Comrades

Franz Boas

Franz was a fellow émigré from the old country (Germany, to be exact), though we met on the mean streets of New York City. Actually, we met at the New York Public Library, but that sounds so bland and bookish. Franz was a fellow anthropologist who helped me assimilate into the American scene.

While I was France's bigwig anthropologist, Boas was the big guy in the United States. Like me, Franz didn't believe in the idea that one version of history could account for all cultures and peoples. Like a good anthropologist, Boas believed there were many histories, all equally important.

Roman Jakobson

This Russian linguist was smart, kind, and just an all around great guy. We taught together at the New School for Social Research. His intellectual companionship helped me expand my ideas about structuralism in culture to structuralism in language and art. He helped make structuralism matter for literary criticism, and he taught me to that the way to understand words was to compare them to other words. So clever.

I applied this idea to my work by considering the features of one culture against the features of another culture and then figuring out what the differences and similarities could tell me. I concluded that we understand things in the world by comparison—and not by understanding things in themselves. Hot is not hot because it's hot; it's hot because it's not cold. Everything is relative to something else. Got it?

Max Ernst

I wasn't one to confine my social life to mingling with anthropologists, linguists, and ethnographers. I was also hip to artists and became buds with the great surrealist painter Max Ernst. We shared a love of wacky juxtapositions and cultural artifacts. Surrealists loved putting things like sewing machines and umbrellas together in a poem, while I liked comparing clay writing implements and Awajún bracelets. Different fields, but the idea is the same.

Simone de Beauvoir

Now, I don't like Simone just because she was a colleague and praised my book The Elementary Structures of Kinship. She was also a friend. Simone gave me some feminist cred—and she was by far the most well suited to do that. She also had fond memories of me warning my students "in a deadpan voice, and with a deadpan expression, against the folly of the passions" (source). Sweet.

Rivals

Edmund Leach

This Cambridge anthropologist was a real so-and-so. Not only was he pretty much a hater, but he also talked about other people who didn't like my work—which means that he just liked haters. I guess that's what happens when your name is Leach.

Leach also had the chutzpah to question the integrity of my fieldwork in Brazil: he wondered out loud whether I hung around in Brazil long enough to really learn anything about indigenous culture, and he also wondered whether I could have had real conversations with the indigenous folks… after all, I spoke French and English, and they spoke languages like Rondônia, Aikanã, and Tubarão.

He also got on board with critics who doubted what I had to say about cannibals' appetites. As if. I sure didn't see them there at the supper table.

Stanley Diamond

I loved the figure of the trickster in mythology. In fact, as I saw it, the trickster plays a major role as mediator in Native American myths, which means that the trickster is always creating balance between chaos and social order. The trickster uses foolishness and trickery to reveal cultural truths. Convinced?

Well, the American anthropologist Mr. Diamond wasn't. He nay-sayed my argument about the importance of the trickster in native cultures, and he accused me of imposing oppositions of life and death onto cultures that saw life and death as intermingled (not separate). I say he wasn't at my grandmother's funeral. Not alive=dead, amirite?

Stanislav Andreski

Stan was a Polish sociologist who basically pointed the finger at me for being sloppy. He said that when I couldn't defend myself with science and facts, I would retreat into confusing mathematical "evidence" as a way of bullying people who were messing with me. Who was he to question the sincerity of my love for quasi-algebraic equations?