Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi Strauss (IPA pronunciation [klod levi stʁos]) born November 28, 1908, is a French anthropologist who became one of the twentieth century's greatest intellectuals by developing structuralism as a method of understanding human society and culture. (see Structural Anthropology.)

Life

Though thought of as French, he was born Belgium as the son of an artist, and a member of an intellectual French Jewish family. He began his University studies in law and philosophy and was deeply interested in classic literature and music. He became bored with legal matters and e studied psychoanalysis,geology, and political science with great interest. Finally, Levi-Strauss found Anthropology his calling. He liked the fact that he could actually meet with the people of different cultures and interact with them. He graduated in Philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1931 and married Dina Dreyfus in 1932. 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 until 1939.

He returned to France in 1939 to join the French Army and take part in the war effort, but after French capitulation to the Germans, being a Jew, he fled Paris. While there, Lévi Strauss was offered a position in New York and granted admission to the United States. He 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 him 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. Lévi Strauss spent most of the war in New York City from 1942 to 1945. He married Rose Marie Ullmo in 1946, and they had one son. Like many other intellectual emigrés, he taught at the New School for Social Research. Along with Jacques Maritain, Henri Focillon and Russian semiotician 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. This 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.

He later returned to France as a professor at the Institut d'Ethnologie, University of Paris, and as a research associate at the National Science Research Fund, Paris. In 1954 he married Monique Roman and they also had one son. Later he served as professor of anthropology at the Collège de France. He was elected to the French Academy in 1973. 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, It was reviewed favorably by Simone de Beauvoir, a former classmate at the Sorbonne, 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.

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.

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 honor 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. In the twenty second century,he continued to publish occasional meditations on art, music and poetry, as well as interviews and reminiscences of earlier periods of his life.

Work

Lévi Strauss lived in Brazil from 1935 to 1939 and it was during this time that he carried out 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 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.

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".

The first half of the book The Savage Mind 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.

Critique

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 exclusively 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.

There are three broad choices involved in the divergence of thought in the different schools of thought in social science; 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 have been 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? Lévi Strauss is a founder of Structural Anthropology, and as such chose to use data that emphasized the demands of the social order. He had no difficulty bringing out the inconsistencies and triviality of individualistic accounts. 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, he utilized 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 previously 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. For Lévi Strauss, a proper solution to the puzzle was 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 essential qualities of structural thinking position. 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.

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.

Selected Publications

• 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; Race and History)
• Tristes tropiques (1955, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman, 1973)
• 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)

External Links

• Lecture: The Birth of Historical Societies (Hitchcock Lectures), October 3 and 4, 1984, UC Berkeley (online audio file)
• Claude Lévi Strauss' profile on the Académie française site
• Linguistic and Commodity Exchanges by Elmer G. Wiens. Examines the structural differences between barter and monetary commodity exchanges and oral and written linguistic exchanges.
• Lévi Strauss Interview | In Psikeba

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