Paper Short Abstract:

This paper aims to present and analyze Dina Dreyfus Lévi-Strauss's ethnographic and literary writings from her initial field research in southeast Brazil (1935). It seeks to illuminate and reflect on the gender dynamics behind its silent appropriation in one of anthropology's most canonical works.

Paper Abstract:

Dina Dreyfus Lévi-Strauss is one of the few female anthropologists to have conducted field research in the Americas before World War Two. Born to a French Jewish father and a Catholic Italian mother, Dina studied with Paul Rivet and Marcel Mauss in Paris before going to Brazil in 1935. Once there, she conducted extensive investigations in physical and cultural anthropology among both urban and native populations. As a result of this work, she published a textbook on the subject in 1936. Despite her significant contributions to the foundation of ethnographic studies in Brazil, her work remains largely unknown. Most of her ethnographic and personal writings from this period were never published. However, as my doctoral research has shown, some of these papers were in fact preserved and used by her first husband, Claude Lévi-Strauss, in his work. This paper seeks to present and analyze some of this documentation in order to shed light on the ethnographic and literary work accomplished by Dina Dreyfus Lévi-Strauss—a work that was incorporated without recognition in one of anthropology’s most canonical works. Apart from its significance for the history of anthropology itself, her writings also offer us a glimpse of another Brazil, a country that she sees as a “photo negative” in terms of the colors of its landscape and people. Finally, her embodied position, expressed in her writings, indicates a more reflexive ethnographic perspective, differently shaped by the racial and late colonial context of the 1930’s Atlantic world.