Claude Lévi-Strauss ( ; ; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009)
was a Belgian-born French
anthropologist
An anthropologist is a scientist engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropologists study aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms, values ...
and
ethnologist
Ethnology (from the , meaning 'nation') is an academic field and discipline that compares and analyzes the characteristics of different peoples and the relationships between them (compare cultural, social, or sociocultural anthropology).
Scien ...
whose work was key in the development of the theories of
structuralism
Structuralism is an intellectual current and methodological approach, primarily in the social sciences, that interprets elements of human culture by way of their relationship to a broader system. It works to uncover the structural patterns t ...
and
structural anthropology
Structural anthropology is a school of sociocultural anthropology based on Claude Lévi-Strauss' 1949 idea that immutable deep structures exist in all cultures, and consequently, that all cultural practices have homologous counterparts in other ...
. He held the chair of Social Anthropology at the
Collège de France
The (), formerly known as the or as the ''Collège impérial'' founded in 1530 by François I, is a higher education and research establishment () in France. It is located in Paris near La Sorbonne. The has been considered to be France's most ...
between 1959 and 1982, was elected a member of the
Académie française
An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of tertiary education. The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy, founded approximately 386 BC at Akademia, a sanctuary of Athena, the go ...
in 1973 and was a member of the
School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences
The School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (, EHESS) is a graduate ''grande école'' and '' grand établissement'' in Paris focused on academic research in the social sciences. The school awards Master and PhD degrees alone and conjo ...
in Paris. He received numerous honors from universities and institutions throughout the world.
Lévi-Strauss argued that the "savage" mind had the same structures as the "civilized" mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere. These observations culminated in his famous book ''
Tristes Tropiques'' (1955) which established his position as one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought. As well as
sociology
Sociology is the scientific study of human society that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of Interpersonal ties, social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. The term sociol ...
, his ideas reached into many fields in the
humanities
Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture, including Philosophy, certain fundamental questions asked by humans. During the Renaissance, the term "humanities" referred to the study of classical literature a ...
, including
philosophy
Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...
. Structuralism has been defined as "the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity."
He won the 1986
International Nonino Prize in Italy.
Biography
Early life and education
Gustave Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in 1908 to
French-Jewish (turned agnostic) parents who were living in
Brussels
Brussels, officially the Brussels-Capital Region, (All text and all but one graphic show the English name as Brussels-Capital Region.) is a Communities, regions and language areas of Belgium#Regions, region of Belgium comprising #Municipalit ...
, where his father was working as a portrait painter at the time.
[
][
] He grew up in Paris, living on a street of the upscale
16th arrondissement named after the artist
Claude Lorrain
Claude Lorrain (; born Claude Gellée , called ''le Lorrain'' in French; traditionally just Claude in English; c. 1600 – 23 November 1682) was a French painter, draughtsman and etcher of the Baroque era. He spent most of his life in I ...
, whose work he admired and later wrote about. During the
First World War
World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...
, from age 6 to 10, he lived with his maternal grandfather, who was the Rabbi of Versailles.
Despite his religious environment early on, Claude Lévi-Strauss was an atheist or agnostic, at least in his adult life.
From 1918 to 1925 he studied at
Lycée Janson de Sailly high school, receiving a baccalaureate in June 1925 (age of 16).
In his last year (1924), he was introduced to philosophy, including the works of
Marx
Karl Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet '' The Communist Manifesto'' (written with Friedrich Engels) ...
and
Kant
Immanuel Kant (born Emanuel Kant; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, et ...
, and began shifting to the political left (however, unlike many other socialists, he never became communist).
From 1925, he spent the next two years at the prestigious
Lycée Condorcet
The Lycée Condorcet () is a secondary school in Paris, France, located at 8, rue du Havre, in the city's 9th arrondissement. Founded in 1803, it is one of the four oldest high schools in Paris and also one of the most prestigious. Since its inc ...
preparing for the entrance exam to the highly selective
École normale supérieure
École or Ecole may refer to:
* an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by Secondary education in France, secondary education establishments (collège and lycée)
* École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing i ...
. However, for reasons that are not entirely clear, he decided not to take the exam. In 1926, he went to
Sorbonne in Paris, studying
law
Law is a set of rules that are created and are enforceable by social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior, with its precise definition a matter of longstanding debate. It has been variously described as a science and as the ar ...
and
philosophy
Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...
, as well as engaging in socialist politics and activism. In 1929, he opted for philosophy over law (which he found boring), and from 1930 to 1931, put politics aside to focus on preparing for the ''
agrégation
In France, the () is the most competitive and prestigious examination for civil service in the French public education
A state school, public school, or government school is a primary school, primary or secondary school that educates all stu ...
'' in philosophy, in order to qualify as a professor. In 1931, he passed the agrégation, coming in 3rd place, and youngest in his class at age 22. By this time, the
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe global economic downturn from 1929 to 1939. The period was characterized by high rates of unemployment and poverty, drastic reductions in industrial production and international trade, and widespread bank and ...
had hit France, and Lévi-Strauss found himself needing to provide not only for himself but his parents as well.
Early career
In 1935, after a few years of secondary school teaching, he took up a last-minute offer to be part of a French cultural mission to Brazil in which he would serve as a visiting professor of sociology at the
University of São Paulo
The Universidade de São Paulo (, USP) is a public research university in the Brazilian state of São Paulo, and the largest public university in Brazil.
The university was founded on 25 January 1934, regrouping already existing schools in ...
while his then-wife,
Dina, served as a visiting professor of ethnology.
The couple lived and did their anthropological work in Brazil from 1935 to 1939. During this time, while he was a visiting professor of sociology, Claude undertook his only
ethnographic
Ethnography is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. It explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. Ethnography is also a type of social research that involves examining ...
fieldwork. He accompanied Dina, a trained ethnographer in her own right, who was also a visiting professor at the University of São Paulo, where they conducted research forays into the
Mato Grosso
Mato Grosso ( – ) is one of the states of Brazil, the List of Brazilian states by area, third largest by area, located in the Central-West Region, Brazil, Central-West region. The state has 1.66% of the Brazilian population and is responsible ...
and the
Amazon Rainforest
The Amazon rainforest, also called the Amazon jungle or Amazonia, is a Tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests, moist broadleaf tropical rainforest in the Amazon biome that covers most of the Amazon basin of South America. This basin ...
. They first studied the
Guaycuru and
Bororó Indian tribes, staying among them for a few days. In 1938, they returned for a second, more than half-year-long expedition to study the
Nambikwara and
Tupi-Kawahib societies. At this time, his wife had an eye infection that prevented her from completing the study, which he concluded. This experience cemented Lévi-Strauss's professional identity as an
anthropologist
An anthropologist is a scientist engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropologists study aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms, values ...
.
Edmund Leach
Sir Edmund Ronald Leach FRAI FBA (7 November 1910 – 6 January 1989) was a British social anthropologist and academic. He served as provost of King's College, Cambridge from 1966 to 1979. He was also president of the Royal Anthropolo ...
suggests, from Lévi-Strauss's own accounts in ''
Tristes Tropiques'', that he could not have spent more than a few weeks in any one place and was never able to converse easily with any of his native informants in their native language, which is uncharacteristic of anthropological research methods of participatory interaction with subjects to gain a full understanding of a culture.
In the 1980s, he discussed why he became
vegetarian
Vegetarianism is the practice of abstaining from the Eating, consumption of meat (red meat, poultry, seafood, insects as food, insects, and the flesh of any other animal). It may also include abstaining from eating all by-products of animal slau ...
in pieces published in Italian daily newspaper ''
La Repubblica
(; English: "the Republic") is an Italian daily general-interest newspaper with an average circulation of 151,309 copies in May 2023. It was founded in 1976 in Rome by Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso (now known as GEDI Gruppo Editoriale) and l ...
'' and other publications anthologized in the posthumous book ''Nous sommes tous des cannibales'' (2013):
Expatriation
Lévi-Strauss returned to France in 1939 to take part in the war effort and was assigned as a liaison agent to the
Maginot Line
The Maginot Line (; ), named after the Minister of War (France), French Minister of War André Maginot, is a line of concrete fortifications, obstacles and weapon installations built by French Third Republic, France in the 1930s to deter invas ...
. After the French capitulation in 1940, he was employed at a ''
lycée
In France, secondary education is in two stages:
* ''Collèges'' () cater for the first four years of secondary education from the ages of 11 to 14.
* ''Lycées'' () provide a three-year course of further secondary education for students between ...
'' in
Montpellier
Montpellier (; ) is a city in southern France near the Mediterranean Sea. One of the largest urban centres in the region of Occitania (administrative region), Occitania, Montpellier is the prefecture of the Departments of France, department of ...
, but then was dismissed under the
Vichy racial laws (Lévi-Strauss's family, originally from Alsace, was of Jewish ancestry).
Around that time, he and his first wife separated. She stayed behind and worked in the
French resistance
The French Resistance ( ) was a collection of groups that fought the German military administration in occupied France during World War II, Nazi occupation and the Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy#France, collaborationist Vic ...
, while he managed to escape Vichy France by boat to
Martinique
Martinique ( ; or ; Kalinago language, Kalinago: or ) is an island in the Lesser Antilles of the West Indies, in the eastern Caribbean Sea. It was previously known as Iguanacaera which translates to iguana island in Carib language, Kariʼn ...
, from where he was finally able to continue travelling. (
Victor Serge
Victor Serge (; born Viktor Lvovich Kibalchich, ; 30 December 1890 – 17 November 1947) was a Belgian-born Russian revolutionary, novelist, poet, historian, journalist, and translator. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Bolsheviks in Janu ...
describes conversations with Lévi-Strauss aboard the freighter Capitaine Paul-Lemerle from Marseilles to Martinique in his Notebooks.)
In 1941, he was offered a position at the
New School for Social Research
The New School for Social Research (NSSR), previously known as The University in Exile and The New School University, is a graduate-level educational division of The New School in New York City, United States. NSSR enrolls more than 1,000 stud ...
in New York City and granted admission to the United States. A series of voyages brought him, via South America, to
Puerto Rico
; abbreviated PR), officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, is a Government of Puerto Rico, self-governing Caribbean Geography of Puerto Rico, archipelago and island organized as an Territories of the United States, unincorporated territo ...
, where he was investigated by the
FBI
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic Intelligence agency, intelligence and Security agency, security service of the United States and Federal law enforcement in the United States, its principal federal law enforcement ag ...
after German letters in his luggage aroused the suspicions of customs agents. Lévi-Strauss spent most of the war in New York City. Along with
Jacques Maritain
Jacques Maritain (; 18 November 1882 – 28 April 1973) was a French Catholic philosopher. Raised as a Protestant, he was agnostic before converting to Catholicism in 1906. An author of more than 60 books, he helped to revive Thomas Aqui ...
,
Henri Focillon, and
Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson (, ; 18 July 1982) was a Russian linguist and literary theorist. A pioneer of structural linguistics, Jakobson was one of the most celebrated and influential linguists of the twentieth century. With Nikolai Trubetzk ...
, he was a founding member of the
École Libre des Hautes Études, a sort of university-in-exile for French academics.
The war years in New York were formative for Lévi-Strauss in several ways. His relationship with Jakobson helped shape his theoretical outlook (Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss are considered to be two of the central figures on which
structuralist thought is based). In addition, Lévi-Strauss was also exposed to the American anthropology espoused by
Franz Boas
Franz Uri Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942) was a German-American anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. He was a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the mov ...
, who taught at
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...
. In 1942, while having dinner at the Faculty House at Columbia, Boas died in Lévi-Strauss's arms. This intimate association with Boas gave his early work a distinctive American inclination that helped facilitate its acceptance in the U.S.
After a brief stint from 1946 to 1947 as a
cultural attaché
Culture ( ) is a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, attitudes, and habits of the individuals in these groups ...
to the French embassy in
Washington, DC
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and Federal district of the United States, federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from ...
, Lévi-Strauss returned to Paris in 1948. At this time, he received his
state doctorate
State most commonly refers to:
* State (polity), a centralized political organization that regulates law and society within a territory
**Sovereign state, a sovereign polity in international law, commonly referred to as a country
**Nation state, a ...
from the
Sorbonne by submitting, in the French tradition, both a "major" and a "minor"
doctoral thesis
A thesis (: theses), or dissertation (abbreviated diss.), is a document submitted in support of candidature for an academic degree or professional qualification presenting the author's research and findings.International Standard ISO 7144: D ...
. These were (''The Family and Social Life of the
Nambikwara Indians'') and (''The Elementary Structures of Kinship'').
Later life and death
In 2008, he became the first member of the Académie française to reach the age of 100 and one of the few living authors to have his works published in the
Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. On the death of
Maurice Druon
Maurice Druon (; 23 April 1918 – 14 April 2009) was a French novelist and a member of the Académie Française, of which he served as "Perpetual Secretary" (chairman) between 1985 and 1999.
Life and career
Born in Paris, France, Druon was the ...
on 14 April 2009, he became the dean of the ''Académie'', its longest-serving member.
He died on 30 October 2009, at age 100.
The death was announced four days later.
French President
The president of France, officially the president of the French Republic (), is the executive head of state of France, and the commander-in-chief of the French Armed Forces. As the presidency is the supreme magistracy of the country, the pos ...
Nicolas Sarkozy
Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa ( ; ; born 28 January 1955) is a French politician who served as President of France from 2007 to 2012. In 2021, he was found guilty of having tried to bribe a judge in 2014 to obtain information ...
described him as "one of the greatest ethnologists of all time".
Bernard Kouchner
Bernard Kouchner (born 1 November 1939) is a French politician and doctor. He is the co-founder of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and Médecins du Monde. From 2007 until 2010, he was the French Minister of Foreign and European Affairs in t ...
, the
French Foreign Minister, said Lévi-Strauss "broke with an ethnocentric vision of history and humanity ... At a time when we are trying to give meaning to globalization, to build a fairer and more humane world, I would like Claude Lévi-Strauss's universal echo to resonate more strongly".
In a similar vein, a statement by Lévi-Strauss was broadcast on
National Public Radio
National Public Radio (NPR) is an American public broadcasting organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It serves as a national Radio syndication, syndicator to a network of more ...
in the remembrance produced by ''
All Things Considered
''All Things Considered'' (''ATC'') is the flagship news program on the American network National Public Radio (NPR). It was the first news program on NPR, premiering on May 3, 1971. It is broadcast live on NPR affiliated stations in the United ...
'' on 3 November 2009: "There is today a frightful disappearance of living species, be they plants or animals. And it's clear that the density of human beings has become so great, if I can say so, that they have begun to poison themselves. And the world which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world that I like." ''
The Daily Telegraph
''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a British daily broadsheet conservative newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed in the United Kingdom and internationally. It was found ...
'' said in its obituary that Lévi-Strauss was "one of the dominating postwar influences in French intellectual life and the leading exponent of Structuralism in the social sciences".
Permanent secretary of the Académie française
Hélène Carrère d'Encausse said: "He was a thinker, a philosopher.... We will not find another like him".
Career and development of structural anthropology
''The Elementary Structures of Kinship'' was published in 1949 and quickly came to be regarded as one of the most important anthropological works on kinship. It was even reviewed favorably by
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir (, ; ; 9 January 1908 – 14 April 1986) was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist, and feminist activist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, nor was she ...
, who saw it as an important statement of the position of women in non-Western cultures. A play on the title of
Durkheim's famous ''
Elementary Forms of the Religious Life'', Lévi-Strauss' ''Elementary Structures'' re-examined how people organized their families by examining the logical structures that underlay relationships rather than their contents. While British anthropologists such as
Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown argued that kinship was based on descent from a common ancestor, Lévi-Strauss argued that kinship was based on the alliance between two families that formed when women from one group married men from another.
Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lévi-Strauss continued to publish and experienced considerable professional success. On his return to France, he became involved with the administration of the
CNRS
The French National Centre for Scientific Research (, , CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe.
In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers, 13,415 eng ...
and the
Musée de l'Homme
The Musée de l'Homme (; literally "Museum of Mankind" or "Museum of Humanity") is an anthropology museum in Paris, France. It was established in 1937 by Paul Rivet for the 1937 ''Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moder ...
before finally becoming a professor () of the fifth section of the
École Pratique des Hautes Études
École or Ecole may refer to:
* an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée)
* École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France
* Éco ...
, the 'Religious Sciences' section where
Marcel Mauss
Marcel Israël Mauss (; 10 May 1872 – 10 February 1950) was a French sociologist and anthropologist known as the "father of French ethnology". The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss, in his academic work, crossed the boundaries between sociolo ...
was previously professor, the title of which chair he renamed "Comparative Religion of Non-Literate Peoples".
While Lévi-Strauss was well known in academic circles, in 1955 he became one of France's best-known intellectuals by publishing ''
Tristes Tropiques'' in Paris that year by Plon (best-known translated into English in 1973, published by Penguin). Essentially, this book was a memoir detailing his time as a French expatriate throughout the 1930s and his travels. Lévi-Strauss combined exquisitely beautiful prose, dazzling philosophical meditation, and
ethnographic
Ethnography is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. It explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. Ethnography is also a type of social research that involves examining ...
analysis of the Amazonian peoples to produce a masterpiece. The organizers of the
Prix Goncourt
The Prix Goncourt ( , "The Goncourt Prize") is a prize in French literature, given by the académie Goncourt to the author of "the best and most imaginative prose work of the year". The prize carries a symbolic reward of only 10 euros, but resul ...
, for instance, lamented that they were not able to award Lévi-Strauss the prize because ''Tristes Tropiques'' was nonfiction.
Lévi-Strauss was named to a chair in social anthropology at the
Collège de France
The (), formerly known as the or as the ''Collège impérial'' founded in 1530 by François I, is a higher education and research establishment () in France. It is located in Paris near La Sorbonne. The has been considered to be France's most ...
in 1959. At roughly the same time he published ''Structural Anthropology'', a collection of his essays that provided both examples and programmatic statements about structuralism. At the same time as he was laying the groundwork for an intellectual program, he began a series of institutions to establish anthropology as a discipline in France, including the Laboratory for Social Anthropology where new students could be trained, and a new journal, ''
l'Homme
''L'Homme. Revue française d'anthropologie'', is a French anthropological journal established in 1961 by Émile Benveniste, Pierre Gourou, and Claude Lévi-Strauss at the École pratique des hautes études, as a French counterpart to ''Man'' ...
'', for publishing the results of their research.
''The Savage Mind''
In 1962, Lévi-Strauss published what is for many people his most important work, , translated into English as ''
The Savage Mind
''The Savage Mind'' (), also translated as ''Wild Thought'', is a 1962 work of structural anthropology by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Summary
"The Savage Mind"
Lévi-Strauss makes clear that "''la pensée sauvage''" refers not ...
'' (and later as ''Wild Thought''). The French title is an untranslatable pun, as the word means both 'thought' and '
pansy
The garden pansy (''Viola'' × ''wittrockiana'') is a type of polychromatic large-flowered hybrid plant cultivated as a garden flower. It is derived by hybridization from several species in the section ''Melanium'' ("the pansies") of the ge ...
', while has a range of meanings different from English 'savage'. Lévi-Strauss supposedly suggested that the English title be ''Pansies for Thought'', borrowing from a speech by
Ophelia
Ophelia () is a character in William Shakespeare's drama ''Hamlet'' (1599–1601). She is a young noblewoman of Denmark, the daughter of Polonius, sister of Laertes and potential wife of Prince Hamlet. Due to Hamlet's actions, Ophelia ultima ...
in
Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's natio ...
's ''
Hamlet
''The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark'', often shortened to ''Hamlet'' (), is a Shakespearean tragedy, tragedy written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1599 and 1601. It is Shakespeare's longest play. Set in Denmark, the play (the ...
'' (Act IV, Scene V). French editions of are often printed with an image of wild pansies on the cover.
''The Savage Mind'' discusses not just "primitive" thought, a category defined by previous anthropologists, but also forms of thought common to all human beings. The first half of the book lays out Lévi-Strauss's
theory of culture
A theory is a systematic and rational form of abstract thinking about a phenomenon, or the conclusions derived from such thinking. It involves contemplative and logical reasoning, often supported by processes such as observation, experimentation, ...
and mind, while the second half expands this account into a theory of history and social change. This latter part of the book engaged Lévi-Strauss in a heated debate with
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (, ; ; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary criticism, literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th ...
over the nature of human freedom. On the one hand, Sartre's
existentialist
Existentialism is a family of philosophical views and inquiry that explore the human individual's struggle to lead an authentic life despite the apparent absurdity or incomprehensibility of existence. In examining meaning, purpose, and value ...
philosophy committed him to a position that human beings fundamentally were free to act as they pleased. On the other hand, Sartre also was a
leftist
Left-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy either as a whole or of certain social hierarchies. Left-wing politi ...
who was committed to ideas such as that individuals were constrained by the ideologies imposed on them by the powerful. Lévi-Strauss presented his structuralist notion of
agency in opposition to Sartre. Echoes of this debate between structuralism and existentialism eventually inspired the work of younger authors such as
Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu (, ; ; ; 1 August 1930 – 23 January 2002) was a French sociologist and public intellectual. Bourdieu's contributions to the sociology of education, the theory of sociology, and sociology of aesthetics have achieved wide influ ...
.
''Mythologiques''
Now a worldwide celebrity, Lévi-Strauss spent the second half of the 1960s working on his master project, a four-volume study called ''
Mythologiques
''Mythologiques'' is a four-volume work of cultural anthropology by Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss ( ; ; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a Belgian-born French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the dev ...
''. In it, he followed a single myth from the tip of South America and all of its variations from group to group north through Central America and eventually into the
Arctic Circle
The Arctic Circle is one of the two polar circles, and the northernmost of the five major circle of latitude, circles of latitude as shown on maps of Earth at about 66° 34' N. Its southern counterpart is the Antarctic Circle.
The Arctic Circl ...
, thus tracing the myth's cultural evolution from one end of the Western Hemisphere to the other. He accomplished this in a typically structuralist way, examining the underlying structure of relationships among the elements of the story rather than focusing on the content of the story itself. While ' was a statement of Lévi-Strauss's big-picture theory, ''Mythologiques'' was an extended, four-volume example of analysis. Richly detailed and extremely long, it is less widely read than the much shorter and more accessible ', despite its position as Lévi-Strauss's masterwork.
Lévi-Strauss completed the final volume of ''Mythologiques'' in 1971. On 14 May 1973, he was elected to the Académie française, France's highest honour for a writer. He was a member of other notable academies worldwide, including the
American Academy of Arts and Letters
The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, Music of the United States, music, and Visual art of the United States, art. Its fixed number ...
. In 1956, he became foreign member of the
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (, KNAW) is an organization dedicated to the advancement of science and literature in the Netherlands. The academy is housed in the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam.
In addition to various advisory a ...
. He then became a member of the
American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society (APS) is an American scholarly organization and learned society founded in 1743 in Philadelphia that promotes knowledge in the humanities and natural sciences through research, professional meetings, publicat ...
in 1960 and the United States
National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...
in 1967. He received the
Erasmus Prize
The Erasmus Prize is an annual prize awarded by the board of the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation to individuals or institutions that have made exceptional contributions to culture, society, or social science in Europe and the rest of the world. I ...
in 1973, the
Meister-Eckhart-Prize for philosophy in 2003, and several honorary doctorates from universities such as
Oxford
Oxford () is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city and non-metropolitan district in Oxfordshire, England, of which it is the county town.
The city is home to the University of Oxford, the List of oldest universities in continuou ...
,
Harvard
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher lear ...
,
Yale
Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and one of the nine colonial colleges ch ...
, and
Columbia. He also was the recipient of the
Grand-croix de la Légion d'honneur, was a
Commandeur de l'ordre national du Mérite, and
Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. In 2005, he received the XVII Premi Internacional Catalunya (
Generalitat of Catalonia
The Generalitat de Catalunya (; ; ), or the Government of Catalonia, is the institutional system by which Catalonia is Self-governance, self-governed as an autonomous communities of Spain, autonomous community of Spain. It is made up of the Parli ...
). After his retirement, he continued to publish occasional meditations on art, music, philosophy, and poetry.
Anthropological theories
Lévi-Strauss sought to apply the structural linguistics of
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand Mongin de Saussure (; ; 26 November 185722 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is wi ...
to anthropology.
At the time, the family was traditionally considered the fundamental object of analysis but was seen primarily as a self-contained unit consisting of a husband, a wife, and their children. Nephews, cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents all were treated as secondary. Lévi-Strauss argued that akin to Saussure's notion of
linguistic value, families acquire determinate identities only through relations with one another. Thus, he inverted the classical view of anthropology, putting the secondary family members first and insisting on analyzing the relations between units instead of the units themselves.

In his own analysis of the formation of the identities that arise through marriages between tribes, Lévi-Strauss noted that the relation between the uncle and the nephew was to the relation between brother and sister, as the relation between father and son is to that between husband and wife, that is, A is to B as C is to D. Therefore, if we know A, B, and C, we can predict D. An example of this law is illustrated in the diagram. The four relation units are marked with A to D. Lévi-Strauss noted that if A is positive, B is negative, and C is negative, then it can inferred that D is positive, thereby satisfying the constraint 'A is to B as C is to D'; in this case, the relations are contrasting. The goal of Lévi-Strauss's
structural anthropology
Structural anthropology is a school of sociocultural anthropology based on Claude Lévi-Strauss' 1949 idea that immutable deep structures exist in all cultures, and consequently, that all cultural practices have homologous counterparts in other ...
, then, was to simplify the masses of empirical data into generalized, comprehensible relations between units, which allow for predictive laws to be identified, such as A is to B as C is to D.
Lévi-Strauss's theory is set forth in ''Structural Anthropology'' (1958). Briefly, he considers
culture
Culture ( ) is a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and Social norm, norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, Social norm, customs, capabilities, Attitude (psychology), attitudes ...
a system of symbolic communication, to be investigated with methods that others have used more narrowly in the discussion of novels, political speeches, sports, and movies. His reasoning makes the best sense when contrasted against the background of an earlier generation's social theory. He wrote about this relationship for decades.
A preference for
"functionalist" explanations dominated the social sciences from the turn of the 20th century through the 1950s, which is to say that anthropologists and sociologists tried to state the purpose of a social act or institution. The existence of a thing was explained, if it fulfilled a function. The only strong alternative to that kind of analysis was a historical explanation, accounting for the existence of a social fact by stating how it came to be.
The idea of social function developed in two different ways, however. The English anthropologist
Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, who had read and admired the work of the French sociologist
Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim (; or ; 15 April 1858 – 15 November 1917) was a French Sociology, sociologist. Durkheim formally established the academic discipline of sociology and is commonly cited as one of the principal architects of modern soci ...
, argued that the goal of anthropological research was to find the collective function, such as what a religious creed or a set of rules about marriage did for the social order as a whole. Behind this approach was an old idea, the view that civilization developed through a series of phases from the primitive to the modern, everywhere in the same manner. All of the activities in a given kind of society would partake of the same character; some sort of internal logic would cause one level of culture to evolve into the next. On this view, a society can easily be thought of as an organism, the parts functioning together as do the parts of a body. In contrast, the more influential functionalism of
Bronisław Malinowski
Bronisław Kasper Malinowski (; 7 April 1884 – 16 May 1942) was a Polish anthropologist and ethnologist whose writings on ethnography, social theory, and field research have exerted a lasting influence on the discipline of anthropology.
...
described the satisfaction of individual needs, what a person derived by participating in a custom.
In the United States, where the shape of anthropology was set by the German-educated
Franz Boas
Franz Uri Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942) was a German-American anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. He was a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the mov ...
, the preference was for historical accounts. This approach had obvious problems, which Lévi-Strauss praises Boas for facing squarely. Historical information seldom is available for non-literate cultures. The anthropologist fills in with comparisons to other cultures and is forced to rely on theories that have no evidential basis, the old notion of universal stages of development or the claim that cultural resemblances are based on some unrecognized past contact between groups. Boas came to believe that no overall pattern in social development could be proven; for him, there was no single history, only histories.
There are three broad choices involved in the divergence of these schools; each had to decide:
# what kind of evidence to use;
# whether to emphasize the particulars of a single culture or look for patterns underlying all societies; and
# what the source of any underlying patterns might be, the definition of common humanity.
Social scientists in all traditions relied on cross-cultural studies, as it was always necessary to supplement information about a society with information about others. Thus, some idea of a common human nature was implicit in each approach. The critical distinction, then, remained twofold:
* Does a social fact exist because it is functional for the social order, or because it is functional for the person?
* Do uniformities across cultures occur because of organizational needs that must be met everywhere, or because of the uniform needs of human personality?
For Lévi-Strauss, the choice was for the demands of the social order. He had no difficulty bringing out the inconsistencies and triviality of individualistic accounts. Malinowski said, for example, that magic beliefs come into being when people need to feel a sense of control over events when the outcome is uncertain. In the
Trobriand Islands
The Trobriand Islands are a archipelago of coral atolls off the east coast of New Guinea. They are part of the nation of Papua New Guinea and are in Milne Bay Province. Most of the population of 60,000 (2016) indigenous inhabitants live on the m ...
, he found proof of this claim in the rites surrounding abortions and weaving skirts. But in the same tribes, there is no magic attached to making clay pots even though it is no more certain a business than weaving. So, the explanation is not consistent. Furthermore, these explanations tend to be used in an ad hoc, superficial way – one postulates a trait of personality when needed. However, the accepted way of discussing organizational function did not work either. Different societies might have institutions that were similar in many obvious ways and yet, served different functions. Many tribal cultures divide the tribe into two groups and have elaborate rules about how the two groups may interact. However, exactly what they may do—trade, intermarry—is different in different tribes; for that matter, so are the criteria for distinguishing the groups. Nor will it do to say that dividing in two is a universal need of organizations, because there are a lot of tribes that thrive without it.
For Lévi-Strauss, the methods of
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
became a model for all his earlier examinations of society. His analogies usually are from
phonology
Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...
(though also later from music, mathematics,
chaos theory
Chaos theory is an interdisciplinary area of Scientific method, scientific study and branch of mathematics. It focuses on underlying patterns and Deterministic system, deterministic Scientific law, laws of dynamical systems that are highly sens ...
,
cybernetics
Cybernetics is the transdisciplinary study of circular causal processes such as feedback and recursion, where the effects of a system's actions (its outputs) return as inputs to that system, influencing subsequent action. It is concerned with ...
, and so on). "A really scientific analysis must be real, simplifying, and explanatory," he writes.
[Lévi-Strauss, Claude. ]958
Year 958 (Roman numerals, CMLVIII) was a common year starting on Friday of the Julian calendar.
Events
By place
Byzantine Empire
* October / November – Battle of Raban: The Byzantine Empire, Byzantines under John I Tzimiskes, Jo ...
1963. ''Structural Anthropology'', translated by C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf. Phonemic
A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...
analysis reveals features that are real, in the sense that users of the language can recognize and respond to them. At the same time, a phoneme is an abstraction from language – not a sound, but a category of sound defined by the way it is distinguished from other categories through rules unique to the language. The entire sound structure of a language may be generated from a relatively small number of rules.
In the study of the kinship systems that first concerned him, this ideal of explanation allowed a comprehensive organization of data that partly had been ordered by other researchers. The overall goal was to find out why family relations differed among various South American cultures. The father might have great authority over the son in one group, for example, with the relationship rigidly restricted by
taboos
A taboo is a social group's ban, prohibition or avoidance of something (usually an utterance or behavior) based on the group's sense that it is excessively repulsive, offensive, sacred or allowed only for certain people.''Encyclopædia Britannica ...
. In another group, the mother's brother would have that kind of relationship with the son, while the father's relationship was relaxed and playful.
A number of partial patterns had been noted. Relations between the mother and father, for example, had some sort of reciprocity with those of father and son – if the mother had a dominant social status and was formal with the father, for example, then the father usually had close relations with the son. But these smaller patterns joined in inconsistent ways. One possible way of finding a master order was to rate all the positions in a kinship system along several dimensions. For example, the father was older than the son, the father produced the son, the father had the same sex as the son, and so on; the matrilineal uncle was older and of the same sex, but did not produce the son, and so on. An exhaustive collection of such observations might cause an overall pattern to emerge.
However, for Lévi-Strauss, this kind of work was considered "analytical in appearance only". It results in a chart that is far more difficult to understand than the original data and is based on arbitrary abstractions (empirically, fathers are older than sons, but it is only the researcher who declares that this feature explains their relations). Furthermore, it does not explain anything. The explanation it offers is
tautological—if age is crucial, then age explains a relationship. And it does not offer the possibility of inferring the origins of the structure.
A proper solution to the puzzle is to find a basic unit of
kinship
In anthropology, kinship is the web of social relationships that form an important part of the lives of all humans in all societies, although its exact meanings even within this discipline are often debated. Anthropologist Robin Fox says that ...
which can explain all the variations. It is a cluster of four roles – brother, sister, father, son. These are the roles that must be involved in any society that has an
incest taboo
Incest ( ) is sex between close relatives, for example a brother, sister, or parent. This typically includes sexual activity between people in consanguinity (blood relations), and sometimes those related by lineage. It is condemned and con ...
requiring a man to obtain a wife from some man outside his own hereditary line. A brother may give away his sister, for example, whose son might reciprocate in the next generation by allowing his sister to marry
exogamous
Exogamy is the social norm of mating or marrying outside one's social group. The group defines the scope and extent of exogamy, and the rules and enforcement mechanisms that ensure its continuity. One form of exogamy is dual exogamy, in which tw ...
ly. The underlying demand is a continued circulation of women to keep various clans peacefully related.
Right or wrong, this solution displays the qualities of structural thinking. Even though Lévi-Strauss frequently speaks of treating culture as the product of the axioms and corollaries that underlie it, or the phonemic differences that constitute it, he is concerned with the objective data of field research. He notes that it is logically possible for a different atom of kinship structure to exist–sister, sister's brother, brother's wife, daughter – but there are no real-world examples of relationships that can be derived from that grouping. The trouble with this view has been shown by Australian anthropologist Augustus Elkin, who insisted on the point that in a four-class marriage system, the preferred marriage was with a classificatory mother's brother's daughter and never with the true one. Lévi-Strauss's atom of kinship structure deals only with consanguineal kin. There is a big difference between the two situations, in that the kinship structure involving the classificatory kin relations allows for the building of a system which can bring together thousands of people. Lévi-Strauss's atom of kinship stops working once the true MoBrDa is missing. Lévi-Strauss also developed the concept of the
house society to describe those societies where the domestic unit is more central to the social organization than the descent group or lineage.
The purpose of structuralist explanation is to organize real data in the simplest effective way. All science, he says, is either structuralist or reductionist. In confronting such matters as the incest taboo, one is facing an objective limit of what the human mind has accepted so far. One could hypothesize some biological imperative underlying it, but so far as social order is concerned, the taboo has the effect of an irreducible fact. The social scientist can only work with the structures of human thought that arise from it. And structural explanations can be tested and refuted. A mere analytic scheme that wishes causal relations into existence is not structuralist in this sense.
Lévi-Strauss's later works are more controversial, in part because they impinge on the subject matter of other scholars. He believed that modern life and all history were founded on the same categories and transformations that he had discovered in the Brazilian
backcountry—''
The Raw and the Cooked
''The Raw and the Cooked'' (1964) is the first volume from ''Mythologiques'', a structural study of Amerindian mythology written by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. It was originally published in French as '. Although the book is part ...
, From Honey to Ashes, The Naked Man'' (to borrow some titles from the ''
Mythologiques
''Mythologiques'' is a four-volume work of cultural anthropology by Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss ( ; ; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a Belgian-born French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the dev ...
''). For instance, he compares anthropology to musical
serialism
In music, serialism is a method of composition using series of pitches, rhythms, dynamics, timbres or other musical elements. Serialism began primarily with Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, though some of his contemporaries were also ...
and defends his "philosophical" approach. He also pointed out that the modern view of primitive cultures was simplistic in denying them a history. The categories of myth did not persist among them because nothing had happened–it was easy to find the evidence of defeat,
migration
Migration, migratory, or migrate may refer to: Human migration
* Human migration, physical movement by humans from one region to another
** International migration, when peoples cross state boundaries and stay in the host state for some minimum le ...
, exile, and repeated displacements of all the kinds known to recorded history. Instead, the mythic categories had encompassed these changes.
He argued for a view of human life as existing in two timelines simultaneously, the eventful one of history and the long cycles in which one set of fundamental mythic patterns dominates and then perhaps another. In this respect, his work resembles that of
Fernand Braudel
Fernand Paul Achille Braudel (; 24 August 1902 – 27 November 1985) was a French historian. His scholarship focused on three main projects: ''The Mediterranean'' (1923–49, then 1949–66), ''Civilization and Capitalism'' (1955–79), and the un ...
, the
historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human species; as well as the ...
of the Mediterranean and 'la longue durée,' the cultural outlook and forms of social organization that persisted for centuries around that sea. He is right in that history is difficult to build up in a non-literate society, nevertheless, Jean Guiart's anthropological and José Garanger's archaeological work in central Vanuatu, bringing to the fore the skeletons of former chiefs described in local myths, who had thus been living persons, shows that there can be some means of ascertaining the history of some groups which otherwise would be deemed a historical. Another issue is the experience that the same person can tell one a myth highly charged in symbols, and some years later a sort of chronological history claiming to be chronic of a descent line (e.g., in the Loyalty islands and New Zealand), the two texts having in common that they each deal in topographical detail with the land-tenure claims of the said descent line (see
Douglas Oliver on the Siwai in Bougainville). Lévi-Strauss would agree to these aspects be explained inside his seminar but would never touch them on his own. The anthropological data content of the myths was not his problem. He was only interested in the formal aspects of each story, considered by him as the result of the workings of the collective unconscious of each group, which idea was taken from the linguists, but cannot be proved in any way although he was adamant about its existence and would never accept any discussion on this point.
Structuralist approach to myth
Similar to his anthropological theories, Lévi-Strauss identified myths as a type of speech through which a language could be discovered. His work is a
structuralist theory of mythology In structural anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss, a French anthropologist, makes the claim that "myth is language". Through analysing mythology as language, Lévi-Strauss suggests that it can be approached the same way as language can be approached ...
which attempted to explain how seemingly fantastical and arbitrary tales could be so similar across cultures. Because he had the belief that there was no one "authentic" version of a myth, rather that they were all manifestations of the same language, he sought to find the fundamental units of myth, namely, the
mytheme
In structuralism-influenced studies of mythology, a mytheme is a fundamental generic unit of narrative structure (typically involving a relationship between a character, an event, and a theme) from which myths are thought to be constructed—a m ...
. Lévi-Strauss broke each of the versions of a myth down into a series of sentences, consisting of a relation between a function and a subject. Sentences with the same function were given the same number and bundled together. These are mythemes.
What Lévi-Strauss believed he had discovered when he examined the relations between mythemes was that a myth consists of juxtaposed
binary opposition
A binary opposition (also binary system) is a pair of related terms or concepts that are opposite in meaning. Binary opposition is the system of language and/or thought by which two theoretical opposites are strictly defined and set off against one ...
s.
Oedipus
Oedipus (, ; "swollen foot") was a mythical Greek king of Thebes. A tragic hero in Greek mythology, Oedipus fulfilled a prophecy that he would end up killing his father and marrying his mother, thereby bringing disaster to his city and family. ...
, for example, consists of the overrating of blood relations and the underrating of blood relations, the
autochthonous origin of humans, and the denial of their autochthonous origin. Influenced by
Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (27 August 1770 – 14 November 1831) was a 19th-century German idealism, German idealist. His influence extends across a wide range of topics from metaphysical issues in epistemology and ontology, to political phi ...
, Lévi-Strauss believed that the human mind thinks fundamentally in these binary oppositions and their unification (the
thesis, antithesis, synthesis
Dialectic (; ), also known as the dialectical method, refers originally to dialogue between people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing to arrive at the truth through reasoned argument. Dialectic resembles debate, but th ...
triad), and that these are what makes meaning possible. Furthermore, he considered the job of myth to be a sleight of hand, an association of an irreconcilable binary opposition with a reconcilable binary opposition, creating the illusion, or belief, that the former had been resolved.
[Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1955.]
The Structural Study of Myth
." ''Journal of American Folklore
The ''Journal of American Folklore'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the American Folklore Society. The journal has been published since the society's founding in 1888. Since 2003, this has been published at the University of I ...
'' 68(270):428–44. . .
Lévi-Strauss sees a basic paradox in the study of
myth
Myth is a genre of folklore consisting primarily of narratives that play a fundamental role in a society. For scholars, this is very different from the vernacular usage of the term "myth" that refers to a belief that is not true. Instead, the ...
. On one hand, mythical stories are fantastic and unpredictable: the content of myth seems completely arbitrary. On the other hand, the myths of different cultures are surprisingly similar:
Lévi-Strauss proposed that
universal laws must govern mythical thought and resolve this seeming paradox, producing similar myths in different cultures. Each myth may seem unique, but he proposed it is just one particular instance of a universal law of human thought. In studying myth, Lévi-Strauss tries "to reduce apparently arbitrary data to some kind of order, and to attain a level at which a kind of necessity becomes apparent, underlying the illusions of liberty."
[Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 9641969. '']The Raw and the Cooked
''The Raw and the Cooked'' (1964) is the first volume from ''Mythologiques'', a structural study of Amerindian mythology written by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. It was originally published in French as '. Although the book is part ...
'', translated by J. Weightman and D. Weightman. p. 10. Laurie suggests that for Levi-Strauss, "operations embedded within animal myths provide opportunities to resolve collective problems of classification and hierarchy, marking lines between the inside and the outside, the Law and its exceptions, those who belong and those who do not."
According to Lévi-Strauss, "mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution."
In other words, myths consist of:
# elements that oppose or contradict each other and
#other elements that "mediate", or resolve, those oppositions.
For example, Lévi-Strauss thinks the
trickster
In mythology and the study of folklore and religion, a trickster is a character in a story (god, goddess, spirit, human or anthropomorphisation) who exhibits a great degree of intellect or secret knowledge and uses it to play tricks or otherw ...
of many
Native American mythologies acts as a "mediator". Lévi-Strauss's argument hinges on two facts about the Native American trickster:
# the trickster has a contradictory and unpredictable personality;
# the trickster is almost always a
raven
A raven is any of several large-bodied passerine bird species in the genus '' Corvus''. These species do not form a single taxonomic group within the genus. There is no consistent distinction between crows and ravens; the two names are assigne ...
or a
coyote
The coyote (''Canis latrans''), also known as the American jackal, prairie wolf, or brush wolf, is a species of canis, canine native to North America. It is smaller than its close relative, the Wolf, gray wolf, and slightly smaller than the c ...
.
Lévi-Strauss argues that the raven and coyote "mediate" the opposition between life and death. The relationship between agriculture and hunting is analogous to the opposition between
life
Life, also known as biota, refers to matter that has biological processes, such as Cell signaling, signaling and self-sustaining processes. It is defined descriptively by the capacity for homeostasis, Structure#Biological, organisation, met ...
and
death
Death is the end of life; the irreversible cessation of all biological functions that sustain a living organism. Death eventually and inevitably occurs in all organisms. The remains of a former organism normally begin to decompose sh ...
: agriculture is solely concerned with producing life (at least up until harvest time); hunting is concerned with producing death. Furthermore, the relationship between herbivores and beasts of prey is analogous to the relationship between agriculture and hunting: like agriculture, herbivores are concerned with plants; like hunting, beasts of prey are concerned with catching meat. Lévi-Strauss points out that the raven and coyote eat carrion and are therefore halfway between herbivores and beasts of prey: like beasts of prey, they eat meat; like herbivores, they do not catch their food. Thus, he argues, "we have a mediating structure of the following type":
By uniting herbivore traits with traits of beasts of prey, the raven and coyote somewhat reconcile herbivores and beasts of prey: in other words, they mediate the opposition between herbivores and beasts of prey. As we have seen, this opposition ultimately is analogous to the opposition between life and death. Therefore, the raven and coyote ultimately mediate the opposition between life and death. This, Lévi-Strauss believes, explains why the coyote and raven have contradictory personalities when they appear as the mythical trickster:
Because the raven and coyote reconcile profoundly opposed concepts (i.e., life and death), their own mythical personalities must reflect this duality or contradiction: in other words, they must have a contradictory, "tricky" personality.
This theory about the structure of myth helps support Lévi-Strauss's more basic theory about human thought. According to this more basic theory, universal laws govern ''all'' areas of human thought:
Out of all the products of culture, myths seem the most fantastic and unpredictable. Therefore, Lévi-Strauss claims, that if even mythical thought obeys universal laws, then ''all'' human thought must obey universal laws.
''The Savage Mind'': bricoleur and engineer
Lévi-Strauss developed the comparison of the Bricoleur and Engineer in ''
The Savage Mind
''The Savage Mind'' (), also translated as ''Wild Thought'', is a 1962 work of structural anthropology by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Summary
"The Savage Mind"
Lévi-Strauss makes clear that "''la pensée sauvage''" refers not ...
''.
Bricoleur has its origin in the old French verb ''bricoler'', which originally referred to extraneous movements in ball games, billiards, hunting, shooting and riding, but which today means do-it-yourself building or repairing things with the tools and materials on hand, puttering or tinkering as it were. In comparison to the true craftsman, whom Lévi-Strauss calls the ''Engineer'', the Bricoleur is adept at many tasks and at putting preexisting things together in new ways, adapting his project to a finite stock of materials and tools.
The Engineer deals with projects in their entirety, conceiving and procuring all the necessary materials and tools to suit his project. The Bricoleur approximates "the savage mind" and the Engineer approximates the scientific mind. Lévi-Strauss says that the universe of the Bricoleur is closed, and he often is forced to make do with whatever is at hand, whereas the universe of the Engineer is open in that he is able to create new tools and materials. However, both live within a restrictive reality, and so the Engineer is forced to consider the preexisting set of theoretical and practical knowledge, of technical means, in a similar way to the Bricoleur.
Criticism
Lévi-Strauss's theory on the origin of the
Trickster
In mythology and the study of folklore and religion, a trickster is a character in a story (god, goddess, spirit, human or anthropomorphisation) who exhibits a great degree of intellect or secret knowledge and uses it to play tricks or otherw ...
has been criticized on a number of points by anthropologists.
Stanley Diamond
Stanley Diamond (January 4, 1922 in New York City, NY – March 31, 1991 in New York City, NY) was an American poet and anthropologist. As a young man, he identified as a poet, and his disdain for the fascism of the 1930s greatly influenced ...
notes that while the secular civilized often consider the concepts of life and death to be polar, primitive cultures often see them "as aspects of a single condition, the condition of existence."
Diamond remarks that Lévi-Strauss did not reach such a conclusion by inductive reasoning, but simply by working backwards from the evidence to the "''a priori'' mediated concepts"
of "life" and "death", which he reached by assumption of a necessary progression from "life" to "agriculture" to "herbivorous animals", and from "death" to "warfare" to "beasts of prey". For that matter, the coyote is well known to hunt in addition to scavenging and the raven also has been known to act as a bird of prey, in contrast to Lévi-Strauss's conception. Nor does that conception explain why a scavenger such as a bear would never appear as the Trickster. Diamond further remarks that "the Trickster names 'raven' and 'coyote' which Lévi-Strauss explains can be arrived at with greater economy on the basis of, let us say, the cleverness of the animals involved, their ubiquity, elusiveness, capacity to make mischief, their undomesticated reflection of certain human traits."
Finally, Lévi-Strauss's analysis does not appear to be capable of explaining why representations of the Trickster in other areas of the world make use of such animals as the spider and mantis.
Edmund Leach
Sir Edmund Ronald Leach FRAI FBA (7 November 1910 – 6 January 1989) was a British social anthropologist and academic. He served as provost of King's College, Cambridge from 1966 to 1979. He was also president of the Royal Anthropolo ...
wrote that "The outstanding characteristic of his writing, whether in French or English, is that it is difficult to understand; his sociological theories combine baffling complexity with overwhelming erudition. Some readers even suspect that they are being treated to a confidence trick."
Sociologist
Stanislav Andreski
StanisÅ‚aw Andrzejewski (or Stanislav Andreski) (8 May 1919, CzÄ™stochowa – 26 September 2007, Reading, Berkshire) was a Polish-British sociologist. He is known for his indictment of the "pretentious nebulous verbosity" endemic in the modern ...
criticized Lévi-Strauss's work generally, arguing that his scholarship was often sloppy and moreover that much of his mystique and reputation stemmed from his "threatening people with mathematics", a reference to Lévi-Strauss's use of quasi-algebraic equations to explain his ideas. Drawing on
postcolonial approaches to anthropology, Timothy Laurie has suggested that "Lévi-Strauss speaks from the vantage point of a State intent on securing knowledge for the purposes of, as he himself would often claim, salvaging local cultures...but the salvation workers also ascribe to themselves legitimacy and authority in the process."
Personal life
He married
Dina Dreyfus in 1932. They later divorced. He was then married to Rose Marie Ullmo from 1946 to 1954. They had one son, Laurent. His third and last wife was Monique Roman; they were married in 1954. They had one son, Matthieu.
Honours and tributes
Works
* 1926. ''Gracchus Babeuf et le communisme''. L'églantine.
* 1948. ''La Vie familiale et sociale des Indiens Nambikwara''. Paris:
Société des Américanistes.
* 1949. ''Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté''
** ''The Elementary Structures of Kinship'', translated by J. H. Bell, J. R. von Sturmer, and
R. Needham. 1969.
* 1952. ''Race et histoire'', (as part of the series ''
The Race Question in Modern Science'').
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO ) is a List of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) with the aim of promoting world peace and International secur ...
.
*1955. "The Structural Study of Myth." ''
Journal of American Folklore
The ''Journal of American Folklore'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the American Folklore Society. The journal has been published since the society's founding in 1888. Since 2003, this has been published at the University of I ...
'' 68(270):428–44.
* 1955. ''
Tristes Tropiques''
Sad Tropics'
** ''A World on the Wane'', translated by J. Weightman and D. Weightman. 1973.
* 1958. ''Anthropologie structurale''
** ''Structural Anthropology'', translated by C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf. 1963.
* 1962. ''Le Totemisme aujourdhui''
** ''Totemism'', translated by R. Needham. 1963.
* 1962.
''La Pensée sauvage''
** ''The Savage Mind''. 1966.
* 1964–1971.
''Mythologiques'' I–IV, translated by J. Weightman and D. Weightman.
** 1964. ''Le Cru et le cuit'' (''
The Raw and the Cooked
''The Raw and the Cooked'' (1964) is the first volume from ''Mythologiques'', a structural study of Amerindian mythology written by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. It was originally published in French as '. Although the book is part ...
'', 1969)
** 1966. ''Du miel aux cendres'' (''From Honey to Ashes'', 1973)
** 1968. ''L'Origine des manières de table'' (''The Origin of Table Manners'', 1978)
** 1971. ''L'Homme nu'' (''The Naked Man'', 1981)
* 1973. ''
Anthropologie structurale deux''
** ''Structural Anthropology'', Vol. II, translated by M. Layton. 1976
* 1972. ''La Voie des masques''
** ''The Way of the Masks'', translated by S. Modelski, 1982.
*
*1978. ''Myth and Meaning''. UK:
Routledge & Kegan Paul
Routledge ( ) is a British multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, journals and online resources in the fields of the humanities, behavioural science, education, law, a ...
.
*1983. ''Le Regard éloigné''
**''The View from Afar'', translated by
J. Neugroschel and P. Hoss. 1985.
* 1984. ''Paroles donnés''
** ''Anthropology and Myth: Lectures, 1951–1982'', translated by R. Willis. 1987.
* 1985. ''La Potière jalouse''
** ''The Jealous Potter'', translated by B. Chorier. 1988.
*1991. ''Histoire de Lynx''
**''The Story of Lynx'', translated by C. Tihanyi. 1996.
[Lévi-Strauss, Claude. ]991
Year 991 (Roman numerals, CMXCI) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Julian calendar.
Events
* March 1: In Rouen, Pope John XV ratifies the first Peace and Truce of God, Truce of God, between Æthelred the Unready and Richard I o ...
1996.
The Story of Lynx
', translated by C. Tihanyi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. . Retrieved 5 November 2010.
* 1993. ''Regarder, écouter, lire''
** ''Look, Listen, Read'', translated by B. Singer. 1997.
* 1994. ''Saudades do Brasil''. Paris:
Plon.
* 1994. ''Le Père Noël supplicié''. Pin-Balma: Sables Éditions.
* 2011. ''L'Anthropologie face aux problèmes du monde moderne''. Paris: Seuil.
* 2011. ''L'Autre face de la lune'', Paris: Seuil.
Interviews
* 1978. "Comment travaillent les écrivains," interviewed by
Jean-Louis de Rambures. Paris.
* 1988. "De près et de loin," interviewed by
Didier Eribon (''Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss'', trans. Paula Wissing, 1991)
* 2005. "Loin du Brésil," interviewed by Véronique Mortaigne, Paris, Chandeigne.
See also
References
Sources
*Doja, Albert (2008):
Claude Lévi-Strauss at his Centennial: toward a future anthropology" ''
Theory, Culture & Society
''Theory, Culture & Society'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal that was established in 1982 and covers sociology, cultural, and social theory. The journal aims to work "across the borderlines between sociology and cultural studies, the social ...
'' 25(7/8):321–40. .
*—— 2010.
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009): The apotheosis of heroic anthropology" ''
Anthropology Today'' 26(5):18–23. .
*
Leach, Edmund. 1970. ''Lévi-Strauss''. Fontana/Collins
Chapter excerpt from book
*Wiseman, Boris. 1998. ''Introducing Lévi-Strauss''. Totem Books.
*——, ed. 2009. ''The Cambridge Companion to Lévi-Strauss''. Cambridge University Press.
Further reading
*
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2020. "The Key to All Mythologies" (book review). ''
The New York Review of Books
''The New York Review of Books'' (or ''NYREV'' or ''NYRB'') is a semi-monthly magazine with articles on literature, culture, economics, science and current affairs. Published in New York City, it is inspired by the idea that the discussion of ...
'' 67(2):18–20.
** This is a review of
Emmanuelle Loyer, ''Lévi-Strauss: A Biography'', translated by Ninon Vinsonneau and Jonathan Magidoff, Polity, 2019, 744 pp.; and
Maurice Godelier
Maurice Godelier (born February 28, 1934) is a French anthropologist who works as a Director of Studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. He is one of the most influential French anthropologists and is best known as one o ...
, ''Claude Lévi-Strauss: A Critical Study of His Thought'', translated from the French by Nora Scott, Verso, 2019, 540 pp.
** Appiah concludes his review (p. 20): "Lévi-Strauss... was... an inspired interpreter, a brilliant ''reader''.... When the landmarks of science succeed in advancing their subject, they need no longer be consulted: physicists don't study
Newton; chemists don't pore over
Lavoisier
Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier ( ; ; 26 August 17438 May 1794),
CNRS (Descola, Philippe. 2009. "Claude Lévi-Strauss: a Career Spanning a Century." Pp. 36 in ''The Letter of the Collège de France'' 4.
*
*Ginzburg, Carlo, Safran, Yehuda, Sherer Daniel. "An Interview with Carlo Ginzburg, by Yehuda Safran and Daniel Sherer." Potlatch 5 (2022), special issue on Carlo Ginzburg. Extensive discussion of Claude Lévi-Strauss.
*
*
*.
*
Claude Lévi-Strauss (obituary). ''
The Economist
''The Economist'' is a British newspaper published weekly in printed magazine format and daily on Electronic publishing, digital platforms. It publishes stories on topics that include economics, business, geopolitics, technology and culture. M ...
''. 12 November 2009.
External links
''What Lévi-Strauss owes to Amerindians'' film directed by Edson Matarezio
Profile of Lévi-Strauss in ''The Nation''