complement to the history of their intellectual relationship: much attention has been paid to the importance of Les Structures élémentaires, cited on several occasions in Le Deuxième Sexe. Beauvoir pronounced it a ‘brilliant awakening’ of sociology in a long review in Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal Les Temps modernes. The Nambikwara also resonated with Beauvoir, and Lévi-Strauss highlighted a crucial point of convergence in this inscription. Both among the Nambikwara and within the society described by Beauvoir, women are used as tokens of alliance and political prestige, subject to a universal “feminine curse.” As Boris Wiseman has noted, Beauvoir found in Lévi-Strauss “what Sartre’s L’Être et le Néant was not giving her: a factual description of the relations between man and woman in the diverse context of human communities” (Lévi-Strauss et Les Temps modernes). The contribution of this text even extended beyond the question of the feminine condition for Beauvoir. It stayed with her for a long time, as it appeared years later in her essay on the relationship between societies and old age.

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An important inscription instrumental in establishing a significant intellectual exchange between the anthropologist and the writer, between existentialism and structuralism. From her first reading of Lévi-Strauss’s early studies, Beauvoir had “recognised [...] an ‘awakening of sociology’ beyond the confirmation of some of her feminist theses” (Frédéric Keck, “Beauvoir lectrice de Lévi-Strauss”, Les Temps Modernes, 2008/1, no. 647-648).