Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Population Figures

Abstract

This article examines anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s writings on the Indian subcontinent’s emergence and demographic configuration as a region in the 1950s. It traces how changes in perception engendered by air and train travel attuned Lévi-Strauss to the vectors of dispossession and displacement revealed in the post-Partition landscape as a profound rupture in the relation between figure and ground. Placing his febrile descriptions of the Mughal architecture and destitute, laboring bodies that he saw in India and Pakistan in relation to Partition-era photographs of similar subject matter, this article substantiates Lévi-Strauss’s astute, however fleeting, formalist discernment of how the forces of globalization unmoored human beings from the bonds of community and transformed them into undesirable population figures. In so doing, it demonstrates the urgency for an art historical attention to form to challenge the hegemonic, quantitative discourse on overpopulation.