Claude Gustave Lévi-Strauss

Biography:

Claude Gustave Lévi-Strauss
The French social anthropologist Claude Gustave Lévi-Strauss (born 1908) became a leading scholar in the structural approach to social anthropology.
Claude Lévi-Strauss was born on November 28, 1908, in Brussels, Belgium, of a cultured Jewish family. He grew up in France, attended a lycée in Paris, and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, University of Paris. After holding several provincial teaching posts, he became interested in anthropology and accepted an appointment as professor of sociology at São Paulo University, Brazil (1935-1939), which enabled him to do field research among Brazil's Indian tribes.
Lévi-Strauss returned to wartime France and served in the army (1939-1941). He taught in New York City at the New School for Social Research and at the école Libre deśtudes (1942-1945). He was also cultural attachéin the French embassy (1946-1947).
Back in France, Lévi-Strauss was associate director of the Musée de I'Homme, director of the école Pratique des Hautes études, and editor of Man: Review of French Anthropology. From 1960 he was professor of social anthropology, professor of comparative religions of nonliterate people, and director of the Laboratory of Social Anthropology at the College of France.
Lévi-Strauss's fame began with his book Tristes Tropiques (A World on the Wane, 1961). It is partly biographical, partly a philosophical reflection on travel, and mainly a systematic account of four primitive South American Indian tribes. In this and his next influential book, The Savage Mind (1966), he expressed his belief that in their potential all men are intellectually equal. Instead of primitive man's being frozen in his culture, he wrote, "A primitive people is not a backward or retarded people; indeed it may possess a genius for invention or action that leaves the achievements of civilized peoples far behind."
Citing examples, Lévi-Strauss argued that primitive man's conceptual mental structures, though of a different order from those of advanced man, are just as rich, utilitar-Hautes E ian, theoretical, complex, and scientific. There is no primitive mind or modern mind but "mind-as-such," in which is locked a structural way of thinking that brings order out of chaos and enables man to develop social systems to suit his needs. Man's mental structures and ways of achieving order are derived as much from primitive magic as from Western science, as much from primitive myth as from Western literature, and as much from primitive totemism as from Western morality and religion.
Lévi-Strauss's thesis, which excited world attention, is that if social scientists can understand man's mental structures, they can then build a study of man which is as scientific as the laws of gravity. If order exists anywhere, says Lévi-Strauss as a structuralist, then order exists everywhere, even in the brain.
Lévi-Strauss's search for the common denominator of human thought derives from structural linguistics, a 20th-century science which set out to uncover the possible relationships between the origins of human speech and the origins of culture. He goes beyond language in adding as concepts for social order such activities as music, art, ritual, myth, religion, literature, cooking, tatooing, intermarriage, the kinship system, and the barter of goods and services. He sees each as another related way by which a society maintains itself. Man's mental structures in bringing order out of chaos, no matter how divergent his patterns may seem in old and new cultures, may derive from a common mental code.
The work of Lévi-Strauss seeks to stimulate thinking and research on breaking the mystery of this code. His popularity rests on his belief that there are no superior cultures, that man acts according to a logical structure in his brain, and that once the code of this logical structure can be discovered, the human sciences can be as scientific as the natural sciences.
Lévi-Strauss was awarded the Wenner-Gren Foundation's Viking Fund Medal for 1966 and the Erasmus Prize in 1975. He has been awarded several honorary doctorate degrees from prestigious institutions such as Oxford, Yale, Harvard, and Columbia. He has also held several academic memberships including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
Further Reading
Lévi-Strauss's life and influence are recounted in E. Nelson and Tanya Hayes, eds., Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Anthropologist as Hero (1970). Octavio Paz, Claude Lévi-Strauss: An Introduction (trans. 1970), is an admiring exploration of his ideas. Edmund Leach, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1970), is a critical study. Also useful is Georges Charbonnier, ed., Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss (1961; trans. 1969). The general background is discussed in Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture (1968).

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss.

(born Nov. 28, 1908, Brussels, Belg.) Belgian-French social anthropologist and leading exponent of structuralism. Lévi-Strauss originally studied philosophy at the University of Paris (1927 – 32) but went on to teach sociology at the University of São Paulo (1934 – 37) and to conduct field research on the Indians of Brazil. At the New School for Social Research in New York City (1941 – 45) he came under the influence of the linguist Roman Jakobson; he came to view culture as a system of communication, analogous to a language, and constructed models based on structural linguistics, information theory, and cybernetics to interpret them. He attempted to identify universal structures of the mind as reflected in myths, cultural symbols, and social organization. From 1950 to 1974 he was director of studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and in 1959 he joined the faculty of the Collège de France. Among his major works are The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), Tristes tropiques (1955), Structural Anthropology (1961, vol. 2, 1973), and the four-volume Mythologiques (1964 – 71).

French Literature Companion: Claude Lévi-strauss
Lévi-strauss, Claude (b. 1908). Structural anthropologist. Like the linguist Saussure, to whom he owes much, his theories have been influential in many domains beyond academic anthropology and have helped to form the way of looking at the world associated with Structuralism. Born in Brussels, educated in Paris, Lévi-Strauss took his first degree in law and the agrégation in philosophy. In 1934 he went to teach at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, where he developed an interest in social anthropology. After a brief stay in France in 1939 he returned to America, lecturing in New York (1940-5), and becoming Conseiller Culturel at the French Embassy in Washington at the end of the war. In 1948 he returned to Paris and was appointed director of studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études from 1950 to 1974, and professor of social anthropology at the Collège de France from 1959. He is a member of the Académie Française.
Lévi-Strauss's career has not been conventional. His training as a philosopher rather than as an anthropologist meant that he was considered something of an amateur in ethnographic fieldwork by certain British and American anthropologists, particularly because of the brevity of his periods of observation and his inability to converse fluently in their own language with the peoples he studied. His analyses of kinship theory (in Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté, 1949) have been subject to particularly strong criticism for their alleged superficiality and poor evidence. But Lévi-Strauss's Structuralist technique does not depend for its verification on a multiplicity of empirical evidence, for the data is not used cumulatively in the same way as in a more traditional pragmatic or positivistic enquiry.His background in philosophy did not, however, ensure that he was taken seriously by philosophers either. As an anthropologist in the broad sense of the term, he crossed swords publicly with Sartre in 1962 in La Pensée sauvage, protesting against what he saw as Sartre's misrepresentation of the complexity of the thought-processes of primitive peoples in the Critique de la raison dialectique (1960). Sartre retaliated by accusing Lévi-Strauss of having no comprehension of the nature of dialectical as opposed to analytic reason; though now 30 years old, the controversy has not been definitively settled. It is evidently unfair to hold the broad nature of Lévi-Strauss's formation against him, not least because he certainly became a specialized anthropologist. But he himself describes intellectual activity with positive approval as a kind of bricolage, the putting-together creatively of various previously unconnected odds-and-ends. In his remarkable auto-biographical essay, Tristes tropiques (1955), he stresses the wide variety of factors at work in his own intellectual background, presenting himself as formed initially by the triple impact of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and geology, from which three disparate domains he claims to have learnt that ‘understanding consists in the reduction of one type of reality to another, and that the true reality is never the most obvious’.
The idea that understanding is necessarily reductive is the foundation-stone of Lévi-Strauss's brand of Structuralism. The structures that may be discovered beneath the apparent diversity of reality are in a strong sense common, for they have their origin in the universal structures of the human mind. It is not individual human subjects that pattern the world for Lévi-Strauss; it is rather Mind that, as part of nature, plays out its determined destiny in its individual embodiments. Lévi-Strauss's massive four-volume study of the logic of myths, Mythologiques (1964-71), shows the practical implications of this view most clearly, for individual myths are studied not for their intrinsic meaning, but for their place in the wider network of myths from which their meaning is differentially derived. But its implications are further-reaching than this, affecting areas as diverse as psychoanalysis and aesthetics (Structuralism is broadly supportive of the notion of universal unconscious patterns in life and art) and history and ethics (it is anti-historicist, anti-anthropocentric, and anti-historicist, for it displaces the human subject from its central position as creator of order). Ironically, however, its major influence has been in the domain of literary theory, in ways which Lévi-Strauss himself views with considerable suspicion. Structures, he believes, are evident only through comparative study. A Structuralist analysis of a single text (such as Barthes's S/Z) is a contradiction in terms. For Lévi-Strauss, literary Structuralism is founded on false premisses and leads only to a dead-end.
Bibliography
D. Sperber, Le Structuralisme en anthropologie (1968)
E. Leach, Lévi-Strauss (1970)

Philosophy Dictionary: Claude Lévi-Strauss
Lévi-Strauss, Claude ) French anthropologist (1908- and structuralist. Educated in law, Lévi-Strauss received a doctorate in philosophy at the Sorbonne. He was appointed to a French university mission to Brazil, serving as professor at São Paulo from 1935 to 1938. From there he led several expeditions into the Mato Grosso and the Amazon. Subsequently he taught in the United States before receiving the chair of social anthropology in the Collège de France, from which he retired in 1982. Lévi-Strauss is the most important structuralist anthropologist. He learned from Saussure the importance of studying the unconscious infrastructure of human phenomena, and of seeing the elements of a system only in terms of their positional significance or relations with other elements. Part of his doctoral thesis made Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949, trs. as The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 1969), demonstrating the formal similarity between kinship systems and the phonetic systems studied by Saussure. Later works include La Pensée sauvage (1966, trs. as The Savage Mind, 1968), in which he opposes Lévy-Bruhl's doctrine of ‘primitive mentality’, and Tristes Tropiques (1955, trs. under the same title, 1961).
Columbia Encyclopedia: Lévi-Strauss, Claude

(klōd lā'vē-strous) , 1908–, French anthropologist, b. Brussels, Belgium. He carried out research in Brazil from 1935 to 1939. From 1942 to 1945 he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In 1948 he was appointed professor at the Institut d'Ethnologie, Univ. of Paris, and research associate at the National Science Research Fund, Paris. After 1959 he was professor of anthropology at the Collège de France. He is best known as the founder of structural anthropology, a theory heavily influenced by linguistics that tends to view culture as a communication system, and which proceeds by reducing cultural institutions and products into their relevent constituent units, thereby allowing one to discover the principles of their operation. He was elected to the French Academy in 1973. A memoir, Tristes Tropiques (1955, tr. 1961), was both a critical and popular success. His other works include The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949, tr. 1969), Race and History (1952), The Savage Mind (1962, tr. 1966), Totemism (1962, tr. 1964), Structural Anthropology, (2 vol., 1958–73, tr. 1963–76), The View from Afar (1983, tr. 1985), The Jealous Potter (1985, tr. 1988), and The Story of Lynx (1991, tr. 1995). Mythologiques is a structural analysis of Native American myths and consists of The Raw and the Cooked (1964, tr. 1969), From Honey to Ashes (1967, tr. 1973), The Origin of Table Manners (1968, tr. 1978), and The Naked Man (1971, tr. 1981).
Bibliography
See studies by E. N. Hayes, ed. (1970), E. R. Leach (1970), O. Paz (tr. 1970), H. Gardner (1972), and C. Geertz (1988).

Word Tutor: Levi-Strauss
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IN BRIEF: n. - French cultural anthropologist who promoted structural analysis of social systems (born in 1908).

Quotes By: Claude Levi-Strauss
Quotes: "Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing." "Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress." "The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own." "I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact." "Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization; and for us European earth-dwellers, the adventure played out in the heart of the New World signifies in the first place that it was not our world and that we bear responsibility for the crime of its destruction." "Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of progress are in danger of failing to recognize... the immense riches accumulated by the human race. By underrating the achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accomplished." See more famous quotes by Claude Levi-Strauss

Wikipedia: Claude Lévi-Strauss


It has been suggested that this article be split into articles entitled Claude Lévi-Strauss and Structuralist theory of mythology, accessible from a disambiguation page. (Discuss)
This article is about the anthropologist. For the clothing manufacturer, see Levi Strauss.

Western Philosophy20th-century philosophy
Name
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Birth
November 28 1908 (1908--) (age 98)(Brussels, Belgium)
School/tradition
continental
Main interests
Anthropology, Society, Kinship, Linguistics
Notable ideas
Structuralism, Mythography, Culinary triangle, Bricolage
Influences
Saussure, Jakobson, Boas, Mauss, Trubetzkoy, Rousseau, Marx, Durkheim, Freud
Influenced
Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, Jean Piaget, Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, Louis Althusser, Michael Jackson (anthropology), Rodney Needham
Claude Lévi-Strauss (IPA pronunciation [klod levi stʁos]) (born November 28, 1908) is a 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 practice of structuralism. Lévi-Strauss is a reference for authors such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Judith Butler.
Biography
Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in Brussels. He was raised in the 16th arondissement in Paris, on a street where he still lives today, named after the artist Nicolas Poussin. In his career Strauss came to admire and write about Poussin. Strauss studied law and philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. He did not pursue his study of law, but agrégated in philosophy in 1931 after an epiphany resulting from a late night conversation strolling around the grounds of True's Yard, Kings Lynn with renowned cryptozoologist Lewis Daly.[citation needed] 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 undertook his first ethnographic fieldwork, conducting periodic research forays into the 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 returned for 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. Edmund Leach 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.
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. Lévi-Strauss was offered a position in New York and granted admission to the United States. A series of voyages brought him via South America to Puerto Rico where he was investigated by the FBI after German letters in his luggage aroused the suspicions of customs agents. Lévi-Strauss spent most of the war in New York City. Together with 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 quickly came to be regarded as one of the most important anthropological works on kinship. It 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 another.[1]
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 the 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. Lévi-Strauss combined exquisitely beautiful prose, dazzling philosophical meditation, and ethnographic analysis of the 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 worldwide celebrity, Lévi-Strauss spent the second half of the 1960s working on his master project, a four-volume study called Mythologiques. In it, he 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 masterwork.



Sketch of Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Lévi-Strauss completed the final volume of Mythologiques in 1971 and in 1973 he was elected to the Académie Française, 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


The culinary triangle, diagramming a structural analysis of symbolism within cuisine. Adapted from The Raw and the Cooked.
‎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 when 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 exogamously. 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 Mythologiques). 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.
The structuralist approach to myth
Lévi-Strauss sees a basic paradox in the study of myth. On one hand, mythical stories are fantastic and unpredictable: thus, the content of myth seems completely arbitrary. On the other hand, myths from different cultures are surprisingly similar:
On the one hand it would seem that in the course of a myth anything is likely to happen. […] But on the other hand, this apparent arbitrariness is belied by the astounding similarity between myths collected in widely different regions. Therefore the problem: If the content of myth is contingent [i.e., arbitrary], how are we to explain the fact that myths throughout the world are so similar?[2]
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 actually 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".[3]
According to Lévi-Strauss, "mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution".[4] In other words, myths consist of (1) elements that oppose or contradict each other and (2) other elements that "mediate", or resolve, those oppositions.
For example, Lévi-Strauss thinks the trickster of many Native American mythologies acts as a "mediator". Lévi-Strauss's argument hinges on two facts about the Native American trickster: (1) the trickster has a contradictory and unpredictable personality; (2) the trickster is almost always a raven or a coyote. 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 and death: 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 don't catch their food. Thus, he argues, "we have a mediating structure of the following type":[5]

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 is ultimately 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 a contradictory personality when they appear as the mythical trickster:
The trickster is a mediator. Since his mediating function occupies a position halfway between two polar terms, he must retain something of that duality—namely an ambiguous and equivocal character.[6]
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:
If it were possible to prove in this instance, too, that the apparent arbitrariness of the mind, its supposedly spontaneous flow of inspiration, and its seemingly uncontrolled inventiveness [are ruled by] laws operating at a deeper level […] if the human mind appears determined even in the realm of mythology, a fortiori it must also be determined in all its spheres of activity.[7]
Out of all the products of culture, myths seem the most fantastic and unpredictable. Therefore, Lévi-Strauss claims, if even mythical thought obeys universal laws, then all human thought must obey universal laws.
References and Notes
1. ^ James A. Boon, David M. Schneider Kinship vis-a-vis Myth Contrasts in Levi-Strauss' Approaches to Cross-Cultural Comparison American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 76, No. 4 (Oct., 1974), pp. 799-817
2. ^ Structural Anthropology, p. 208
3. ^ The Raw and the Cooked, p. 10
4. ^ Structural Anthropology, p. 224
5. ^ Structural Anthropology, p. 224
6. ^ Structural Anthropology, p. 226
7. ^ The Raw and the Cooked, p. 10
Sources
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Trans. Claire Jacobson. New York: Basic Books, 1963.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked. Trans. John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.
Edmund Leach, Lévi-Strauss (1970) Fontana/Collins ISBN 0006322557
Selected bibliography
Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, ed. *Rodney Needham, trans. J. H. Bell, J. R. von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham, 1969)
Race et histoire (1952, UNESCO; Extract from "Race and History" - in English; see also The Race Question, UNESCO, 1950)
Tristes tropiques (1955, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman, 1973) - also translated as A World on the Wane
Anthropologie structurale (1958, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, 1963)
Le Totemisme aujourdhui (1962, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham, 1963)
La Pensée sauvage (1962, The Savage Mind, 1966)
Mythologiques I-IV (trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman
Le Cru et le cuit (1964, The Raw and the Cooked, 1969)
Du miel aux cendres (1966, From Honey to Ashes, 1973)
L'Origine des manières de table, 1968, The Origin of Table Manners, 1978
L'Homme nu (1971, The Naked Man, 1981)
Anthropologie structurale deux (1973, Structural Anthropology, Vol. II, trans. M. Layton, 1976)
La Voie des masques (1972, The Way of the Masks, trans. Sylvia Modelski, 1982)
Paroles donnés (1984, Anthropology and Myth: Lectures, 1951-1982, trans. Roy Willis, 1987)
Le Regard éloigne (1983, The View from Afar, trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss, 1985)
La Potière jalouse (1985, The Jealous Potter, trans. Bénédicte Chorier, 1988)
Histoire de lynx (1991)
Regarder, écouter, lire (1993, Look, Listen, Read trans. Brian Singer, 1997)