Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS prepares his reception speech at the Academy.

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908.2009)

Autograph letter signed to his ethnologist friend Isac Chiva.

Two large octavo pages on Social Anthropology Laboratory letterhead.

Lignerolles. July 19, 1973.

“I just read Montherlant and, as he likes to say, “it’s not nothing.” »»

Claude Lévi-Strauss prepares his acceptance speech at the Académie Française.

_____________________________________

“My dear friend, Thank you for your letter.  I am happy to see you settled in for a few weeks in a superb country. I only visited the Jura once, but left a strong impression of it. Here, after a few days of extreme heat, we had storms and, since then, the weather has remained cool and uncertain. For a week, the painters have taken possession of the lower rooms. They progress slowly, being only two and sometimes just one. It really bothers me to be without an office , but, for the moment, I'm just reading Montherlant and, as he likes to say, "it's not nothing . The end is not yet in sight, and even less what I can say about it.

From the Lab, relatively little mail and no news except, this morning, a letter from Janine accompanying mission orders to be signed for Miss ^Guensquin . I am enclosing a letter from the DGRST [General Delegation for Scientific and Technical Research] , unable to remember whether or not we responded to this questionnaire. If not, what can we do? I also received a charming letter from the Director of Archives, thanking me effusively for my conciliatory response and apologizing for having blamed us for the disorder of the archives of various municipalities. So I was not wrong in writing to him as I did.

Maranda visited us for two days, but the painters were already there and he must have had a poor idea of ​​the house... Happy end of vacation and very friendly. Claude Lévi-Strauss. »

_____________________________________

Isac Chiva (1925-2012), ethnologist of Romanian origin, arrived in 1948 in France where he studied, worked at the Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions, became head of work at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (director, at from 1994), and deputy director of the Social Anthropology Laboratory alongside Lévi-Strauss. Indeed, in 1960, the latter, elected to the Collège de France, asked him to assist him in the direction of the Laboratory of Social Anthropology (LAS).

_____________________________________

Claude Lévi-Strauss was elected to the French Academy on May 24, 1973, in the 29th ^chair of Henry de Montherlant. He delivered his inaugural speech on Thursday June 27, 1974.

“Every morning for twenty years, from 8 a.m. to noon, we found Claude Lévi-Strauss at the Social Anthropology Laboratory that he founded with Isac Chiva in 1960, following his election to the Collège de France. First located on avenue d'Iéna then on place Marcelin-Berthelot, in the Chalgrin building, the LAS – the acronym quickly became apparent –, the first social sciences laboratory of the Collège de France, houses the magazine L'Homme (1961) and became, in the 1960s and 1970s, the paradigmatic place of French anthropology.

There, as the laboratory gains in prosperity, we come across ethnologists, linguists and historians, research officers, librarians, visiting foreign professors, secretaries, “temporary workers”, young people and less young, men and many women, and in the middle of this bustling little world of social science in the process of professionalization, the long silhouette of a man in his fifties, who is not only the intellectual leader of structuralism but the re-founder of French ethnology. » Emmanuelle Loyer – Lévi-Strauss , Flammarion, 2015.