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Claude Lévi-Strauss

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Human Scientists

   Claude Lévi-Strauss ( IPA pronunciation [klod levi stʁos]); born
   November 28, 1908) is a Jewish-French anthropologist who developed
   structuralism as a method of understanding human society and culture.
   Outside anthropology, his works have had a large influence on
   contemporary thought, in particular on the practise of structuralism.
   Lévi-Strauss is a reference for authors as diverse as Michel Foucault,
   Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Judith Butler.

Biography

   Claude Lévi-Strauss is an anthropologist best known for his development
   of structural anthropology. He was born in Brussels and studied law and
   philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. He did not pursue his study of
   law, but agrégated in philosophy in 1931. After a few years of teaching
   secondary school, in 1935 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 at the University of São Paulo.

   Lévi-Strauss lived in Brazil from 1935 to 1939. It was during this time
   that he held out his first ethnographic fieldwork, conducting periodic
   research forays into Mato Grosso and the Amazon Rainforest. He studied
   first the Guaycuru and Bororo Indian tribes, actually living among them
   for a while. Several years later, he came back again in a second,
   year-long expedition to study the Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib
   societies. It was this experience that cemented Lévi-Strauss's
   professional identity as an anthropologist.

   He returned to France in 1939 to take part in the war effort, but after
   French capitulation to the Germans, Lévi-Strauss, a Jew, fled Paris.
   While there, Lévi-Strauss was offered a position in New York and
   granted admission to the United States, but still had to find a way to
   flee the increasingly precarious situation in France. After a series of
   attempts to obtain passage, Lévi-Strauss found a captain he had known
   on previous voyages and secured a space on a ship voyaging to South
   America. A series of voyages eventually brought Lévi-Strauss to Puerto
   Rico where he had to undergo one final investigation by the FBI after
   customs agents grew suspicious of German letters in his luggage. After
   satisfying suspicious government agents, Lévi Strauss spent most of the
   war in New York City. Like many other intellectual emigrés, he taught
   at the New School for Social Research. Along with Jacques Maritain,
   Henri Focillon and Roman Jakobson, 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, who taught at Columbia University on New York's Upper West
   Side. In 1942 in fact, while having dinner at the Faculty House at
   Columbia, Boas died of a heart attack in Lévi-Strauss's arms. This
   intimate association with Boas gave his early work a distinctive
   American tilt that helped facilitate its acceptance in the U.S. After a
   brief stint from 1946 to 1947 as a cultural attaché to the French
   embassy in Washington, DC, Lévi Strauss returned to Paris in 1948. It
   was at this time that he received his doctorate from the Sorbonne by
   submitting, in the French tradition, both a "major" and a "minor"
   thesis. These were The Family and Social Life of the Nambikwara Indians
   and The Elementary Structures of Kinship.

   The Elementary Structures of Kinship was published the next year and
   instantly came to be regarded as one of the most important works of
   anthropological kinship to be published and was even reviewed favorably
   by Simone de Beauvoir, who viewed it as an important statement of the
   position of women in non-western cultures. A play on the title of Émile
   Durkheim's famous Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 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 the other.

   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 and the Musée de l'Homme before finally becoming chair of fifth
   section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, the 'Religious
   Sciences' section previously chaired by Marcel Mauss, which he renamed
   "Comparative Religion of Non-Literate Peoples".

   While Lévi Strauss was well-known in academic circles, it was in 1955
   that he became one of France's best known intellectuals by publishing
   Tristes Tropiques. This book was essentially a travel novel detailing
   his time as a French expatriate throughout the 1930s. But Lévi Strauss
   combined exquisitely beautiful prose, dazzling philosophical
   meditation, and ethnographic analysis of Amazonian peoples to produce a
   masterpiece. The organizers of the Prix Goncourt, for instance,
   lamented that they were not able to award Lévi Strauss the prize
   because Tristes Tropiques was technically non-fiction.

   Lévi Strauss was named to a chair in Social Anthropology at the Collège
   de France in 1959. At roughly the same time he published Structural
   Anthropology, a collection of his essays which 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 for establishing anthropology as a discipline in
   France, including the Laboratory for Social Anthropology where new
   students could be trained, and a new journal, l'Homme, for publishing
   the results of their research.

   In 1962 Lévi Strauss published what is for many people his most
   important work, La Pensée Sauvage. The title is a pun untranslatable in
   English — in English the book is known as The Savage Mind, but this
   title fails to capture the other possible French meaning of 'Wild
   Pansies'. In French pensée means both 'thought' and 'pansy,' the
   flower, while sauvage means 'wild' as well as 'savage' or 'primitive'.
   The book concerns primitive thought, forms of thought we all use. (Lévi
   Strauss suggested the English title be Pansies for Thought, riffing off
   of a speech by Ophelia in Hamlet.) The French edition to this day
   retains a flower on the cover.

   The first half of the book lays out Lévi Strauss's theory of culture
   and mind, while the second half expands this account into a theory of
   history and social change. This part of the book engaged Lévi Strauss
   in a heated debate with Jean-Paul Sartre over the nature of human
   freedom. On the one hand, Sartre's existentialist philosophy committed
   him to a position that human beings were fundamentally free to act as
   they pleased. On the other hand, Sartre was also a leftist who was
   committed to the idea that, for instance, 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 would
   eventually inspire the work of younger authors such as Pierre Bourdieu.

   Now a world-wide celebrity, Lévi Strauss spent the second half of the
   1960s working on his master project, a four-volume study called
   Mythologiques. In it, Lévi Strauss took a single myth from the tip of
   South America and followed all of its variations from group to group up
   through Central America and eventually into the Arctic circle, thus
   tracing the myth's spread from one end of the American continent to the
   other. He accomplished this in a typically structuralist way, examining
   the underlying structure of relationships between the elements of the
   story rather than by focusing on the content of the story itself. While
   Pensée Sauvage 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 Pensée Sauvage despite its position as Lévi
   Strauss's master work.

   After completing the final volume of Mythologique in 1971 Lévi Strauss
   was elected to the Académie Française in 1973, France's highest honour
   for an intellectual. He is also a member of other notable Academies
   worldwide, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He also
   received the Erasmus Prize in 1973. In 2003 he received the
   Meister-Eckhart-Prize for Philosophy. He has received several honorary
   doctorates from universities such as Oxford, Harvard, and Columbia. He
   is also a recipient of the Grand-croix de la Légion d'honneur, and is a
   Commandeur de l'ordre national du Mérite and Commandeur des Arts et des
   Lettres. Although retired, he continues to publish occasional
   meditations on art, music and poetry.

Anthropological theories

   Lévi Strauss' theories are set forth in Structural Anthropology (
   1958). Briefly, he considers culture 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 best sense 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 century through the 1950s, which is to
   say that anthropologists and sociologists tried to state what a social
   act or institution was for. The existence of a thing was explained if
   it fulfilled a function. The only strong alternative to that kind of
   analysis was historical explanation, accounting for the existence of a
   social fact by saying how it came to be.

   However, the idea of social function developed in two different ways.
   The English anthropologist Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, who had
   read and admired the work of the French sociologist Émile Durkheim,
   argued that the goal of anthropological research was to find the
   collective function, what a religious creed or a set of rules about
   marriage did for the social order as a whole. At back of this approach
   was an old idea, the view that civilization developed through a series
   of phases from the primitive to the modern, everywhere the same. 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 like parts of a body.

   The more influential functionalism of Bronislaw Malinowski described
   the satisfaction of individual needs, what a person got out of
   participating in a custom.

   In the United States, where the shape of anthropology was set by the
   German-educated Franz Boas, the preference was for historical accounts.
   This approach had obvious problems, which Lévi Strauss praises Boas for
   facing squarely.

   Historical information is seldom 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 whatever, the
   old notion of universal stages of development or the claim that
   cultural resemblances are based on some untraced past contact between
   groups. Boas came to believe that no overall pattern in social
   development could be proven; for him, there was no 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 a common humanity.

   Social scientists in all traditions relied on cross-cultural studies.
   It was always necessary to supplement information about a society with
   information about others. So some idea of a common human nature was
   implicit in each approach.

   The critical distinction, then, remained: 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 where the outcome was uncertain. In the Trobriand Islands,
   he found the 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 – you just
   postulate a trait of personality when you need it.

   But the accepted way of discussing organizational function didn't 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 can interact. But exactly what they can 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 became a model for all his
   earlier examinations of society. His analogies are usually from
   phonology (though also later from music, mathematics, chaos theory,
   cybernetics and so on).

   "A truly scientific analysis must be real, simplifying, and
   explanatory," he says (in Structural Anthropology). Phonemic 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
   can 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
   had been partly ordered by other researchers. The overall goal was to
   find out why family relations differed in different South American
   cultures. The father might have great authority over the son in one
   group, for example, with the relationship rigidly restricted by taboos.
   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 together 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.

   But for Lévi Strauss, this kind of work was "analytical in appearance
   only." It results in a chart that is far harder 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 doesn't
   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
   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 requiring a man to
   obtain a wife from some man outside his own hereditary line. A brother
   can give away his sister, for example, whose son might reciprocate in
   the next generation by allowing his own sister to marry exogenously.
   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 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 so far accepted. 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' 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 was founded on the same categories and
   transformations that he had discovered in the Brazilian back country –
   The Raw and the Cooked, From Honey to Ashes, The Naked Man (to borrow
   some titles from the Mythologies). For instance he compares
   anthropology to musical serialism 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, exile, 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,
   the historian of the Mediterranean and 'la longue durée,' the cultural
   outlook and forms of social organization that persisted for centuries
   around that sea.

Video

     * Documentaire 52': About "Tristes Tropiques" 1991 - Film Super 16

       Preceded by:
   Henry de Montherlant Seat 29
                        Académie française
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