Claude Levi-Strauss

From Philosopedia

Claude Levi-Strauss (28 November 1908 - 1 November 2009)

Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the most influential anthropologists of the 20th century, was born in Brussels, Belgium, to Jewish parents Raymond Lévi-Strauss and the former Emmy Levy.

Obituaries

The New York Times obituary included that he grew up near Versailles, where his grandfather was a rabbi and his father a portrait painter. His great-grandfather Isaac Strauss was a Strasbourg violinest mentioned by Berlioz in his memoirs.

His work elevated the status of “the savage mind, ” a phrase that became the English title of one of his most forceful surveys, La Pensée Sauvage (1962).

“The thirst for objective knowledge,” he wrote, “is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive.’ ”

The world of primitive tribes was fast disappearing, he wrote. From 1900 to 1950, more than 90 tribes and 15 languages had disappeared in Brazil alone. This was another of his recurring themes. He worried about the growth of a “mass civilization,” of a modern “monoculture.” He sometimes expressed exasperated self-disgust with the West and its “own filth, thrown in the face of mankind.”

In this seeming elevation of the savage mind and denigration of Western modernity, he was writing within the tradition of French Romanticism, inspired by the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom Mr. Lévi-Strauss revered. It was a view that helped build Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s public reputation in the era of countercultural romanticism in the 1960s and ’70s.

But such simplified romanticism was also a distortion of his ideas. For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, the savage was not intrinsically noble or in any way “closer to nature.” Mr. Lévi-Strauss was withering, for example, when describing the Caduveo, whom he portrayed as a tribe so in rebellion against nature — and thus doomed — that it even shunned procreation, choosing to “reproduce” by abducting children from enemy tribes.

His descriptions of American Indian tribes bear little relation to the sentimental and pastoral clichés that have become commonplace. Mr. Lévi-Strauss also made sharp distinctions between the primitive and the modern, focusing on the development of writing and historical awareness. It was an awareness of history, in his view, that allowed the development of science and the evolution and expansion of the West. But he worried about the fate of the West. It was, he wrote in The New York Review of Books, “allowing itself to forget or destroy its own heritage.”

With the fading of myth’s power in the modern West, he also suggested that music had taken on myth’s function. Music, he argued, had the ability to suggest, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society.

But Mr. Lévi-Strauss rejected Rousseau’s idea that humankind’s problems derive from society’s distortions of nature. In Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s view, there is no alternative to such distortions. Each society must shape itself out of nature’s raw material, he believed, with law and reason as the essential tools.

This application of reason, he argued, created universals that could be found across all cultures and times. He became known as a structuralist because of his conviction that a structural unity underlies all of humanity’s mythmaking, and he showed how those universal motifs played out in societies, even in the ways a village was laid out.

For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, for example, every culture’s mythology was built around oppositions: hot and cold, raw and cooked, animal and human. And it is through these opposing “binary” concepts, he said, that humanity makes sense of the world.

This was quite different from what most anthropologists had been concerned with. Anthropology had traditionally sought to disclose differences among cultures rather than discovering universals. It had been preoccupied not with abstract ideas but with the particularities of rituals and customs, collecting and cataloguing them.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s “structural” approach, seeking universals about the human mind, cut against that notion of anthropology. He did not try to determine the various purposes served by a society’s practices and rituals. He was never interested in the kind of fieldwork that anthropologists of a later generation, like Clifford Geertz, took on, closely observing and analyzing a society as if from the inside. (He began Tristes Tropiques with the statement “I hate traveling and explorers.”)

The Times obituary cited his critics:

Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s ideas shook his field. But his critics were plentiful. They attacked him for ignoring history and geography, using myths from one place and time to help illuminate myths from another, without demonstrating any direct connection or influence.

In an influential critical survey of his work in 1970, the Cambridge University anthropologist Edmund Leach wrote of Mr. Lévi-Strauss: “Even now, despite his immense prestige, the critics among his professional colleagues greatly outnumber the disciples.”

Mr. Leach himself doubted whether Mr. Lévi-Strauss, during his fieldwork in Brazil, could have conversed with “any of his native informants in their native language” or stayed long enough to confirm his first impressions. Some of Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s theoretical arguments, including his explanation of cannibals and their tastes, have been challenged by empirical research.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss conceded that his strength was in his interpretations of what he discovered and thought that his critics did not sufficiently credit the cumulative impact of those speculations. “Why not admit it?” he once said to an interviewer, Didier Eribon, in Conversations with Lévi-Strauss (1988). “I was fairly quick to discover that I was more a man for the study than for the field.”

The Economist (14 November 2009)

BEFORE Claude Lévi-Strauss revolutionised the discipline, anthropology in France, and generally elsewhere, was a matter of ill-attended lectures in small, cold halls, and the collection of feathers and fish-hooks as evidence of the quaint divergences of the “primitive” tribes of mankind. He made it as fashionable as philosophy and poetry, both of which he wove through his ethnographical studies as perhaps only French intellectuals can. The proper study of mankind was indeed man: not in his politicking, warring or banking, but naked, painting his body, hunting bears, snaring birds. Here lay the universal truths about how the human mind worked and what man was.

Obedient to Jean Jacques Rousseau, who always “set him aflame”, Mr Lévi-Strauss observed men from afar. He never got too near or stayed too long in his rare stints of field-work, mostly in Brazil in the 1930s; he grasped only a few words of the languages, and avoided the “hateful” distractions of individual characters. In the bitter phrase of Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom he sparred for years, he preferred to view men like ants. He focused not on their differences but on the deep-lying patterns and systems in everything they did, until he could proclaim that all tribal myths were reducible to one formula, and that all human thought, “savage” or not, was built up from binary opposites such as hot and cold, night and day, raw and cooked, good and bad. Round these concepts whole societies, as well as stories, were organised.

Mr Lévi-Strauss, throwing down the gauntlet in La Pensée Sauvage in 1962, saw nothing primitive about the tribes he studied. Totemism, for example, was a system as complex as the Linnaean classification. In tribal myths, apparently diverse and arbitrary elements—eruptions by lizards and woodpeckers, the significance of black arrows or the artemisia plant—were suddenly revealed to have a universal unity at their heart, a quest for objective knowledge and origins as acute as any in the West. The minds behind them were not savage, just “untamed”. The salient difference was that his tribesmen stayed within their limits, simply putting the materials they had together in new ways, like handymen or bricoleurs. “Civilised” man, on the other hand, tried to defy his constraints and change the world with new inventions, like an engineer.

The world needed both these types, said Mr Lévi-Strauss. And he embodied both. He too hopped from subject to subject like a bricoleur, discarding philosophy for its arid moralising, giving up law out of sheer boredom, vaunting socialism until it tired him, turning to anthropology as if he was still a fascinated boy in a curio shop. He abandoned theories like scorched earth in the forest. But the far-sighted engineer in him set up a “laboratory” at the Collège de France, where he held the brand-new chair of social anthropology from 1959 to 1982, and produced the four huge volumes of Mythologiques (1964-71), in which he tracked 813 myths the length of the American continent. He happily called himself both “neolithic” and a man of science.

Generations of students considered him the father of structuralism—the theory of underlying order in everything. This annoyed him. He invoked the word in the 1950s mostly in homage to linguists like Roman Jakobson, who had posited binary opposites (voiced and voiceless elements) as the building blocks of language. Thereafter structuralism had become a “vogue”, he thought, “besmirched” by being wrongly applied, and weirdly linking him with thinkers—Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault—with whom he had nothing in common.

But there was really no avoiding structure in his life. He loved Rameau’s music, Poussin’s paintings. His own career appeared to contain a fair element of chance: the second world war, with exile in New York, that led him to Jakobson, or his meetings with Max Ernst and André Breton, who taught him to look at objects with a surrealist’s eye. And yet possibly all this too, as he wrote in Tristes Tropiques in 1955, exemplified how, over time, “events without any apparent connection, and originating from incongruous periods and places…suddenly crystallise into a sort of edifice conceived by an architect…”

Ever diffident and retiring, he wished to be remembered only for his “moment in anthropological thought”: an effort at systematising cultures as profound, he hoped, as what Karl Marx had done for ideologies, or Sigmund Freud for dreams. Proselytising was left to his difficult, often beautiful, books and the pages of his journal L’Homme. The existentialists, and all who thought that man should be studied as an individual rather than en bloc, noisily attacked him. He dismissed their “shop-girl metaphysics”.

Before his immense age turned him into a national treasure for thinkers of all stripes and none, greens claimed him, and he was happy to be claimed. The consumer filth and monoculture of the “civilised” world had depressed him ever since the writing of Tristes Tropiques. As he faded, he mourned the vanishing of the tribes. “Primitive” man was not nobler or purer than he was, but they were, in the deepest sense, connected: for universal laws linked his thinking, in all its book-lined complexity, to that of the Indian clad only in tree-bark, trailing a deer along a forest path.

Agence France Presse contained the following obituary:

French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who helped shape Western thinking about human civilisation, has died at the age of 100, his publisher and colleagues said.

Levi-Strauss died on Friday and was buried at a private service in the Burgundy village of Lignerolles, where he had a house, senior colleagues said.

"Two years ago he broke his hip and he had been very tired ever since. He died at a grand old age," said Philippe Desacola, his successor as head of the social anthropology laboratory at the College of France research institute.

A family friend said relatives chose to wait before announcing his death to protect their privacy and avoid a media storm at his funeral.

Trained as a philosopher, Levi-Strauss shot to prominence with his 1955 book Tristes Tropiques (A World on the Wane), a haunting account of travels and studies in the Amazon basin and one of the 20th century's major works.

Paying tribute, President Nicolas Sarkozy gave "homage to a tireless humanist, a curious academic who was always in search of new knowledge, to a man free of any sectarianism or indoctrination."

The French leader described him as a "very great scholar, always open to the world, who created modern anthropology and raised the reputation of French human and social sciences to its highest level."

His predecessor Jacques Chirac, who opened the Paris museum of tribal arts at Levi-Strauss' side in 2006, paid respect to "a thinker who dedicated his life to understanding and explaining cultures, their strengths, their diversity, their greatness and their fragility."

Levi-Strauss was a leading proponent of structuralism, which sought to uncover the hidden, unconscious or primitive patterns of thought believed to determine the outer reality of human culture and relationships.

Structuralism was also, Levi-Strauss liked to say, "the search for unsuspected harmonies."

French academia and the cultural elite had mobilised for his 100th birthday last year to pay homage to Levi-Strauss with a programme of films, lectures and reflection on his contribution to modern thinking.

Among the more striking conclusions of his work was the idea that there is no fundamental difference between the belief systems and myths of so-called "primitive" races and those of modern Western societies.

He was the oldest member of France's prestigious Academie of leading intellectuals, a respected but retiring figure, who had said he no longer felt at home on an overpopulated planet.

In a 2005 television interview, Levi-Strauss expressed worry about ending his days in "this world that I do not love."

"What I see are the current devastation, the frightening disappearances of living species, be they plants or animals. Because of its current density, the human species is living in a type of internally poisonous regime."

Levi-Strauss was born in Brussels in 1908, the son of French Jewish parents from the German-speaking region of Alsace. He studied philosophy and in 1935 went to Brazil, where he became a professor at the University of Sao Paolo.

He studied the lives of the tribes of the Mato Grosso and the Amazonian rainforest, collecting material for theories on the underlying structures of human relationships and myths shared by various cultures.

Returning to France in 1939 he was conscripted, but after the Nazi invasion he was, as a Jew, forced to flee to the United States, where he taught while awaiting his chance to return home and restart his career.

He was given the chair in social anthropology at the College de France in 1959, where he worked until retirement in 1982.

"Straddling the worlds of philosophy and science, his work is essential for any attempt to reflect on our society and how it works," said Denis Bertholet, one of Levi-Strauss' biographers.

"He had an ecological approach to the world and to individuals that was ahead of its time."

Levi-Strauss was married three times, and had two sons.