Excavating Infrastructure in the Analog Humanities’
Lab: An Analysis of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Laboratoire d’anthropologie socialeAleksandra KilUniversity of Wrocław (Poland)aleksandra.kil-matlak@uwr.edu.pl
Aleksandra Kil is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies and a member of the
Laboratory of Contemporary Humanities at the University of Wrocław (Poland).
Her research areas include media theory and philosophy of the humanities. In
her current work she studies index cards as an apparatus of making knowledge in
the analog humanities.
Alliance of Digital Humanities OrganizationsAssociation for Computers and the Humanities000468014325 September 2020article
This is the source
DHQ classification scheme; full list available at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/taxonomy.xmlKeywords supplied by author; no controlled vocabularyFinished encodingCreated file
In this paper I present Claude Lévi-Strauss’s
Laboratoire
d’anthropologie sociale (LAS), established in 1960, as a case study of the
archaeology of the humanities infrastructure. Building on media archaeology and
critical infrastructure studies, I stress the significance of the research
infrastructure in the analog humanities and I show how the LAS was organized around
the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF), a vast ethnographical pre-electronic
repository produced at Yale. The paper looks into how the Files were mobilized to secure funding and space for Lévi-Strauss’s lab
and gain infrastructural advantage (boosted by the Files’ paper-ness), helping it then to establish its position as richly
endowed. As I suggest, it might be due to these pragmatic considerations – not
recognized as epistemically valid – that the Laboratory has not had any important
place in the readings of Lévi-Strauss’s work. The paper also highlights care
work – taking care of resources and relocations – undertaken by Lévi-Strauss
and his collaborators. Finally, examining the rationale and history of the HRAF and
looking at its use at the LAS, I demonstrate how the tool was refitted to serve the
particular needs and ambitions of the Parisian lab.
The author looks into the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale's Human Relations Area Files
and how their production helped secure funding and space for the lab.
Introduction
Revisiting a certain chapter in the history of structuralism from the point of view
of contemporary digital research in the humanities sounds in no way provocative or
controversial. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, with its systemic, large-scale
view, has already been referred to in the context of digital humanities, as in Alan
Liu’s article discussing the backdrop for the DH-fuelled debates on meaning . Moreover, there has been some evident interest in structural
anthropology’s liaisons with computers (for instance: )
and its linkage with cybernetics . As I will show in
this paper, it is also by dint of its specific institutional and infrastructural
making that the structuralist movement continues to prove compelling for today’s
research agenda in the digital humanities. With
Laboratoire
d’anthropologie sociale as its main hothouse, Lévi-Straussian anthropology
appears to have been an early-adopter of the now increasingly popular idea of the
humanities lab.
This paper uses a case study of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Laboratory of Social
Anthropology, or simply the LAS, officially established at the Collège de France in
1960 and still a part of its structure, to gain insights into the significance of
infrastructure in the analog humanities laboratory. In order to cast some light on
the physical situatedness of the LAS and the pragmatic, entrepreneurial side of its
workings, I will discuss how this lab was initially organized around its prominent
research apparatus – namely, the Human Relations Area Files, commonly referred to as
the
Files or HRAF – and how this instrument was
mobilized by Lévi-Strauss to secure funding and space and fulfill the goals as well
as scientific ambitions of structural anthropology.
What exactly were the
Files? In hindsight, they appear
to be a vast pre-electronic ethnographical database. Their creators described this
instrument as a collection of primary source materials
as well as a major data retrieval system. HRAF, produced at Yale, served as a repository
of selected ethnographic literature, mainly already-published articles and books
written in or translated into English, with the aim being to cover all known cultures
(or at least a representative sample of them).
Each paragraph of a text was annotated and indexed by HRAF analysts using two sets of
categories. The first (known as
Outline of World
Cultures) was geographical, with each world region, ethnic and cultural
group ascribed an individual numeric code. The second (Outline
of Cultural Materials) involved indexing the materials according to
subject matter, which ultimately strives to cover all aspects of human existence
(from religion, magic, kinship, law and political systems to technology, cuisine and
sexual practices, etc.). In each file on a particular culture, the source texts were
reproduced both in full, maintaining the original page order, as well as in processed
form, thus bearing significant amounts of metadata (on multiple levels), with the
pages relating to a particular subject grouped together. Each page of a document also
contained a header featuring standard bibliographical information as well as the
codes (or notations) signaling, for example, the level of education attained by the
author or an assessment of the quality of the source. Also attached was the File Guide that included information on which other sources
relating to a particular culture had also been consulted but not included among the
Files. The name of the HRAF analyst who created the
particular text was also given. Examples of sample file pages could be found in and on the HRAF website.https://hraf.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/HRAF_Paper_Microfiche_Files.pdf.
A glimpse of these multilayered metadata and indexing methods is still offered to
some extent by today’s eHRAF online database – here are examples of the HRAF files of
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s ethnographic texts on the Nambicuara and Bororo.
Analog humanities lab
My interest in the LAS and its practicalities developed while conducting research
within the collaborative project “The humanities laboratory as a mode of knowing.
From archaeology to a project”, designed with Jacek Małczyński and Dorota Wolska and
reflecting upon the forms a laboratory-type approach to scholarship could take in the
humanities.The Laboratory of Social Anthropology is one of the case studies
we chose to investigate in the project (alongside, for instance, Aby Warburg’s
Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek, Paul Otlet’s Mundaneum and Jerzy Grotowski’s
Laboratory Theatre). Furthermore, we inquire into alchemy cabinets and the
cabinets of curiosities as possible pre-figurations of the humanities lab. We
presented preliminary findings of this study in a joint paper From the Archaeology of the Humanities Lab: A Tricky Case of Claude
Lévi-Strauss’s Laboratoire d’anthropologie
sociale at the conference Making of the
Humanities VII (15-18 November 2018, University of Amsterdam).
Expanding on that research, this paper goes into further detail about the
significance of infrastructure in the LAS. Starting from the basic premise
that the humanities laboratory is a distinct mode of knowing and that it is not to
serve as a mere imitation of the scientific lab (despite its obvious adjacency to
that domain), we assume the following determinants in helping to grasp specificity of
this modus: (1) experimenting, (2) collaboration, (3) the significance of the
research infrastructure, (4) openness (personal, discipline-wise, and institutional),
(5) the labile position of the researcher (fluidity of the boundaries between the
inside and the outside of the laboratory, and the resulting problem of the humanist’s
involvement). In an attempt to revise the image of the laboratory as an institution
of strictly natural sciences and to search for deeper discursive layers of this
particular knowledge-making setting, we have taken up the archaeology of the humanities laboratory.A growing interest in the
humanities labs (their early forms as well as their infrastructural side) has been
shared by several scholars – e.g. Lori Emerson, Jussi Parikka and Darren Wershler
in their forthcoming publication The Lab Book: Situated
Practices in Media Studies (the project website: https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/the-lab-book) and Steven E. Jones in
his recent work on reconstructing Roberto Busa’s lab (see: Jones 2018 and the collaborative project website:
http://www.recaal.org/). The
arguments historicizing the current lab fever, which are similar to
our assumptions, have also been made by Grant Wythoff (2018). Other recent works pertaining to the history of the laboratory
in the humanities concentrate on the nineteenth century German philological
seminars (see: Spoerhase 2019) and the interwar
laboratory operating at the intersection of applied linguistics and acoustics
(see: Tkaczyk 2019). While the focus of many
existing works covering this subject is mostly technical and/or design
laboratories of various kinds (media labs, digital humanities labs, fablabs,
hacklabs, etc.), our project looks into the cases which would not fall into these
categories or may not have been otherwise entangled with media studies or other
kindred fields. Thus, the proposed framework of the project, aiming to address the
question of the laboratory in the humanistic scholarship conceived more broadly,
is complementary to the already mentioned studies. Such a general (and perhaps
inescapably vague) conceptualization of the humanities would mean that we have a
predilection for an interpretive, qualitative approach, straddling various
theoretical and methodological orientations, and we tend to emphasize the
humanities’ specificity in regard to the natural and social sciences. However,
when looking for the historical instances of the lab we are interested in
different disciplines, methods and styles of inquiry – vide this paper discussing
the laboratory of structural anthropology which – due to its analytical,
anti-historical orientation – could be sometimes contrasted with what is
traditionally recognized as humanistic knowledge, especially when one takes into
consideration the used nomenclature and national conventions – e.g. distinguishing
between the human sciences and the humanities.
For at least a decade the humanities have seen a conspicuous proliferation of new
initiatives labelled as laboratories. Little is known, however, about their
historical forms. Analysis of them, in a somewhat Foucauldian manner, steers clear of
seeking the unequivocal origins of the humanities lab and creating a linear
history – instead it foregrounds recursion and the element of chance in the process
of constituting the humanistic laboratory. Exploring the LAS as one of the
prefigurations of the contemporary humanities labsIt could be rightfully argued
that searching for precursors does not fit a style of analyses inspired by Michel
Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge with its disregard for genesis, continuity and
totalization. Therefore, we should be cautious when conceptualizing the status of
the LAS and choosing terminology. As stated in the dictionaries, precursor
and forerunner are by and large used as synonyms, although precursor
connotes not only something happening or existing before another thing, but also a
person or thing paving the way for the other’s future accomplishments. Together
with Małczyński and Wolska I opted for prefiguration, assuming that – being
less common and slightly less burdened with teleological thinking – it would be a
safer choice. and focusing on its infrastructural advantage, which
will be explicated later on, is intended here as a deliberate media-archaeological
move, undermining claims that the observed laboratorization of the field is
merely a recent and fleeting trend.
In this archaeological vein, I situate Lévi-Strauss’s lab in the analog
humanities. I adopt a notion of the analog humanities, aiming to use it in
a more rigorous, theory-laden sense rather than simply in a non-methodical,
metaphorical way, sometimes signaled by the quotation marks around the term. What I
propose is to instill a kind of reflexivity or a retrospective, pre-posterous logic
in it (a notion of pre-posterous, pertaining to history and meaning
intentional anachronisms, is borrowed from the Dutch art historian Mieke Bal). As
Jonathan Sterne argues: the
analog humanities refers to a nexus of methodological,
technological, and institutional conditions across the humanities that have
only come into clear focus in retrospect. They refer to the cultural and
material infrastructures on which humanists depended and still depend.
In this sense the term serves as a heuristic, a rhetorical
before, to accompany the digital, despite being somewhat monolithic. One could say that this idea of the analog
humanities perfectly embodies the pre-posterous thinking (where pre- and
post- are being playfully reconfigured) since it evolved and actually made
sense after the digital turn in the humanities had drawn our attention
to the technological modes of inquiry and to epistemic implications of the academic
infrastructures. However, the term is not intended here merely as a negative; a
blurry category denoting everything being pre-digital or not-digital. Elsewhere, in
his entry on the analog in the
Digital Keywords, Sterne
claims that we should return some specificity to the
analog as a particular technocultural sphere — it is not to denote any natural
(pre-technical) state of the world, but rather a certain technology of inscription
(or representation). With a background in sound studies and the history of sound
recording, Sterne conceives of the analog era as a period dominated by analog
technologies reproducing print, sound, video and images, but not erasing any earlier
media.The author is not explicit about any dates. We could gather that this
period spans across the second half of the nineteenth century and the twentieth
century. It would be better, though, not to determine when it definitely ends, as
if it gave up to the digital era. Sterne is careful not to draw a line here,
stressing that the digital devices operate on the layers of the analog
technologies or have analog components. Although we are inclined to contrast the
analog with the digital, we could also shift the focus to their points of contact.
To further complicate the matter, one shall bear in mind a semantic vagueness of
these terms. As evidence by numerous lexicon entries and articles, there are
various ways of defining the analog and the digital – some definitions foreground
technical conditions (continuity vs discontinuity of the signal), while the others
focus more on their cultural and affective attributes (analog being closer to
nature and human senses, triggering nostalgia, etc.) or even on a deeper
philosophical sense (see: Buckley 2014, Cramer 2015, Galloway
2014, Schrey 2014, Robinson 2008). Being rather
chronologically specific (although not in a strict way), the notion of analog
humanities thus irresistibly seems a periodization concept (which could be deemed
problematic).My grappling with the idea of the analog humanities seen as a
periodization tool is in line with the critique of using media as temporal markers
presented by Cox (2015) and Gitelman (2010). Even if we cannot entirely avoid
this logic, I would argue that the analog humanities serve here as a term identifying
a particular techno-cultural state of scholarship; that is, the role of the word
analog in this expression is primarily to emphasize mediality of knowledge
production in the humanities and not so much to carve out a certain era.It is
worth mentioning that in the literature we can find other terms intended to
capture earlier technological conditions of the scholarship, for example
print-based humanities (see: Hayles
2012 and Hayles and Pressman 2013) and
print humanities (see: Mandell
2015). The scope of the analog humanities would be more limited, but the
print remains essential also in this media environment (and so does paper).
In this way perhaps the analog humanities could still make sense in
light of the debates on the post-digital, which, as David M. Berry argues, currently
defines our times. Berry and Fagerjord notes that Sterne’s definition of the analog
humanities is useful in exploring the links between media and epistemology in the
humanities, although it might overstate the disjuncture between
analog and digital.The analog, the digital and the post-digital would
describe specific historical worlds of experiencing media. As Berry and Dieter
state, the post-digital signifies the most recent moment, characterized by immersive, disorientating experiences of computational
infrastructures as they scale up and intensify. On the other hand, regarding the present time (and the
near future), the authors discourage us from delineating the digital and the
non-digital, arguing that such distinctions become nonsensical (as the digital is
being seamlessly interwoven in our daily lives).
Therefore, in my paper I follow Sterne – I understand the analog humanities as a
concept retrospectively facilitated by the digital humanities, intended to
characterize a techno-cultural condition of the earlier scholarship. At the same
time, I see the analog humanities not as everything that preceded the digital and
post-digital age, but rather as a media ecology of print, index cards, typewriters,
sound recordings, transparencies, overhead projectors, copiers and microfiches, etc.,
used by the scholars, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, to
which my case study points to. If we were to find a vivid and detailed illustration
of this, a description of the LAS’s first interior, written by Emmanuelle Loyer, a
biographer of Lévi-Strauss, comes to mind: Desks, closets, metal filing cabinets, slide and microfilm
cabinets, a ladder, a coat rack, two secretary desks, ten armchairs, as well as
data processing and scientific machines: a stencil duplicator, two photocopy
machines (Arcor and Polymicro), a projector for still images, two microfilm
readers, an electric calculator, a stereophonic record-player, a camera, three
tape recorders, electric typewriters (Olivetti, extended
carriage Everest, Olympia, Royal, etc.), and a celestial
globe.The last component of this verbal
snapshot is perhaps less surprising if one recalls a figure of speech, which
Lévi-Strauss seemed to be fond of, positioning anthropology as the astronomy of
the social sciences. By the analog humanities
lab I understand the laboratory of the analog humanities or, to make it
more pleonastic, the humanities laboratory which emerged from the analog humanities
(of which the LAS happens to be an instantiation). The humanities laboratory is seen
as a mode of knowing, but certainly in the case of the LAS it also materializes as a
research institution under the very label of the lab (and with the physical
premises). Lévi-Strauss’s laboratory constitutes a good case to be investigated
within the framework I adopt in this paper, but naturally it is not the only example
of the analog humanities.Another example I have been studying is the use of
scholarly index cards, especially in the context of cultural studies in Poland –
the first department of cultural studies was formally founded in 1972 by Stanisław
Pietraszko, whose collection of cards I have been analyzing in my dissertation.
See: Kil 2017.
The framework of this study is the archaeology of the humanities infrastructure,
built upon media archaeologyMy discussion of the analog humanities lab
presented above is in fact framed in a media archaeological perspective, in which
insights of past and often obsolete technologies inform our understanding of the
contemporary media age and vice versa. Media archaeology foregrounds the
materiality of scholarly work, revisiting old and purportedly discarded
technologies of intellectual labour (such as the HRAF in both paper and
microfiches form) and avoids viewing technological change in terms of imminent
progress. The proposed archaeology of the humanities infrastructure also alludes
to a Foucauldian sense of archaeology, repurposed by media scholars
(e.g. F. Kittler), and seen here as an analysis of the (techno-cultural)
conditions of knowledge. Media archaeology does not form a unified field or
discipline, being perhaps rather a style or aesthetics of the historical
reflection on media and cultural techniques (for a synthesizing account see: Parikka 2012). The most stimulating for my thinking
have been works and ideas by Lori Emerson, Errki Huhtamo, Markus Krajewski, Jussi
Parikka, and Siegfried Zielinski. and informed by the critical
infrastructure studies.The body of research within the purview of critical
infrastructure studies have been growing, as evidenced by an extensive
bibliography curated by Alan Liu, which can be found online: https://cistudies.org/critical-infrastructures-bibliography/. Critical
infrastructure studies encompass many different approaches to infrastructure
(informed by the science and technology studies, ethnography, media studies,
digital humanities, art and design, etc.). They also seem to include a narrower
field of studies dealing with research infrastructure or – even more precisely,
humanities infrastructure, seen as a more domain-specific type of infrastructure,
devoted specifically to enable research and used within the scholarly communities.
Different, yet overlapping, terms exist in the literature – namely: research
infrastructure (see: Anderson 2013), knowledge
infrastructure (see: Bowker 2017), scholarly
(information) infrastructure (see: Borgman 2007),
academic infrastructure (preferred by Svensson as the one carrying fewer
connotations with science – see: Svensson 2016).
I find it fruitful not to reduce the complexity evidenced by this rich terminology
and mesh together the insights coming from these different approaches. As far as
the humanities are concerned, although it could be useful to grasp specificity of
specialized facilities, tools, resources, institutions and standards supporting
research in the humanities, in some cases we may as well resort to a more generic
understanding of infrastructure (bearing in mind that research infrastructures
tend to be layered upon or entangled with other kinds of substrates). Svensson
also argues for a rather broad understanding: With an
inclusive definition of research infrastructure, almost anything needed to
carry out research in the humanities could be included: ranging from paper,
pens, books, furniture and people to database structures, grid computing
facilities, visualization centers and libraries. Additionally, it will be discussed further in the
paper that the HRAF is in fact illustrative of the porous boundaries between the
concept of research infrastructure associated with science and engineering (and
often understood as infrastructure tout court) and the humanities
infrastructure. The work being done in this vibrant subfield of the
humanistic theory encourages us to examine infrastructure as unavoidably
relationalA relational character of infrastructure (put forward in a
canonical work by Star and Ruhleder (1996) and
eagerly adopted by others) is understood as an emphasis on when, not
what is infrastructure. For Star and Ruhleder that means
infrastructure is always embedded in organized practice. Interestingly,
relationality entrenched in the concept could also be seen in the origins of the
word – according to Carse (2017, 29), in
the language of the late nineteenth century’s French engineering, infrastructure
primarily referred to construction work done prior to laying road tracks and also
the very road beds beneath the tracks. Thus rails, trains and train stations –
which we commonly imagine as emblematic infrastructure – actually
used to serve as superstructure in relation to what was done to make
these projects happen. and heterogenous, comprising material equipment and
installations as well as their human builders and operators, underlying protocols,
ideas, or standards. In other words, it highlights both ‘the hard and soft
scaffolding’ of research, as named by Shannon Mattern (2016). Furthermore,
infrastructure critics and theorists helpfully remind us to study media with an infrastructural disposition, that is, with questions of
resources and distribution in mind, performing an infrastructural inversion – foregrounding the truly backstage elements of work
practice and to engage with
infrastructure on the level of packaging. In the case of Lévi-Strauss’s Laboratory,
the latter could be understood quite literally – as ways of handling tons of packages
filled with paper files and sent regularly from New Haven, Connecticut to Paris since
the beginning of the 1960s. It is this concrete piece of infrastructure that mostly
preoccupies me in this paper and I dwell on the reasons for it in the sections that
follow.
The HRAF as humanities infrastructure
Before turning directly to the nitty-gritty of the LAS, it ought to be mentioned that
there has in fact been very little exploration and discussion of the significance of
the laboratory in relation to Lévi-Strauss’s oeuvre.A notable exception could
be a recently translated biography by Loyer (2018),
whose meticulous archival and ethnographic work provides valuable insights into
the LAS’s history and allows for the behind-the-scenes view (presented in the
chapter The Manufacture of Science). To her work I
owe my deepened knowledge of the LAS’s functioning. Other relevant sources include
mainly interviews with Lévi-Strauss, his own writings as well as memoirs and
occasional materials published by the LAS. What could possibly account for
such a surprising marginalization or lack of interest? Together with Małczyński and
Wolska I posited that the laboratory idea could either have been forgotten (as a
relatively minor element of the structuralist program) or overlooked because of the
dominance of anti-laboratory ways of thinking fostered by the interpretive
anthropology after the peak of structuralism had passed.What I mean here is
that the idea of laboratory could have lost traction in the anthropological
meta-discourse due to a growing impact of phenomenology and hermeneutics and after
the interpretive turn. The latter is exemplified by Clifford Geertz. In his
influential Thick description (in The Interpretation of Cultures) published in 1973, Geertz
remained antagonistic to such a mode of scholarship in which anthropologists
construct models, study cultures as if they were natural experiments and
adopt a concept of the natural laboratory; what kind
of a laboratory is it where none of the parameters are
manipulable? – asked Geertz provocatively , polemically alluding to the structuralist anthropology. For a
further discussion on the competing visions of anthropological research (the one
aligning itself with social science and the other oriented towards the humanistic
interpretation) and the resulting perception of the HRAF see: Tobin 1990. Perhaps it might also be the case
that the laboratory has neither been forgotten nor overlooked, but has instead been
passed over in silence in light of the pragmatic reasons behind its founding. These
very reasons will be revealed as my infrastructural inversion unfolds, making
a case for the significance of infrastructure (as one of the
hypothetical determinants of the humanities laboratory listed above), understood in a
twofold way – as evidenced by the dictionaries, significance could mean both
importance, the quality of being worthy of attention and the ability to convey
meaning. The latter could be further interpreted within the media studies
perspective, asserting that conveying is hardly epistemically neutral and that to
convey meaning would be at the same time to shape it. We can rephrase it into a
question of how research tools, spatial arrangements and management of resources
affect the process of humanistic knowing.
As already stated, infrastructure is of vital importance to my description of the
LAS. Not only does it result from a chosen approach (according to which the HRAF
prefigures research infrastructure as we know it today – for example a digital
repository), but it is also grounded in primary source material – Lévi-Strauss’s own
statements show that the
Files, acquired with no little
difficulty, were at the heart of the Laboratory’s work. Lévi-Strauss admitted that
the HRAF formed the center around which he built the institution and that the role of
this research instrument was comparable to that of the telescope
or electron microscope in the natural sciences (cited in: Abélès 2008, 66). What this comparison clearly
shows is that while grasping infrastructure in the humanities, one is likely to be
challenged by its juxtaposition with science.
Therefore, to stress the situatedness of the apparatuses and avoid modelling
humanistic infrastructure on the sciences, Patrik Svensson puts forward the idea of
the humanistiscope, which is much less laden than the
aforementioned devices, although it borrows from a scientific infrastructural
logic and the Greek for to look/examine (which also points to the
commonplace privileging of the visual in the infrastructure turn). In his paper, Svensson examines which
assumptions and expectations are deeply entrenched in the very concept of
infrastructure, relating it to science and engineering. Interestingly, the HRAF –
although it is just a paper-based collection of indexed ethnographic reports –
falls exactly into this category by being (1) expensive,HRAF is a
membership-based research agency, based at Yale but financially independent and
not-for-profit. According to a report from 2000, member dues were considered to be
too high for many academic institutions to be willing to join it (see: Ember and Human Relations Area Files 2000).
(2) used beyond single research groups,Starting as
a single project based at the Yale Institute of Human Relations, in 1949 the HRAF,
Inc. became an interuniversity research consortium with five founding members. Now
there are over 400 institutions (such as universities, libraries, museums, etc.)
with access to the Files. (3) having considerable longevity and (4) a sense
of discreteness and unity, being described by a name
or a phrase, or, we could add, in this case also by an
acronym. The HRAF thus constitutes a perfect instantiation of infrastructure tout
court. Likewise, it meets the basic criteria of infrastructure proposed by Susan Leigh Star (1999, 381-382), such as
embeddedness in other structures or layers, transparency (unless it breaks) and
taken-for-grantedness, significant reach, modularity, the ability to embody standards
and protocols and a nature that is learnt and practiced through community-driven
conventions.
It seems particularly relevant to consider a lab of the analog humanities in terms of
its infrastructure. The humanities have always had infrastructure even if it was
rather unlikely to be recognized as readily as in the case of the contemporary
cyberinfrastructure and the digital labs. Commenting on a common (and erroneous)
notion that the humanities in general do not actually have (or have had)
infrastructure, Svensson writes: the
view of basic humanities as having little or no significant infrastructure not
only assumes a science- and technology-based idea of what makes up
infrastructure but also imposes a pen-and-paper construction of the humanities.
Pen and paper, while inherently communicative and collaborative, is also linked
to the assumption that humanities scholarship is to a large extent a solitary
endeavor. The
Files serve here as a puzzling example eluding straightforward typologies
– they fulfill a pen-and-paper model only partially: as paper files comprising
photocopies of articles and monographs which had earlier been annotated by hand by
the analysts and as a collectively authored tool designed to aid an individual
researcher’s work as well as to diversify pedagogy at both pre-university and college
level. In addition, despite being made from paper, the HRAF Files have always seemed
to be heading into the digital age, being more than suitable for informatization.
Today the HRAF exists as online databases (eHRAF World Cultures and eHRAF
Archaeology).They can be accessed here: http://hraf.yale.edu/products/
(free trials of both databases are also being offered).
To unpack the HRAF as foundational infrastructure in the LAS I am posing the
following questions: how and when did the
Files find
their way to Lévi-Strauss’s Laboratory? How did they operate? What did they bring
along – in terms of any in-built theory, methods, scientific rationale as well as
reputation, possible connotations and network of allies and foes? How was the HRAF
put to use (or repurposed) in the particular setting of the LAS and in Lévi-Strauss’s
own work? What was its position then and what status does it enjoy today?
Infrastructural advantage and the persistence of paper
Moving on to describe in greater detail the inner workings of the LAS and its use of
the HRAF, one should actually start from the beginning. But when exactly was that? It
is difficult to pinpoint when Lévi-Strauss first learnt about the
Files. Having spent several years in the US meeting the most
prominent American anthropologists, he availed himself of cutting-edge trends and
methods and must have heard of the widely advertised initiative started at Yale
University by the anthropologist George Peter Murdock.The first mention of
Murdock and his Cross-Cultural Survey (which later
became the HRAF) I found in a paper delivered by Lévi-Strauss as early as in 1952
and later published in his Structural anthropology . As reported in a volume
published for the occasion of the LAS’s fiftieth anniversary , Lévi-Strauss managed to acquire the files as
early as 1958, two years before the Laboratory was formally established. He might
have benefitted from his role as secretary general of the International Social
Science Council, founded under the auspices of UNESCO (of which he happened to say
that it was an organization without goal or function,
but in disposition of some means. With UNESCO funding and thanks to the
efforts of Gaston Berger from the French Ministry of National Education, Claude
Lévi-Strauss’s Laboratory (as a part of the École pratique des hautes études) came
into possession of the only complete paper copy of the HRAF card index in Europe. As
Lévi-Strauss noted, he succeeded in this mission after many
tribulations; moreover, the funding conditions meant that his center was
obliged to make the HRAF available to any interested party .
If we were to apply the categories used in describing competition over natural
resources, we could say that it was because of the files that LAS acquired
infrastructural advantage, having access to something otherwise
unavailable outside North America and Japan. In order to emphasize its
ownership of the imported papers or to domesticate them – for HRAF
members did not technically own the files, they only enjoyed the privilege of keeping
and using them – the Laboratory gave its own name to the collection –
Centre documentaire d'ethnologie comparée.We could
ponder on the possible ramifications of this imported nature of the Files, produced (selected and annotated) in the United
States and used at a French academic institution. For instance, could it be an
issue that all texts collected in the HRAF index – aiming at representing the
world cultures – were in English (some being translated from other
languages, also from French, but reportedly original versions were also filed)?
Could the Anglo-American pedigree of the tool have invited criticism (if we bear
in mind the situation of the social sciences in post-war France described by Loyer
– they are said to have been underfunded, supported by UNESCO and frowned upon by
the Marxist left, who looked very unfavorably on these
American sciences of capitalist social engineering)? Or perhaps contrariwise, could it have been
seen as a positive sign of international academic cooperation or even a welcome
gift from a scientific community of the country which sheltered numerous
French exiles, Lévi-Strauss included, during the war? The infrastructural
advantage of the LAS was of course closely related to prestige and the sense of
exclusivity which was in turn – perhaps surprisingly – amplified by a paper
technology. It should be said that in 1958 the Files
were introduced in a microfiche format which proved quite efficient – cheaper to
ship, more durable and taking up far less space. Still, the paper versions continued
to be produced until 1984. Why did Lévi-Strauss’ Laboratory opt for the paper
version, given its constant problems with obtaining adequate space (a more detailed
account of these difficulties will follow)? After all, subscribing to the paper HRAF
was burdensome, involving endless boxes of 5 x 8 inches loose paper slips which had
to be carefully filed and properly stored.As Geoffrey Rockwell (2010) observes, one of the inherent problems of
infrastructure is that it has to be maintained. Loyer notes that in its
second year in the LAS the HRAF already consisted of about two
million index cards, organized in 380 double metal filing cabinets, weighing 7.5
tons and taking up 18 cubic meters of space.
There are a few possible explanations of this seemingly strange preference of the
LAS’s administrators (namely, Claude Lévi-Strauss and his deputy and right-hand, Isac
Chiva). First is that a robust HRAF collection could have acted as a pretext
concocted by Lévi-Strauss in his efforts to receive a more comfortable location. What
is more, one of the researchers currently working in the LAS drew my attention to the
fact that due to the singular rules of succession at the Collége de France, it is
more likely for the chair to justify its continued existence when it possesses some
expensive specialist equipment (which usually pertained to the natural sciences
chairs, but also to the extraordinary resources used by humanists, like for instance
particularly rich and valuable libraries or collections of artifacts).For this
clue I am thankful to Professor Wiktor Stoczkowski who shared his insights into
the history of the LAS with my colleagues and me during his visit at the
University of Wrocław (personal communication, May 2018).
On the other hand, the persistence of paper
Files in the
LAS could have more to do with joining an international prestigious club than with
locally situated institutional equilibristics. Rebecca Lemov (2015, 137) notes that the Laboratory was among the handful
of first-tier subscribers (i.e. sponsor members), alongside for example Harvard, who
received full-sized paper copies. Everyone else (the so called microfiles members)
received miniaturized photographic reproductions.
However, there is yet another explanation that should be considered: the limited
number of twenty five paper sets of the HRAF ever produced (one set located in the
headquarters at Yale and twenty-four copies entrusted to the sponsor members) was
part of the arrangements made by the HRAF corporation with the publishers holding the
copyrights to the ethnographic sources reprinted in the
Files — they agreed on releasing twenty five copies in total (see: Roe 2007, 64). Expanding the number of
subscribers was thus only feasible by changing the medium of publication – apparently
microfiches were acceptable as derivative version of paper originals, which
were ultimately xeroxed copies. As evidenced by a 1970 report by the HRAF president
Clellan Ford (1970,39), in that period
there were already eight microfiche collection of the Files in Europe (for instance in Germany, Holland, Sweden and
Switzerland). The Laboratory of Social Anthropology in Paris was thus in charge of a
truly unique resource but only for several years after its purchase or as long as we
conceive this exclusivity as bound to a concrete technology of reproduction.
Roe remarks that paper versions of HRAF indeed held some prestige – in fact, they
were highly valued, kept in specially arranged and locked places and not available to
students or members of the public without some precautions (such as prior training)
. However, what can be inferred from the updated
lists of subscribers published throughout the years in occasional reports is that not
every sponsor member that acquired a paper-based collection decided to keep it –
hence the paper
Files travelled to new campuses. Perhaps
the membership was too costly to maintain for many years or it just seemed more
practical and modern to switch to microfiches. Alternatively, apart from all the
practical issues, being a part of an exclusive paper-aficionados club did not in the
end turn out to be sufficiently prestigious.
Resources and relocations: highlighting care work
Fresh batches of files reached the Laboratory each year thanks to its subscription.
Cataloging and storing the materials demanded ever more effort and space.
Lévi-Strauss explained that this was the reason behind the Laboratory’s multiple
changes of location. The Laboratory’s location for the first five years of its
existence was in an annex to the Musée Guimet on Avenue d’Iéna (formerly the private
residence of Emile Guimet, it was not necessarily fit to house a research
organization). It comprised two rooms, with the largest being almost completely
filled by the files, while a smaller one (a reconfigured bathroom with the stumps of
pipes protruding from the floor) was shared by several researchers: Lévi-Strauss,
Isac Chiva, his collaborator Françoise Flis (Zonabend) and Jean Pouillon, the editor
of
L’Homme.When located on Avenue d’Iéna, Isac
Chiva mentioned that the laboratory’s secretarial staff (typewriters,
receptionists, people in charge of accounting, mail, library
resources and archiving) used to work together in another office (cited
in: Loyer 2018, 386). They could have
been all located in the second larger room (where the HRAF was stored).
This did not stop Susan Sontag from claiming in her review article A Hero of our Time(1963) that Lévi-Strauss heads a
large and richly endowed research institute, much to the bewilderment of
Chiva. The reputation enjoyed by the Laboratory and its founder certainly encouraged
one to imagine its physical location as something much grander than it was in
reality.
Its second home, this time located in the Latin Quarter (Place Marcelin-Berthelot)
and installed in the Collége buildings (which, as revealed in the interview with
Didier Eribon, appeared crucial to Lévi-Strauss (1991, 75)), was more grandiose but even it became too cramped
over time. The burgeoning HRAF files were too heavy for the eighteenth-century
building’s ceilings to bear. There was also a growing team of over thirty technical
and research staff. Space was in short supply. The sound of talking and the noise
generated by typewriters made working conditions in the common room difficult, if not
impossible. Rooms were thus divided to create individual compartments. There seems to
be a case here of the HRAF exerting proxemic dominance. The ability to store the
Files even took precedence over guaranteeing
individual and spacious offices for researchers. The Latourian non-human actor
dominated the Laboratory’s space. Accommodating the HRAF collection was an issue that
made Lévi-Strauss and Chiva boldly apply for greater floorspace, customarily rather
unthinkable for the human sciences facilities. Loyer points out that Lévi-Strauss
requested 2,000 square meters, while the standard was 150-200, envisioning a perfect
location as having an adjoining reading room, two offices for
archivists, a photographic workshop, fifteen offices for researchers and a reading
and conference room. The Laboratory moved to its third and
current location in 1985, doubling its space.
Presenting his Laboratory in the journal
Reveu de
L’enseignement supérieur, Lévi-Strauss indicates four main areas it should
develop in, namely: teaching, documentation, research and publication (1965). He spoke at length about how the training
in anthropology should be organized in his text The Place of
Anthropology in the Social Sciences and Problems Raised in Teaching It
(see: Lévi-Strauss 1968). On several occasions
Lévi-Strauss voiced his views on how neglected were problems of tools and resources
in the human sciences, beginning his response to a UNESCO survey in 1964 with these
words: how much more efficient it
would have been if, at the national level, there were the granting of a place
of work to scattered researchers, who are most often demoralized by the lack of
a chair, a table, and the few square yards indispensable for the decent
exercise of their work; by the nonexistence or insufficiency of libraries, and
the lack of funds.
Earlier on, in
The Structural Study of Myth, where he
imagines analyzing myths by disassembling them into smaller units written down on
index cards, pigeon-holed and reconfigured with the help of enormous wooden boards
(two meters long and one and one-half meters high), later to be replaced by
perforated cards and IBM equipment, Lévi-Strauss complains about the limited means
for such research in France. What he has in mind speaking of such means is a spacious workshop, special
devices and a team comprising both researchers and technicians. He adds:
it is much desired that some American group, better equipped
than we are here in Paris, will be induced by this paper to start a project of its
own in structural mythology.This reference to a potentially
better equipped American research team appears only in the version of The Structural Study of Myth published in 1955 in The Journal of American Folklore – its later version
published in French as a chapter of Anthropologie
structurale lacks such a statement. As evidenced by this quote,
Lévi-Strauss envisaged his research as inherently collective. However, one can argue
that this idea of collaboration is principally of a pragmatic (or instrumental)
nature; Lévi-Strauss was aware that such a study would only be feasible (in a
reasonable time) when taken up by a group.
Lévi-Strauss actively sought to secure funds and spaces, since, as he noted, they
were inadequate at the outset. He was able to seize the chance of establishing a
prospering human sciences lab, recognizing in the 1960s that, thanks to the French
state's Fifth Plan, new funding opportunities for collective research had
arrived.Reporting on how new higher education policies – oriented toward
modernization and triggering influx of money for social sciences – in
Gaullist France had shaped the research agenda of the LAS, Loyer touches on
several state-sponsored projects in the 1960s and 1970s joined by members of the
Laboratory. One example is the interdisciplinary, collective and multiyear study
on Plozévet, a French village in Brittany, where the LAS researchers conducted
anthropology of the contemporary rural communities. Loyer points out that
Lévi-Strauss was not personally too keen on such research (mostly for
methodological reasons), nonetheless he grasped these fieldwork missions as
strategically important means of bringing in funds, creating new posts as well as
gaining recognition for the consolidating discipline. See: Loyer 2018, 380–383. Moreover,
cognizant of the perks of the status of laboratory chair (which entitled the
holder to greater office space), Lévi-Strauss had the faculty assembly vote to grant
them such a status, although at that time only 14 out of 52 chairs in the Collége had
a laboratory (see: Loyer 2018, 391). He was
skilled in garnering attention, using the experience gained in the US and contacts
with the charities like Rockefeller or Ford Foundation and the Wenner-Gren
Foundation.He might have learnt this from Roman Jakobson, a friend and
mentor during his American years, who was also knowledgeable when it comes to
obtaining funds and promoting his research to collaborators in the US, especially
when structuralism went hand in hand with and flourished because of cybernetics.
More on this topic – see: Geoghegan 2011.
Loyer describes the LAS not as a theoretical engine room
of structuralism, but rather a place where scholars would
receive resources they needed to pursue their work – inter alia, the HRAF files. The Files act here as both sources (they were advertised as a
collection of primary source materials) and – from an infrastructural perspective
– resources, understood as a reserve on which one can draw
when necessary – Christine L. Borgman suggests these terms tend to be
conflated, but in this case both seem applicable, underlining different aspects of
the HRAF . For instance, Philippe
Descola (later the director of the LAS) remembers that as a young researcher not yet
fully engaged in the Laboratory, he benefitted from it, occasionally making
photocopies (however trivial and mundane this privilege might seem for us today) .
In light of the above brief reconstruction of the Lévi-Straussian knack for academic
entrepreneurship, we could say that the infrastructural
disposition, advised by Lisa Parks, foregrounding questions of resources
and distribution, is actually something that characterizes Lévi-Strauss. Apart from
his great intellectual renown, he epitomizes the canny organizer and facilitator.
To use a notion proposed by Antonijević, Dormans and Wyatt in their study on
collaboration in virtual knowledge (2013),
looking after coworkers, space, resources and budget allocations could be seen as
expressions of care work – a sort of immaterial, affective labor in
academia. Many of this informal aspects of being caring as well as careful tend to remain invisible in research
outputs, difficult to discern against a backdrop of administrative documents and
traditional academic genres. In posthumous overviews and summaries of the scientific
legacy one is more likely to find a list of an academic’s achievements, projects,
awards and publications than an appreciation like this one stating that Lévi-Strauss was to devote a significant part of his life to
channeling young (and not so young) energies and to organizing collective
work.
However, a discussion of care work in the LAS is not to depict it as an idealized,
team-spirited site of academic work; free of conflicts and forming the proclaimed
direct democracy (while Lévi-Strauss explicitly spoke of this prevailing
modus operandi, supposedly down to and including the cleaning
woman, his biographer suggests it was rather an
enlightened monarchy.As Antonijević, Dormans and Wyatt note,
one should not overlook various instances of academic carelessness (mistreating
colleagues, data, texts and sources) .
Along with the memoirs of former members of the LAS (later Lévi-Strauss’s
successors in the role of director) such as Descola and Nathan Wachtel, who recall
a friendly, hardly doctrinaire atmosphere and a collective spirit , one should also consider any signs of
friction or even animosity (not to be found in the occasional official
publications of the Laboratory) – e.g. Lévi-Strauss mentioned the split with
Robert Jaulin who had left the LAS as a result of personal differences (we quickly separated because we were incompatible) and he commented on disputes related
to the events of May 1968, speaking of the LAS’ feminist-oriented researchers who
got stirred up and were asked to leave the
laboratory. Nor should it be suggested that
Lévi-Strauss was a lone hero (to echo Sontag’s essay title) – in fact, a great
deal of care work in the LAS must have been done cooperatively, engaging other
academics and staff. This also involved taking care of the HRAF – someone had to
unpack, arrange, catalog and maintain the files pouring into the LAS’ library in
order to make them available. Throughout the years there have been several people
managing the library (Marion Abélès, among others) and additional specialists in
charge of the HRAF (Nicole Belmont, Tina Jolas, Roberto Miguelez, Solange Pinton – to
name just a few)
Being used to doing administrative work alongside his scientific activities,
Lévi-Strauss stated that directing the laboratory was a
load he carried most willingly, though not
without some secretarial help.He could have not disposed of this
secretarial help after he had retired as the LAS’ director – his
secretarial work was taken care of by Eva Kempinski, who – as stated by Strauss
and Eribon in the Prologue to the interview – in addition to
typing the manuscript, did so much to organize a transcription laden with
additions, deletions, and corrections. Also, he relied heavily on the
LAS’ assistant director and his long-time closest collaborator, Isac Chiva. In a
private letter to Chiva dated back to 1976, he admitted: I have
not said that the laboratory helped me directly in my own work, but that I could
never have managed to do it if you had not so greatly relieved me of the task of
managing that institution, repeating this praise much later (in 2003) in
another letter: For I would never have embarked on the adventure
of the laboratory if I had not known that you were ready to come along with
me (cited in: Loyer 2018,
387-388). What might be true of any academic center, the LAS could not have
flourished if it had not been for a significant load of immaterial work performed by
its permanent, apprentice and visiting researchers, by technicians, journal editors,
research coordinators, archivists, librarians, and the secretarial personnel. Strauss
could have been a central figure crucial for functioning of the lab (often attributed
to him as his laboratory), but he also thrived on the endeavors undertaken by
others. Even if, as his biographer points out, Lévi-Strauss never stopped working on
his own, nourishing his soloist nature and spending half a day in the
Laboratory and the rest in his office, it could be claimed that the LAS, the plan for
which Lévi-Strauss had had in his mind for a long time,As we read in Loyer’s
biography, an initial (but already fully-fledged) idea of the Laboratoire
d’anthropologie sociale was born in 1949, when Lévi-Strauss first applied (with no
success, though) to the Collége de France. According to Loyer, he had known that
the Collége was a golden prison and its professors
had no research teams and doctoral students to supervise. That is why he wanted to
create a research center connected to his chair and a journal of international
reach (L’Homme, managed by Jean Pouillon, his close
collaborator and a key figure in the LAS). The research
center and journal were the long arms of the new position, writes Loyer
. constituted for him a vital
knowledge environment, additionally luring many academics from around the world.
Background of the HRAF
Let us now turn again to the Human Relations Area Files in order to investigate the
conceptual and practical baggage that the HRAF might have carried along – its
theoretical and methodological pedigree, inherent assumptions, and any links –
institutional or personal – clinging to this instrument.
The
Files are in a way a co-authored publication – a
product of the teamwork of the HRAF analystsThe people behind the HRAF
production did not form a unified group. It is worth mentioning Lemov’s account of
this process: They hired two strata of data processors
- a team of graduate students and their wives to go through texts and mark the
targeted information and an auxiliary team of typists and office workers to do
the clerical work of typing and filing. Cf. Jones (2018) pointing out the gendered and hierarchical data processing at the
Busa’s lab. and the authors of the ethnographic texts. It is not only the
research team associated with Yale who were behind their production and distribution,
but also a consortium officially founded in 1949 that initially involved other US
universities: Harvard and the Universities of Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and
Washington.
Tracing the history of HRAF, the anthropologist George Peter Murdock emerges as the
driving force behind the whole enterprise. As Rebecca Lemov has noted in her book
World as Laboratory(2006), Murdock was a Yale professor famous for his
encyclopedic knowledge. In 1928, he started constructing a bibliography on the
subject of various cultures around the world. After several years working alone, his
project transformed into the collective endeavor that became the Cross-Cultural Survey. From 1935, Murdock’s team operated under the aegis
of the Yale Institute of Human Relations, which saw it as suitable for their
experimental and comparative social science research. It is particularly notable —
and has already been discussed at length (see: Price
2012, 2016) — that the Files experienced their most intensive period of development during the
Second World War. It was then that the project acquired the financial support of the
military and US intelligence. It was a valuable operational instrument during the War
and also later in Cold War imperialist policy, offering a rich source of systematic
data that could easily be misused as intelligence information. Lévi-Strauss was
almost certainly aware (at least to some extent) of the rather inglorious backstage
of the HRAF development. He noted in interviews that it was created on behalf of the United States government.
According to the handbook
Nature and Use of the HRAF
Files, the files were initially intended as a tool for testing
hypotheses (constructed on the basis of causal relations between variables) and hence
would lead to the generation of a valid theory in the social and
behavioral sciences. Exemplary questions posed by cross-cultural
researchers could be: Is there an association between most important subsistence
activity and level of political complexity? or Why do some societies
practice matrilocal residence and others patrilocal residence?. Lagacé claims a certain a-theoretical
nature of this apparatus, stating that the Filesconstitute an organized collection of data, and they should be
used to retrieve data, not theory.
Looking for theoretical underpinnings of the HRAF, Rebecca Lemov inquired into
Murdock’s education and any intellectual influences he might have been affected by –
rejected by Franz Boas, he did his Ph.D. at Yale, studying under A. G. Keller in the
tradition of W. G. Sumner (both associated with the evolutionism to which Boas was
rather hostile). However, Lemov concludes that the files were
now neither Kellerian nor Boasian, but, increasingly, Murdockian. This, on the one hand, could mean that he
started to realize his own vision of anthropology as a part of the empirical
behavioral sciences and connect the
Files with a
discourse of laboratory trials, calling the HRAF a sort of
social science laboratory. On the other hand, he tended to present the
HRAF as a merely auxiliary tool, reducing the time and effort needed to complete
research by taking out the leg work, all the routine unproductive labor and freeing the
researcher’s creativity .
The HRAF-ers were well aware of the critical responses to that idea – Ford noted that
it was seen as unnecessary pampering of scholars by, for instance, Alfred
Kroeber . This could seem not only needless, but,
more importantly, undesirable for epistemic reasons. In their review of the HRAF,
Clarke and Henige discuss reducing the chores like bibliographical survey and
translation of sources: we can ask, if only rhetorically here,
whether the serious scholar should allow him or herself this particular luxury.
That is, both the HRAF and electronic databases may well take too many decisions
(as well as some work) away from the individual scholar, and it is indeed
debatable whether this is, on balance, desirable.
The Files and the LAS: refitting
In this section I examine on what levels the
Files were
compatible with the LAS’s research and what was its connection to Lévi-Strauss’s
work. Did the HRAF afford structuralist studies? How was it put to use in Paris?
Bruno Latour offered a fairly radical take on it, stating that Lévi-Strauss’s theories of savages are an artifact of card indexing at the
Collége de France. Putting aside Latour’s rhetorical emphasis, is
the connection indeed so undeniable?
Like Murdock and his team at Yale, Lévi-Strauss appreciated the speed with which
information could be searched for in the HRAF catalog. Based on his own empirical
testing, i.e. using his own experience, Murdock claimed that using the files meant a
text could be written in a little more than 24 hours rather than the 24 days that a
standard search through a library would entail . Perhaps this is what Margaret Mead also had in mind when she criticized the Human
Relations Area Files for being instant anthropology, like
instant coffee.Mead’s opinion was cited by Isac Chiva in his text
Une communauté de solitaires: le Laboratoire
d’anthropologie sociale, but with no direct source attribution. It was
both the unusual speed and reliance on second-hand, republished sources (which the
HRAF-ers called simply data, as though it were stripped of context) that is
targeted here. There is no hiding the fact that using the HRAF might provoke
associations with an already at that time outdated armchair anthropology.
Interestingly, a tool which was said to elevate a regular library to the next level
in terms of its scope and ease could have interested Lévi-Strauss, who described
himself as a library man, not necessarily too keen on prolonged fieldwork
(see: Lévi-Strauss and Eribon 1991,
44).
The
Files, conceived as a kind of laboratory by Murdock
and called the laboratory without walls by librarians, as Clarke and Henige
acknowledge , embodied a narrative and aura of
experimentation, tailored for the needs of the Laboratory of Social Anthropology.
After all, the laboratory label was chosen by the LAS founder on purpose, and he was
aware of the obvious connotations it carried.Given Lévi-Strauss’ scientistic
ambitions, one could argue that it is possible to consider LAS an imitation of a
scientific laboratory and not a fully-fledged human sciences (let alone
humanities) institution. Of course, any clear-cut answers would depend
both on the definition of the humanities applied and the academic tradition
(which, for example, deploy different names, such as the human sciences and
humanities) used to contextualize the argument. If we consider that the
LAS is an example of the scientification of the humanities, we should be
cognizant of the conditions of this process which may be not be symmetrical to
what is happening in today’s scholarship. On the contemporary
scientification of the humanities in relation to the laboratory see:
. His views on the relations between the
natural, social and human sciences and the position of the latter are in fact quite
compelling and by all means would deserve a more detailed investigation. Risking an
oversimplification, one could say that Lévi-Strauss’s mindset was close to a nuanced
form of scientism. While speaking about choosing a name for his center, he resorts to
etymology, as if he tried to revisit the history of the lab as a strictly science
domain, as well as nodding to the hard sciences, which he understands as
more advanced: Some people
were surprised that the term laboratory could be applied to a
center for the human sciences. In adopting it, however, we did not follow a
fashion nor were misled by appearances. According to the etymology, a
laboratory is first of all a place where one works. And it suffices to enter
ours to see that the methods of ethnological research today adopt a style that
brings them closer to those of more advanced sectors. (cited in: Belmont 2008, 62) Elsewhere, he
said: We consider ourselves, rather, as artisans, laboriously
bending over phenomena which are too small to excite human passions, but whose
value comes from the fact they can, when grasped at this level, become the object
of a rigorous knowledge (cited in: Pace
1983, 5).
It is interesting to look into this metaphorical language of the lab (microscopes and
lab benches that researchers bend over are only hinted at in the scene imagined in
the latter quote) that Strauss drew on, constructing a conceptual image of his
center.It is not only language making up a picturesque image of the lab.
This metaphor could also materialize in a physical form – consider Lévi-Strauss’s
awe and fascination with a former geology lab, in which buildings he installed the
LAS (Place Marcelin-Berthelot). He marveled at its mahogany cabinets storing
mineral collections, elegant, sturdy furniture and aura of the mid-nineteenth
century laboratory. He said affectionately: Nowhere else, I
thought, would I rather spend my days than in these spacious, silent, and
secret rooms. I would argue that we could think of
these spaces as epistemic surroundings, which Mario Wimmer describes
as places where one could think with what is at hand and these spatial
arrangements shape the very process of thinking. He writes on the material
concepts and is interested in how they contribute to knowing on a more
unconscious level: My basic assumption is that this surplus
of meaning is an effect of both the excess of the materiality of language, as
well as the experience that emerges in the process of research but which cannot
be translated into scholarly discourse and thus enters, in its
symbolic-material form, the epistemic surroundings where it acquires a latent
existence. Was the laboratory a material concept in
Lévi-Strauss’ thinking? Besides, the LAS – the first social science lab in
the Collége – was not an only initiative so denominated. There was also the
Laboratory of Graphics at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (founded
by Jacques Bertin, who created diagrams for
The Raw and the
Cooked).As for the laboratorial Zeitgeist and the origins of the
idea for the LAS, it is rather unclear whether Lévi-Strauss’s lab was inspired by
the American cybernetics centers like MIT’s CENIS and Research Laboratory of
Electronics which Strauss was familiar with and even engaged in some cooperation.
As documented in his letters to Jakobson, in the early 1950s Lévi-Strauss sought
funding in the US to open in France a center for structuralist analysis
undergirded by cybernetics. As discussed by Geoghegan and Loyer, it is not
probable that the LAS was a direct realization of these plans.
Like a telescope or microscope, the HRAF perfectly fit Lévi-Strauss’s famous formula
of conducting anthropology from afar. According to Lévi-Strauss, the anthropologist is the astronomer of the social sciences: his
task is to discover a meaning for configurations which, owing to their size and
remoteness, are very different from those within the observer’s immediate
purview. Indeed, locating hundreds of files on a
single table or a collection of two million pages on the subject of three hundred
cultures from around the world in metal drawers in one room offered a perfect example
of zooming out in producing knowledge.
Melvin Ember, who served as the HRAF president in 1987, promoted the
Files by quoting a passage on laboratorial anthropology
treating societies as ready-made experiments. The author of these words was
none other than Claude Lévi-Strauss . In a text presenting
the LAS, Lévi-Strauss used exactly the same terminology as the creators of HRAF:
variables, positive and negative correlations, and the verification of hypotheses
. However, elsewhere he mostly referred
to it as an enormous documentary tool or a bibliographical treasure and he stressed: the card index to the Files, which some
people have unwisely denigrated, is above all a library. This actually proves that Lévi-Strauss
treated this tool in a fairly traditional way.
What puzzles me is the fact that despite all the praise, Lévi-Strauss hardly spoke of
the
Files as useful in his writing. Even while
describing his work on the well-documented and abundant volumes of Mythologies, when he had to comb through all relevant
ethnographic literature to distill myths, he never made use of the HRAF collection
explicit.Jason Pribilsky interpreted a famous cartoon by Maurice Henry
depicting the great French intellectuals – Foucault, Derrida, Barthes and
Lévi-Strauss, with his nose in papers – asking a question (of a rather rhetorical
nature) if Strauss was actually lost in the pages of Human
Relations Area Files. My tentative answer to such a question
would be that he probably wasn’t or at least he would not have seen it as reading
the HRAF, but instead the ethnographic reports deposited there. It is
possible, of course, that he had used it like a standard library and decided to cite
only primary sources he retrieved, without acknowledging the tool itself (which seems
also to be the case in the usage of today’s online repositories).
Was HRAF widely used in the Parisian Laboratory? I was not able to determine it, but,
according to Lévi-Strauss himself, some key figures like Raymond Aron, Gabriel Le
Bras, Jacques Lacan and Pierre Bourdieu expressed interest in it (cited in: Loyer 2018, 385). Also, Simone de Beauvoir was
said to consult the HRAF (see: Salerno 2004,
137). Regarding collaboration fostered by the HRAF, it appears that sharing
infrastructure did not necessarily lead to working together.The ideas of
sharing and collaboration are entwined in the definitions of infrastructure
promoted by e-Science programs (and imported to the humanities as well) – see:
Anderson and Blanke 2012,
153. The collection was rather used individually by scholars.
Referring to an already mentioned account of the spatial constraints imposed on the
LAS’s members by the growing HRAF, we can observe that expansion of the
Files led to shrinkage of office space and eventually
resulted in adding partition walls, especially under the Mansard
roof, to create individual cubicles. The sheer size of the HRAF was perhaps
more likely to affect work habits and forms of sociality in the Laboratory
(solidifying a perceived need for a solo studio, or a cubicle) rather than transform
modes of doing research. Regarding affordances of the Files coming from their content and organization, they could have lent
themselves to analyses undertaken by the LAS’s researchers. Lévi-Strauss talks about
collaborating with his colleagues (Lucien Sebag and Jean-Claude Gardin) on the
mythology of Pueblos – preparing an inventory, laying a myth on
the table and analyzing it together – maybe the Files could have been used for such purposes.But such collaboration
did not result in co-authored publications. Speaking of collective work,
Lévi-Strauss pointed to his seminar: our weekly seminar can
become the meeting place for a team whose members, already united by other
ties, can thus keep each other informed of their individual work. It goes
without saying that this collaboration supposes a certain unity of views,
without, however, excluding a doctrinal independence. The unity results from
the fact that whether to get inspiration or to combat them, the participants
readily take as terms of reference the ideas that we, ourselves, continue to
develop in both our lectures at the Collège and the discussions - often very
lively - which occupy the last part of each seminar.
Moreover, being a database-like tool, consisting of chunks of ethnographic texts as
discrete units mapping different cultures and enabling manipulation and
reconfiguration by the scholar, the HRAF could afford and at the same time epitomize
structuralist activity defined by Roland Barthes as
the fabrication of the world, which involves two typical operations: dissection and articulation. Barthes explains: Structural man takes the real, decomposes it, then recomposes it; this appears to
be little enough (which makes some say that the structuralist enterprise is
meaningless,uninteresting,useless, etc.). Interestingly, the very accusations were also
made with regard to the
Files (reportedly, Margaret Mead
spoke of their artlessness – see Tobin 1990, 477).
It should be noted here that the critique of the Human Relations Area Files – not
uncommon thenActually, reconstructing the critical arguments against the Files and analyzing how they changed throughout the years
would be of value. I would just like to point to Joseph Tobin’s interesting piece
The HRAF as Radical Text? (1990), which is a truly
tongue-in-cheek interpretation of the Files as
reactionary in a political and also epistemological sense, but stylistically
radical. Tobin shows that in the course of the interpretive turn in anthropology
(after Writing Culture), HRAF was dismissed as
uncool, dull and falsely scientific. But even before there were considerable
objections to it voiced by British anthropologists. Tobin argues it shows a
transatlantic rift between visions of how anthropological theory should be built.
What was artless tabulated nonsense for Edmund Leach
(Cambridge), remains a valid behavioral sciences theory created by analyzing
causal relationships between variables for his American colleagues using
Cross-Cultural Survey and disapproving British anthropology for being overwhelmingly humanistic, descriptive and intuitive
(cited in: Tobin 1990, 478). – was
expressed inside the LAS, too. Furthermore, it came from the chief expert on
informatization, appreciated by Lévi-Strauss, Jean-Claude Gardin (who ran
Section d’Automatique documentaire in CNRS). Gardin is
recognized as a pioneer of archaeological computing. As early as in 1960 he published
an article reviewing the HRAF in which he points out two main problems of this tool –
on a practical level it is too expensive and cumbersome and on a theoretical level it
imposes a rigid classification scheme and its categories are too broad to
operationalize and lack cross-referencing (see: Gardin
1960). He also suggests that the HRAF could be opposed because of its
aspirations to universality, or the totalitarianism of a general system. After
a few critical remarks on the HRAF, Gardin elaborates on a different project in the
making, undertaken in order to search through vast ethnographic literature by
employing mechanical methods. The ethnographer in charge of this task had been
Françoise Izard (later known as Héritier), who became Lévi-Strauss’s successor.
Yet another interesting critique that should be addressed here pertains to Murdock
and his methods and dates back to 1952. The critic is Lévi-Strauss himself. While
acknowledging Murdock’s contribution to the study of social structure by
rejuvenating statistical methods and painstaking effort in creating
Cross-Cultural Survey (a.k.a. HRAF), he points out that the number of 250 cultures
selected by Murdock as a sample for cross-cultural analyses is an overindulgent
estimate, data is abstracted and the categories used in the scheme mirrored
the traditional evolutionary anthropological theory rather than do justice to terms
derived from the source material. It is also to be noted – Lévi-Strauss continues –
that the method proves efficient mostly in a negative way (when used to scrutinize
whether any alleged correlations are plausible). Finally, he states: the reader here may easily verify that I take the greatest care to
dissociate my conceptions from those of Radcliffe-Brown and Murdock,
adding that he never used statistical methods . This is all rather serious methodological and theoretical
critique, suggesting unambiguously that Lévi-Strauss was not willing to use the HRAF
in the ways intended by Murdock. Perhaps that is why he reduced it to a rich
bibliographical treasury, intending to repurpose it for his newly opened center as a
well-equipped library of literature (in English, so probably less widely available in
France). After all, having conducted research in the New York Public Library, he knew
how useful it was since he touted this place as the bedrock of his expanded
anthropological erudition.
It would be interesting to examine what has become these days of the paper HRAF in
the LAS. The paper version of HRAF today serves as something of a curiosity. It takes
up a lot of space, although nobody uses it for research purposes, but a lot of people
do like to take photos in front of it. It is reminiscent of the categories coined by
Anke te Heesen writing about a type of furniture – the cabinet or cupboard – and its
role in making academic knowledge. The author distinguished several subcategories,
one of them being Ordungsmöbel, enabling storing and sorting and the
other one Representationmöbel, which is for example a decorative old
cabinet, usually emptied and put in the rector’s office as a nostalgic representative
of the great many years of tradition . Although HRAF
drawers are not empty and materials still can be consulted (by appointment), the
paper files do not really serve as a go-to library resource, but rather an index of
the fascinating origins and adventures of the Laboratory. It is worth asking whether
structural anthropology might have shared the fate of the HRAF: has it become to some
degree a museum piece?
Traversing through the reception of structuralism and the legacy of the Laboratory in
today’s anthropology is beyond the scope of this paper. Notwithstanding, I would like
to mention Paul Rabinow’s critique of the LAS. As he has noted, despite its
significant achievements in fostering a collective mode of research, LAS has not
stood the test of time, failing to adapt its methods to changing realities and
solidifying a hierarchical structure perpetuated by Lévi-Strauss’ personal charisma
. Rabinow, Collier and Lakoff are also critical of the
Files and their claims to universality . What is worth noting, though, is that Rabinow and his
colleagues have advocated for anthropological laboratories and have founded one
themselves. In their blueprint for the lab, infrastructure is recognized as
meaningful, no mimicry of the natural science is intended and the most important role
is occupied by rigorous concept work (based on collective
agreement).Rabinow et al. founded the Laboratory for the Anthropology of the
Contemporary (LAC). A striking resemblance to the LAS is most certainly
unintentional here, but the idea provokes us to think of the similarities and
dissimilarities between the two endeavors. What is worth mentioning, Rabinow’s
drive to the laboratory of the interpretive human sciences comes from
dissatisfaction with the individual project as the dominant mode of knowledge
production.
Conclusions
This study is a contribution to the archaeology of the humanities laboratory
approached from an infrastructure and media angle. My goal was to shed more light on
the significance of infrastructure in the analog humanities’ lab by focusing on the
case of the
Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale founded
in 1960 and directed (till 1982) by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Drawing on the literature
from the field of humanities infrastructure and research infrastructure as well as
other seminal works in critical infrastructure studies, I have shown how the
Laboratory was organized around the Human Relations Area Files. They played an
important role in seeking funds and space and – considered as valuable and rare
resources – were used to gain infrastructural advantage (based on their paper-ness)
and helped to position the LAS as richly endowed. I suggest that it may be
partly due to these pragmatic reasons – recognized as not epistemically related or
valid – that the Laboratory has not had any important place in the readings of
Lévi-Strauss’s work.
Moreover, the LAS has not been (yet) rediscovered by the movement towards the
humanities labs which we are observing in the present day. We could be tempted to see
Lévi-Strauss as a proto-digital humanist (or the humanities’ computing fellow), given
his interest in applying computers and new means of documentation to anthropological
research. In fact, he rather adhered to more old-fashioned, makeshift methods
(as admitted in: Lévi-Strauss and Eribon
1991, 138). Meanwhile, he observed – not without great interest – how others
in his Laboratory were figuring out how to benefit from computing in the anthropology
of kinship.More on these early attempts at computerizing anthropology in the
LAS can be found in: Zonabend et al. 2010,
36-37 and Lévi-Strauss 1965b. Also,
Loyer writes that since 1967 the LAS could share an SDS 9300 computer with a
nuclear physics laboratory at the Collége (she also claims that the LAS was marked
by a rather naïve enthusiasm for computers) .
This allows us to say that the computer in Lévi-Straussian thinking was not just
imagined, as Seaver claims , but actually quite
real.
What this paper also highlights, is a significant load of immaterial academic care
work, which means here taking care of (re)sources and (re)locations.
Lévi-Strauss appears to be a skillful administrator, fundraiser, facilitator of
teaching and publishing platforms and a vocal advocate for the human sciences
(despite the scientism he may have subscribed to). He was able to coordinate the
LAS’s activities with French state-driven research programs, taking advantage of new
higher education policies in the 1960s and 1970s. Caring for the LAS’ material
conditions (i. e., maintaining its costly and burdensome HRAF collection) was,
though, a team effort. Refocusing my history of this lab on the hidden figures
(who contributed greatly to the actual quotidian work of the research institution,
failing to be fully acknowledged) seems worthy of exploration and would entail
seeking additional source materials.
Lastly, I also examined the place of the
Files in the
Laboratory of Social Anthropology in terms of their mutual or contradictory research
goals and methods and theoretical underpinnings. Considering how the HRAF contributed
to the situatedness of the lab, I elucidated its imported character and
possible implications thereof. I argued that although maintaining this enormous
collection influenced the organization of the physical premises of the LAS, it
apparently did not alter in a significant way the modes of study (neither did it
start intensive research collaborations within the lab, which is sometimes believed
to result from sharing infrastructure). It could be said that the HRAF used by
Strauss and his Laboratory took on various functions, ranging from boosting the sense
of excellence and exclusivity, through being a rhetorical tool in discourse on
modernization of the human sciences and experimental anthropology, to even being a
bargaining chip in negotiation for a bigger locale. In several respects the Files were compatible with research agenda in the Laboratory
of Social Anthropology and with its founder’s own proclivities, constituting a
repository of ready-made experiments and lending
themselves to structuralist dissection and articulation. However, it is more
likely that Files in the LAS were actually tailored for
its specific (infrastructural) needs and used more traditionally than was intended by
their creators – not as a machine for drawing statistical correlations, but rather an
efficient library catalog. Through the infrastructural inversion it all comes
into focus, proving how seemingly prosaic arrangements tend to be epistemically
laden.
Continuing this study will need to pick up some loose threads and engage with the
materiality of knowledge production in the LAS. Further research could usefully
explore topics such as Lévi-Strauss’s strong inclination to experiments performed
with the help of models and mobiles (made from paper and wires and hanging from the
ceiling in the Laboratory) and all the handiwork invested in modelling, which
he conceived – contrary to common belief – as the work of an engineer rather than
a bricoleur.
Acknowledgements
This research is a part of the collaborative grant Laboratorium
humanistyczne jako modus poznania. Od archeologii do projektu [The humanities
laboratory as a mode of knowing. From archaeology to a project], NCN OPUS 13,
no. UMO-2017/25/B/HS2/00593, 2018-2021, based at the Department of Cultural Studies,
University of Wrocław, and funded by the National Science Centre in Poland.
I wish to specially thank Dorota Wolska and Jacek Małczyński, with whom I have been
working closely on this project, for their invaluable advice, patience and support. I
would also like to acknowledge other members of the project team for providing
feedback on my study and willingness to discuss their own work on the humanities
laboratory (in alphabetical order): Maciej Bączyk, Joanna Bednarek, Karolina
Charewicz-Jakubowska, Mirosław Kocur, Krzysztof Łukasiewicz, Rafał Nahirny, Adam
Pisarek, Joanna Sieracka.
I benefitted greatly from the thoughtful and inspiring comments by the DHQ special
issue editors and two anonymous reviewers.
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