© Claude Lévi-Strauss
Lévi-Strauss in the United States. Between 1940 and 1944, he is one of the founders of the "École libre des hautes études de New York".

One of the architects of the first UNESCO declaration on race (1950), author of Race and History (1952) and Race and Culture(1971), written at the request of UNESCO, Claude Lévi-Strauss recently participated in the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Organization (2005). Half a century of history.

The first contribution of Claude Lévi-Strauss to the deliberations of UNESCO goes back to 1949: he participated then in the international commission of scholars entrusted with drafting the first UNESCO declaration on race, published consecutively in 1950. In the same year, he was commissioned by UNESCO to carry out an inquiry into the state of social sciences in Pakistan. In 1951, he sat on the committee of experts convened to set up the International Social Science Council, of which he was the first Secretary-General, from 1952 to 1961. In 1952, on the request of UNESCO, he wrote Race and History, which was to become a classic of antiracist literature. In 1971, invited to inaugurate the International Year for Action to Combat Racism, Lévi-Strauss gave a lecture entitled Race and Culture. This lecture was not in keeping with the doctrine of the Organization, and it undermined the relationship. There has, however, been reconciliation in recent years, as was shown by the attendance of Claude Lévi-Strauss at UNESCO’s sixtieth anniversary celebrations in 2005.

These vicissitudes show the parallel development, over half a century, of the thought of Claude Lévi-Strauss on one hand, and of the doctrine of UNESCO on the other. The main topic with which both dealt was the biological and cultural diversity of mankind.

Agreements…
In his twenties, Claude Lévi-Strauss was a committed political activist belonging to a circle of young socialist intellectuals, who were profoundly affected by the catastrophe of the Great War, which they had not participated in. They were all virulently pacifistic and anti-nationalistic. The revolution to which they aspired would have to be made without violence, by a radical transformation of the moral conscience, which would lay the foundations of a new humanism, necessary to build an egalitarian, fair and peaceful society. They wanted relationships between peoples to be placed under the responsibility of international authorities, which would be able to resolve conflicts between States without recourse to war. These ideas were close to the programme of The International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, which already prefigured the principles of UNESCO’s future doctrine in the 1920s and 1930s. It was therefore natural for Lévi-Strauss to respond favourably in 1949 to the invitation to participate in the activities of the Organization, whose programme embodied his own convictions so well.

Declaration on Race (1950) (Excerpts)

After the disaster caused by Nazism, one of the priorities was to delegitimize the ideology of the inequality of races. UNESCO intended to promote the ideas that had previously been disputed by Nazism: the unity of mankind, the arbitrary nature of racial classifications, the equality of humans, the harmless effects of miscegenation and the instinct of cooperation as an essential property of humans. Such was the main message of the first UNESCO declaration on race (1950).

Following this text, several brochures for the general public were quickly published, conceived by UNESCO’s Division for the Study of Race as an instrument of an “educational offensive”. The contribution of Lévi-Strauss was Race and History. Its interest was to offer an argument that could remedy a major defect of UNESCO’s anti-racist doctrine. What good was it – as Lévi-Strauss said – to establish that no biological data confirmed the idea of the inequality of “races”, if one allowed the belief in inequality in its cultural dimension to endure, by which the conviction that societies are not able to make equivalent contributions to the common heritage of civilization remained intact? The solution proposed by Lévi-Strauss consisted in showing that the ability to make cultural progress was not linked to the superiority of one society compared to others, but rather to the aptitude of everyone to establish mutual exchanges with others. Thus, by making exchanges the fundamental condition for progress, Race and History was in perfect harmony with the ideology of cooperation, whose propagation UNESCO wished to promote.

Nineteen years later, when he was invited to deliver the inaugural lecture of the International Year for Action to Combat Racism, Claude Lévi-Strauss had a much more critical view of UNESCO’s doctrine than in 1952. He confessed that he doubted that “the spread of knowledge and the development of communication among human beings will some day let them live in harmony, accepting and respecting their diversity”. The fight against racism had proved ineffective – he concluded –, because the initial diagnosis, which was at the root of the Organization’s programme, was erroneous right down to its fundamental principles: the racial form taken by intolerance was not a result of false ideas about race; it had a much deeper basis, whose ideas were just an ideological distortion, deployed to conceal the conflict that, according to Lévi-Strauss, resulted from the demographic saturation of our planet. (next)

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Photo 2: © UNESCO
“Race and History” in Japanese.

Photo 3: © UNESCO/Claude Bablin
Claude Lévi-Strauss and René Maheu (UNESCO, 1971).