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.^[8]

India’s great failure can teach us a lesson. When a community becomes too numerous, however great the genius of its thinkers, it can only endure by secreting enslavement. Once men begin to feel cramped in their geographical, social and mental habitat, they are in danger of being tempted by the simple solution of denying one section of the species the right to be considered as human. This allows the rest a little elbow-room for a few more decades. Then it becomes necessary to extend the process of expulsion. When looked at in this light, at the culmination of a century during which the population figures have doubled, […] can no longer appear as being simply the result of aberration on the part of one nation, one doctrine, or one group of men. I see them rather as a premonitory sign of our moving into a finite world such as southern Asia had to face a thousand or two thousand years ahead of us, and I cannot see us avoiding the experience unless some major decisions are taken. The systematic devaluation of man by man is gaining ground, and we would be guilty of hypocrisy and blindness if we dismissed the problem by arguing that recent events represented only a temporary contamination.

What frightens me in Asia is the vision of our own future which it is already experiencing. In the America of the Indians, I cherish the reflection, however fleeting it may have now become, of an era when the human species was in proportion to the world it occupied, and when there was still a valid relationship between the enjoyment of freedom and the symbols denoting it.^[10]