ABSTRACT
It is a nice irony that the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the most avantgarde theoretical fashion of the 1960s, should have taken for its subject matter Enlightenment speculations about primitive society. Born in 1908, Lévi-Strauss graduated in philosophy from the Sorbonne in 1931, and he went out to Brazil in 1935 intending to put philosophy to an empirical test.1(‘I had gone to the ends of the earth to look for what Rousseau calls “the almost imperceptible stages of man’s beginnings”’, he wrote in Tristes Tropiques.)2Two issues engaged him in particular. The first was the intuition of Rousseau, his favourite philosopher, that the principles of social justice go back to the very origins of society. Among the Nambikwara Indians of the Mato Grosso, Lévi-Strauss identified the political principles idealised by Rousseau: equality, and leadership by assent. One Nambikwara chief with whom he became friendly told him that he had accepted his election only with the utmost reluctance, and Lévi-Strauss recalled with ‘astonishment and admiration’ that this was precisely what a Brazilian Indian had told Montaigne four centuries earlier.3The Nambikwara assumption of equality was rooted in the practice of reciprocity, and people imagined that they stood in a similarly egalitarian and reciprocal relationship with the natural world, and with the dead.
