Academic work is a slow business, academic publishing
was always crushingly slow, and the reception of academic work even
slower. The chronology which follows may give dubious comfort to those who
wonder if there will ever be a day when …
Academic year 1971 – 1972: As a Leverhulme scholar,
I attend lectures by Claude Lévi-Strauss at the Collège de France in Paris. He
takes as his subject for the year the plastic art of the American / Canadian
North West coast Indian tribes. I take notes.
1975: The Geneva publisher Albert Skira publishes an
elegant, heavily illustrated two volume work based on the lectures titled La Voie des Masques
1979: The Paris publisher Plon publishes a cheaper
one volume version which I buy
1982: A Vancouver publisher brings out a translation
by Sylvia Modelski titled The Way of the
Masks
1983: The London publisher Jonathan Cape brings out
Modelski’s translation, and I buy it.
1984: The editor of a student magazine published by the Philosophy Society at the University
of Sussex, where I am teaching, asks me to contribute something and I do a
review/essay based on Modelski’s translation and title it “The Dialogue of Masks”.
The journal is called Aletheia and my
essay appears in issue 4, pages 16 – 22. I argue that in relation to the
standard structuralist formula A:B::C:D (A is to B as C is to D) there is a
missing fourth term in Lévi-Strauss’s analysis. You would be very lucky to find
a copy of this journal!
2003: I add the 1984 article, with a few small
changes, to my academic website www.selectedworks.co.uk
which at the time was unusual in allowing free download access to unabridged
work
2009: In a Serbian journal published in French, Problèmes d’ethnologie et d’anthropologie,
nouvelle série, vol. 4, nr. 2, pp 121 -134, Senka Kovač publishes an article “Claude Lévi-Strauss: le
masque et le mythe” which includes an extensive summary of my essay: for
example, seven paragraphs begin with the
word “Pateman”. I come across this article in 2017
2012: In a French journal Gradhiva, published by the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, Baptiste
Gille publishes a long essay (pages 216 – 39) “Le visage des Bébés des eaux et
des Gens du ciel. Nouvelles perspectives sur les masques swaihwé”.This also makes some use of my 1984 essay. I come across
this article in 2017
But for the Internet, this little piece of work - just a few pages - would
never have lived: the student journal publication could be reckoned as a bit like auto-destructive art. Since website publication in 2003, it has been discussed twice, but the first time in 2009 was twenty five years after the original 1984 publication.
I'm still hoping that one day the hours sweated on "Liberty, Authority and the Negative Dialectics of John Stuart Mill" will be rewarded by a reader :)
