Claude Levi-Strauss's fascination with Northwest Coast Indian art
dates back to the late 1930s. "Sometime before the outbreak of the
Second World War," he writes, "I had already bought in Paris a
Haida slate panel pipe." In New York in the early forties, he
shared his enthusiasm with a group of Surrealist refugee artists
with whom he was associated. "Surely it will not be long," he wrote
in an article published in 1943, "before we see the collections
from this part of the world moved from ethnographic to fine arts
museums to take their just place amidst the antiquities of Egypt of
Persia and the works of medieval Europe. For this art is not
unequal to the greatest, and, in the course of the century and a
half of its history that is known to us, it has shown evidence of a
superior diversity and has demonstrated apparently inexhaustible
talents for renewal." In The Way of the Masks, first published more
than thirty years later, he returned to this material, seeking to
unravel a persistent problem that he associated with a particular
mask, the Swaihwe, which is found among certain tribes of coastal
British Columbia. This book, now available for the first time in an
English translation, is a vivid, audacious illustration of
Levi-Strauss's provocative structural approach to tribal art and
culture. Bringing to bear on the Swaihwe masks his theory that
mythical representations cannot be understood as isolated objects,
Levi-Strausss began to look for links among them, as well as
relationships between these and other types of masks and myths,
treating them all as parts of a dialogue that has been going on for
generations among neighboring tribes. The wider system that emerges
form his investigation uncovers the association of the masks with
Northwest coppers and with hereditary status and wealth, and takes
the reader as far north as the Dene of Alaska, as far south as the
Yurok of northern California, and as far away in time and space as
medieval Europe. As one reader said of this book, "It will be
controversial, as his work always is, and it will stimulate more
scholarship on the Northwest Coast than any other single book that
I can think of."
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