NAMBIKWARA

Our project's objective is to decipher, to digitize and to publish a critical edition of the field notes that Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote during his second stay among the Nambikwara (May 1938-January 1939), which are held by the French national library, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF). The consortium involved in the project is composed of three complementary partners: the BNF, the IMM and the ITEM. The critical apparatus of this scholarly edition will pursue four lines of research: (i) Enriching the documentation concerning the Nambikwara languages thanks to the historical value of the data gathered at the end of the 1930s, and reconstructing the ethnolinguistic investigation undertaken by Lévi-Strauss; (ii) Reconsidering the articulation between different orders of phenomena—the primacy of exchange, the virtual monopolizing of women—in the development of Lévi-Strauss's thought; (iii) Reflecting on the conditions of creation of the notebooks, the veritable workshop in which the anthropologist's interiority was forged during his fieldwork; (iv) Describing the content of the notebooks as a matrix of variations producing successive textual strata, from ethnographic notebooks to anthropological articles and books. The facsimile digital edition will be established following the “Sources” model developed by the ITEM and made available on both the BNF's Gallica platform and on the multimodal consultation platform Huma-Num. This scholarly edition will contextualize the materials presented by incorporating automatic two-way links between the facsimile and commentaries and articles pertaining to the contents of the notebooks. The realization of a timeline will make possible the graphic representation of the chronology of the different pieces of writing (establishing this timeline is one of the biggest challenges of the project, since the notebooks are not dated). A particular originality of the project lies in the fact that it closely combines a critical edition with a genetic analysis. The wealth of linguistic and ethnographic materials contained in the notebooks can be fully explored only through a sustained dialogue among researchers from different disciplines of the human sciences, in particular anthropologists, linguists and specialists in literary analysis. An in-depth examination of the notebooks will ideally allow us to identify the first emergence, in the course of Lévi-Strauss's ethnographic research, of concepts central to his thought, unbound by the epistemological positioning that he would put in place twenty years later when seized by the narrative fever of Tristes Tropiques. A close study of the different publications (and of any related archives) drawing on the Nambikwara ethnography up until the publication of Tristes Tropiques will constitute a crucial part of the project and further contribute to its originality. The project will mobilize the collaborative efforts of researchers in three countries: France, Brazil, and the Netherlands. In addition to the online publication of the notebooks, it will give rise to several other publications (including a publication of the field notes in book format), a major symposium on the ethnographic and linguistic roots of Lévi-Straussian structuralism and, finally, an art exhibition (the notebooks feature many drawings and thus possess a visual aspect that deserves recognition alongside the famous photographs in Tristes Tropiques).