Claude Lévi-Strauss - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

Claude Lvi-Strauss
Lvi-Strauss in November 2005

Born 28 November 1908
Brussels, Belgium
Died 30 October 2009 (aged 100)
Paris, France
School Structuralism
Main interests Anthropology
Society
Kinship
Linguistics
Notable ideas Structuralism
Mythography
Culinary triangle
Bricolage
Marx
Influences
Influenced
Signature
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Claude Lvi-Strauss (French: [klod levi stos]; 28 November
1908 30 October 2009)
[1][2][3]
was a French Emigrant
anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along
with James George Frazer and Franz Boas,
[4]
the "father of
modern anthropology".
[5]
The work of Lvi-Strauss was also
key in the development of the theory of structuralism and
structural anthropology.
[6]
He was honored by universities
throughout the world and held the chair of Social
Anthropology at the Collge de France (19591982), and was
elected a member of the Acadmie franaise in 1973.
He argued that the "savage" mind had the same structures as
the "civilized" mind and that human characteristics are the
same everywhere.
[7][8]
These observations culminated in his
famous book Tristes Tropiques, which positioned him as one
of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought,
where his ideas reached into many fields in the humanities, as
well as sociology and philosophy. Structuralism has been
defined as "the search for the underlying patterns of thought
in all forms of human activity."
[2]
1 Biography
1.1 Early life, education, and career
1.2 Expatriation
1.3 Structural anthropology
1.4 Later life and death
2 Theories
2.1 Summary
2.2 Anthropological theories
2.3 The structuralist approach to myth
2.3.1 The Savage Mind: Bricoleur and
Engineer
2.3.2 Criticism
3 Bibliography
4 Interviews

Claude Lvi-Strauss - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Lvi-Strauss
1 of 17 7/25/2014 11:28 PM
5 See also
6 Notes
7 References
8 Further reading
9 External links
Early life, education, and career
Claude Lvi-Strauss was born to French parents with Jewish background who were living in Brussels at the
time, where his father was working as a painter.
[9]
He grew up in Paris, living on a street of the 16th
arrondissement named after the artist Claude Lorrain, whose work he admired and later wrote about.
[10]
During
the First World War, he lived with his maternal grandfather, who was the rabbi of the synagogue of
Versailles.
[11]
He attended the Lyce Janson de Sailly and the Lyce Condorcet.
At the Sorbonne in Paris, Lvi-Strauss studied law and philosophy. He did not pursue his study of law, but
agrgated in philosophy in 1931. In 1935, after a few years of secondary-school teaching, he took up a
last-minute offer to be part of a French cultural mission to Brazil in which he would serve as a visiting professor
of sociology at the University of So Paulo while his wife, Dina, served as a visiting professor of ethnology.
The couple lived and did their anthropological work in Brazil from 1935 to 1939. During this time, while he
was a visiting professor of sociology, Claude undertook his only ethnographic fieldwork. He accompanied Dina,
a trained ethnographer in her own right who was also a visiting professor at the University of So Paulo, where
they conducted research forays into the Mato Grosso and the Amazon Rainforest. They first studied the
Guaycuru and Bororo Indian tribes, staying among them for a couple of days. In 1938 they returned for a
second, more than half-year-long expedition to study the Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib societies. At this time
his wife suffered an injury that prevented her from completing the study, which he concluded. This experience
cemented Lvi-Strauss's professional identity as an anthropologist. Edmund Leach suggests, from
Lvi-Strauss's own accounts in Tristes Tropiques, that he could not have spent more than a few weeks in any
one place and was never able to converse easily with any of his native informants in their native language,
which is uncharacteristic of anthropological research methods of participatory interaction with subjects to gain a
full understanding of a culture.
In the 1980s he suggested why he went vegetarian in pieces published in Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica
and other publications anthologized in the posthumous book Nous sommes tous des cannibales (2013): "A day
will come when the thought that to feed themselves, men of the past raised and massacred living beings and
complacently exposed their shredded flesh in displays shall no doubt inspire the same repulsion as that of the
travellers of the 16th and 17th century facing cannibal meals of savage American primitives in America,
Oceania or Africa."
Expatriation
Lvi-Strauss returned to France in 1939 to take part in the war effort, and was assigned as a liaison agent to the
Maginot Line. After the French capitulation in 1940, he was employed at a lyce in Montpellier, but then was
2 of 17 7/25/2014 11:28 PM
dismissed under the Vichy racial laws. (Lvi-Strauss's family, originally from Alsace, was of Jewish ancestry.)
By the same laws, he was denaturalized (stripped of French citizenship). He managed to escape Vichy France
by boat to Martinique,
[12]
from where he was finally able to travel on. In 1941, he was offered a position at the
New School for Social Research 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. Lvi-Strauss spent most of the war in New York City.
Together with other intellectual emigrs, 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 cole Libre des Hautes
tudes, a sort of university-in-exile for French academics.
The war years in New York were formative for Lvi-Strauss in several ways. His relationship with Jakobson
helped shape his theoretical outlook (Jakobson and Lvi-Strauss are considered to be two of the central figures
on which structuralist thought is based).
[13]
In addition, Lvi-Strauss was also exposed to the American
anthropology espoused by Franz Boas, who taught at Columbia University. In 1942, while having dinner at the
Faculty House at Columbia, Boas died of a heart attack in Lvi-Strauss's arms.
[14]
This intimate association
with Boas gave his early work a distinctive American inclination that helped facilitate its acceptance in the U.S.
After a brief stint from 1946 to 1947 as a cultural attach to the French embassy in Washington, D.C.,
Lvi-Strauss returned to Paris in 1948. At this time 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.
[15]
Structural anthropology
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
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, Lvi-Strauss argued that kinship was based on the alliance between two
families that formed when women from one group married men from another.
[16]
Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lvi-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
Muse de l'Homme before finally becoming professor (directeur d'tudes) of the fifth section of the cole
Pratique des Hautes tudes, the 'Religious Sciences' section where Marcel Mauss was previously professor, the
title of which chair he renamed "Comparative Religion of Non-Literate Peoples".
While Lvi-Strauss was well known in academic circles, in 1955 he became one of France's best known
intellectuals by publishing Tristes Tropiques, published in Paris that year by Plon (and translated into English in
1973, published by Penguin). Essentially, this book was a memoir detailing his time as a French expatriate
throughout the 1930s, and his travels. Lvi-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 Lvi-Strauss the prize because Tristes
Tropiques was non-fiction.
Lvi-Strauss was named to a chair in Social Anthropology at the Collge 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
3 of 17 7/25/2014 11:28 PM
Wikinews has related
news: French
structuralist Claude
Lvi-Strauss dies at age
100
intellectual program, he began a series of institutions to establish anthropology as a discipline in France,
including the Laboratory for Social Anthropology where new students could be trained, and a new journal,
l'Homme, for publishing the results of their research.
In 1962, Lvi-Strauss published what is for many people his most important work, La Pense Sauvage,
translated into English as The Savage Mind. The French title is an untranslatable pun because the word pense
means both "thought" and "pansy," while sauvage has a range of meanings different from English "savage."
Lvi-Strauss supposedly suggested that the English title be Pansies for Thought, borrowing from a speech by
Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet (ACT IV, Scene V). French editions of La Pense Sauvage are often printed
with an image of wild pansies on the cover.
The Savage Mind discusses not just "primitive" thought, a category defined by previous anthropologists, but
forms of thought common to all human beings. The first half of the book lays out Lvi-Strauss's theory of
culture and mind, while the second half expands this account into a theory of history and social change. This
latter part of the book engaged Lvi-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
fundamentally were free to act as they pleased. On the other hand, Sartre also was a leftist who was committed
to ideas such as that individuals were constrained by the ideologies imposed on them by the powerful.
Lvi-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, Lvi-Strauss spent the second half of the 1960s working on his master project, a
four-volume study called Mythologiques. In it, he followed a single myth from the tip of South America and all
of its variations from group to group up through Central America and eventually into the Arctic Circle, thus
tracing the myth's cultural evolution from one end of the Western hemisphere to the other. He accomplished this
in a typically structuralist way, examining the underlying structure of relationships among the elements of the
story rather than by focusing on the content of the story itself. While Pense Sauvage was a statement of
Lvi-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 Pense Sauvage,
despite its position as Lvi-Strauss's masterwork.
Lvi-Strauss completed the final volume of Mythologiques in 1971. On 14 May 1973 he was elected to the
Acadmie franaise, France's highest honour for an intellectual.
[17]
He was a member of other notable
academies worldwide, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He received the Erasmus Prize in
1973, the Meister-Eckhart-Prize for philosophy in 2003, and several honorary doctorates from universities such
as Oxford, Harvard, Yale and Columbia. He also was the recipient of the Grand-croix de la Lgion d'honneur,
was a Commandeur de l'ordre national du Mrite, and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. In 2005 he received
the XVII Premi Internacional Catalunya (Generalitat of Catalonia). After his retirement, he continued to publish
occasional meditations on art, music, and poetry.
Later life and death
In 2008 he became the first member of the Acadmie franaise to reach
the age of 100 and one of the few living authors to have his works
published in the Bibliothque de la Pliade. On the death of Maurice
Druon on 14 April 2009, he became the Dean of the Acadmie, its
longest-serving member.
He died on 30 October 2009, a few weeks before his 101st birthday.
[1]
The death was announced four days
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later.
[1]
French President Nicolas Sarkozy described him as "one of the greatest ethnologists of all time".
[18]
Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister, said Lvi-Strauss "broke with an ethnocentric vision of history
and humanity [...] At a time when we are trying to give meaning to globalisation, to build a fairer and more
humane world, I would like Claude Lvi-Strauss's universal echo to resonate more strongly".
[5]
The Daily
Telegraph said in its obituary that Lvi-Strauss was "one of the dominating postwar influences in French
intellectual life and the leading exponent of Structuralism in the social sciences".
[19]
Permanent secretary of the
Acadmie franaise Hlne Carrre d'Encausse said: "He was a thinker, a philosopher [...] We will not find
another like him".
[20]
Summary
Lvi-Strauss sought to apply the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure to anthropology.
[21]
At the time,
the family was traditionally considered the fundamental object of analysis, but was seen primarily as a
self-contained unit consisting of a husband, a wife, and their children. Nephews, cousins, aunts, uncles, and
grandparents all were treated as secondary. Lvi-Strauss argued that, however, akin to Saussure's notion of
linguistic value, families acquire determinate identities only through relations with one another. Thus he
inverted the classical view of anthropology, putting the secondary family members first and insisting on
analyzing the relations between units instead of the units themselves.
[22]
In his own analysis of the formation of the identities that arise through marriages between tribes, Lvi-Strauss
noted that the relation between the uncle and the nephew was to the relation between brother and sister, as the
relation between father and son is to that between husband and wife, that is, A is to B as C is to D. Therefore if
we know A, B, and C, we can predict D, just as if we know A and D, we can predict B and C. The goal of
Lvi-Strauss's structural anthropology, then, was to simplify the masses of empirical data into generalized,
comprehensible relations between units, which allow for predictive laws to be identified, such as A is to B as C
is to D.
[22]
Similarly, Lvi-Strauss identified myths as a type of speech through which a language could be discovered. His
work is a structuralist theory of mythology which attempted to explain how seemingly fantastical and arbitrary
tales, could be so similar across cultures. Because he believed there was not one "authentic" version of a myth,
rather that they were all manifestations of the same language, he sought to find the fundamental units of myth,
namely, the mytheme. Lvi-Strauss broke each of the versions of a myth down into a series of sentences,
consisting of a relation between a function and a subject. Sentences with the same function were given the same
number and bundled together. These are mythemes.
[23]
What Lvi-Strauss believed he had discovered when he examined the relations between mythemes was that a
myth consists of juxtaposed binary oppositions. Oedipus, for example, consists of the overrating of blood
relations and the underrating of blood relations, the autochthonous origin of humans and the denial of their
autochthonous origin. Influenced by Hegel, Lvi-Strauss believed that the human mind thinks fundamentally in
these binary oppositions and their unification (the thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad), and that these are what
make meaning possible. Furthermore, he considered the job of myth to be a sleight of hand, an association of an
irreconcilable binary opposition with a reconcilable binary opposition, creating the illusion, or belief, that the
former had been resolved.
[23]
Anthropological theories
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Claude Lvi-Strauss, 1955
Lvi-Strauss's 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 when contrasted against the background of an earlier generation's social theory.
He wrote about this relationship for decades.
A preference for "functionalist" explanations dominated the social sciences from the turn of the twentieth
century through the 1950s, which is to say that anthropologists and sociologists tried to state the purpose of a
social act or institution. The existence of a thing was explained, if it fulfilled a function. The only strong
alternative to that kind of analysis was historical explanation, accounting for the existence of a social fact by
stating how it came to be.
The idea of social function developed in two different ways, however. The English anthropologist Alfred
Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, who had read and admired the work of the French sociologist mile Durkheim,
argued that the goal of anthropological research was to find the collective function, such as what a religious
creed or a set of rules about marriage did for the social order as a whole. Behind this approach was an old idea,
the view that civilization developed through a series of phases from the primitive to the modern, everywhere in
the same manner. All of the activities in a given kind of society would partake of the same character; some sort
of internal logic would cause one level of culture to evolve into the next. On this view, a society can easily be
thought of as an organism, the parts functioning together as do the parts of a body.
In contrast, the more influential functionalism of Bronisaw Malinowski described the satisfaction of individual
needs, what a person derived by participating in a custom.
In the United States, where the shape of anthropology was set by the German-educated Franz Boas, the
preference was for historical accounts. This approach had obvious problems, which Lvi-Strauss praises Boas
for facing squarely.
Historical information seldom is available for non-literate cultures. The anthropologist fills in with comparisons
to other cultures and is forced to rely on theories that have no evidential basis whatsoever, the old notion of
universal stages of development or the claim that cultural resemblances are based on some unrecognized past
contact between groups. Boas came to believe that no overall pattern in social development could be proven; for
him, there was no single history, only histories.
There are three broad choices involved in the divergence of these schoolseach 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 always was 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 Lvi-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
The world began without the human race
and will certainly end without it.
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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 wayone postulates a trait of personality when needed.
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 may interact. But exactly
what they may dotrade, intermarryis 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 Lvi-Strauss, the methods of linguistics became a model for all his earlier examinations of society. His
analogies usually are from phonology (though also later from music, mathematics, chaos theory, cybernetics,
and so on).
"A really 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 languagenot a sound, but a category of
sound defined by the way it is distinguished from other categories through rules unique to the language. The
entire sound-structure of a language may be generated from a relatively small number of rules.
In the study of the kinship systems that first concerned him, this ideal of explanation allowed a comprehensive
organization of data that partly had been ordered by other researchers. The overall goal was to find out why
family relations differed among various South American cultures. The father might have great authority over
the son in one group, for example, with the relationship rigidly restricted by taboos. 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 sonif 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 Lvi-Strauss, this kind of work was considered "analytical in appearance only." It results in a chart that
is far more difficult to understand than the original data and is based on arbitrary abstractions (empirically,
fathers are older than sons, but it is only the researcher who declares that this feature explains their relations).
Furthermore, it doesn't explain anything. The explanation it offers is tautologicalif 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 rolesbrother, 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 may
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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 Lvi-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 existsister, sister's brother, brother's wife,
daughterbut there are no real-world examples of relationships that can be derived from that grouping. The
trouble with this view has been shown by the Australian anthropologist Augustus Elkin, who insisted on the
point that in a four class marriage system, the preferred marriage was with a classificatory mother' s brother's
daughter and never with the true one. Lvi-Strauss's atom of kinship structure deals only with consanguineal
kin. There is a big difference between the two situations, in that the kinship structure involving the
classificatory kin relations allows for the building of a system which can bring together thousands of people.
Lvi-Strauss's atom of kinship stops working once the true MoBrDa is missing. Lvi-Strauss also developed the
concept of the house society to describe those societies where the domestic unit is more central for social
organization than the descent group or lineage.
The purpose of structuralist explanation is to organize real data in the simplest effective way. All science, he
says, is either structuralist or reductionist. In confronting such matters as the incest taboo, one is facing an
objective limit of what the human mind has accepted so far. One could hypothesize some biological imperative
underlying it, but so far as social order is concerned, the taboo has the effect of an irreducible fact. The social
scientist can only work with the structures of human thought that arise from it.
And structural explanations can be tested and refuted. A mere analytic scheme that wishes causal relations into
existence is not structuralist in this sense.
Lvi-Strauss's later works are more controversial, in part because they impinge on the subject matter of other
scholars. He believed that modern life and all history was founded on the same categories and transformations
that he had discovered in the Brazilian back countryThe 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 happenedit 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 dure,'
the cultural outlook and forms of social organization that persisted for centuries around that sea. He is right in
that history is difficult to build up in non literate society, nevertheless, Jean Guiart's anthropological and Jos
Garanger's archeological work in central Vanuatu, bringing to the fore the skeletons of former chiefs described
in local myths, who had thus been living persons, shows that there can be some means of ascertaining the
history of some groups which otherwise would be deemed a-historical. Another issue is the experience that the
same person can tell one a myth highly charged in symbols, and some years later a sort of chronological history
claiming to be the chronic of a descent line (from examples in the Loyalty islands and New Zealand), the two
texts having in common that they each deal in topographical detail with the land-tenure claims of the said
descent line (see Douglas Oliver on the Siwai in Bougainville). Lvi-Strauss would agree to these aspects be
explained inside his seminar, but would never touch them on his own. The anthropological data content of the
myths was not his problem. He was only interested with the formal aspects of each story, considered by him as
8 of 17 7/25/2014 11:28 PM
the result of the workings of the collective unconscious of each group, which idea was taken from the linguists,
but cannot be proved in any way although he was adamant about its existence and would never accept any
discussion on this point.
The structuralist approach to myth
Lvi-Strauss sees a basic paradox in the study of myth. On one hand, mythical stories are fantastic and
unpredictable: the content of myth seems completely arbitrary. On the other hand, the myths of different
cultures are surprisingly similar:
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?
[24]
Lvi-Strauss proposed that universal laws must govern mythical thought and resolve this seeming paradox,
producing similar myths in different cultures. Each myth may seem unique, but he proposed it is just one
particular instance of a universal law of human thought. In studying myth, Lvi-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".
[25]
According to Lvi-Strauss, "mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their
resolution".
[26]
In other words, myths consist of:
elements that oppose or contradict each other and 1.
other elements that "mediate", or resolve, those oppositions. 2.
For example, Lvi-Strauss thinks the trickster of many Native American mythologies acts as a "mediator".
Lvi-Strauss's argument hinges on two facts about the Native American trickster:
the trickster has a contradictory and unpredictable personality; 1.
the trickster is almost always a raven or a coyote. 2.
Lvi-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. Lvi-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":
[26]
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By uniting herbivore traits with traits of beasts of prey, the raven and coyote somewhat reconcile herbivores and
beasts of prey: in other words, they mediate the opposition between herbivores and beasts of prey. As we have
seen, this opposition ultimately is analogous to the opposition between life and death. Therefore, the raven and
coyote ultimately mediate the opposition between life and death. This, Lvi-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 dualitynamely an ambiguous and equivocal
character.
[27]
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 Lvi-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.
[25]
Out of all the products of culture, myths seem the most fantastic and unpredictable. Therefore, Lvi-Strauss
claims, if even mythical thought obeys universal laws, then all human thought must obey universal laws.
The Savage Mind: Bricoleur and Engineer
Lvi-Strauss developed the comparison of the Bricoleur and Engineer in The Savage Mind. "Bricoleur" has its
origin in the old French verb bricoler, which originally referred to extraneous movements in ball games,
10 of 17 7/25/2014 11:28 PM
billiards, hunting, shooting and riding, but which today means do-it-yourself building or repairing things with
the tools and materials on hand, puttering or tinkering as it were. In comparison to the true craftsman, whom
Lvi-Strauss calls the Engineer, the Bricoleur is adept at many tasks and at putting preexisting things together in
new ways, adapting his project to a finite stock of materials and tools. The Engineer deals with projects in their
entirety, conceiving and procuring all the necessary materials and tools to suit his project. The Bricoleur
approximates "the savage mind" and the Engineer approximates the scientific mind. Lvi-Strauss says that the
universe of the Bricoleur is closed, and he often is forced to make do with whatever is at hand, whereas the
universe of the Engineer is open in that he is able to create new tools and materials. But both live within a
restrictive reality, and so the Engineer is forced to consider the preexisting set of theoretical and practical
knowledge, of technical means, in a similar way to the Bricoleur.
Criticism
Lvi-Strauss's theory on the origin of the Trickster has been criticized on a number of points by anthropologists.
Stanley Diamond notes that while the secular civilized often consider the concepts of life and death to be polar,
primitive cultures often see them "as aspects of a single condition, the condition of existence."
[28]
Diamond
remarks that Lvi-Strauss did not reach such a conclusion by inductive reasoning, but simply by working
backwards from the evidence to the "a priori mediated concepts"
[29]
of "life" and "death", which he reached by
assumption of a necessary progression from "life" to "agriculture" to "herbivorous animals", and from "death"
to "warfare" to "beasts of prey". For that matter, the coyote is well known to hunt in addition to scavenging and
the raven also has been known to act as a bird of prey, in contrast to Lvi-Strauss's conception. Nor does that
conception explain why a scavenger such as a bear would never appear as the Trickster. Diamond further
remarks that "the Trickster names 'raven' and 'coyote' which Lvi-Strauss explains can be arrived at with greater
economy on the basis of, let us say, the cleverness of the animals involved, their ubiquity, elusiveness, capacity
to make mischief, their undomesticated reflection of certain human traits."
[30]
Finally, Lvi-Strauss's analysis
does not appear to be capable of explaining why representations of the Trickster in other areas of the world
make use of such animals as the spider and mantis.
Ironically, the criticism of playing the trickster was leveled by some at Lvi-Strauss himself, albeit somewhat
tongue-in-cheek. Edmund Leach noted that: "The outstanding characteristic of his writing, whether in French or
English, is that it is difficult to understand; his sociological theories combine baffling complexity with
overwhelming erudition. Some readers even suspect that they are being treated to a confidence trick".
[31]
Similarly, sociologist Stanislav Andreski
[32]
criticized Lvi-Strauss's work generally, arguing that his
scholarship was often sloppy and moreover that much of his mystique and reputation stemmed from his
"threatening people with mathematics," a reference to Lvi-Strauss's use of quasi-algebraic equations to explain
his ideas.
Gracchus Babeuf et le communisme, L'glantine, 1926.
La Vie familiale et sociale des Indiens Nambikwara, Paris, Socit des amricanistes, 1948.
Les Structures lmentaires de la parent (1949, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, ed. *Rodney
Needham, trans. J. H. Bell, J. R. von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham, 1969) Online preview of 1970
Traviston paperback (http://books.google.com/books?id=C6YOAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&
dq=%22Claude+L%C3%A9vi-Strauss%22&hl=en&ei=Z2LUTIqaEY70vQOlpKnQBA&
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sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false)
Race et histoire (1952, UNESCO; Extract (http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1310
/is_2001_Dec/ai_82066713/pg_1) 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 Pense sauvage (1962, The Savage Mind, 1966)
Mythologiques IIV (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 manires 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. Monique Layton, 1976)
La Voie des masques (1972, The Way of the Masks, trans. Sylvia Modelski, 1982)
. (2005), Myth and Meaning (http://books.google.com/books?id=s-knuZrYlw8C&printsec=frontcover&
dq=%22Claude+L%C3%A9vi-Strauss%22&hl=en&ei=Z2LUTIqaEY70vQOlpKnQBA&
sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CEUQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false), First
published 1978 by Routledge & Kegan Paul, U.K, Taylor & Francis Group, ISBN 0-415-25548-1,
retrieved 5 November 2010 Paperback ISBN 0-415-25394-2; Master e-book ISBN 0-203-16472-5;
Adobe e-Reader Format ISBN 0-203-25895-9
Paroles donns (1984, Anthropology and Myth: Lectures, 19511982, trans. Roy Willis, 1987)
Le Regard loign (1983, The View from Afar, trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss, 1985)
La Potire jalouse (1985, The Jealous Potter, trans. Bndicte Chorier, 1988)
.; Catherine Tihanyi (Translator) (1996), The Story of Lynx (http://books.google.com
/books?id=mNYCPfM6gWUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22Claude+L%C3%A9vi-Strauss%22&
hl=en&ei=Z2LUTIqaEY70vQOlpKnQBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&
ved=0CDYQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false), Originally published 1991 as Histoire de Lynx,
University of Chicago Press, ISBN 0-226-47471-2, retrieved 5 November 2010 Paperback ISBN
0-226-47472-0
Regarder, couter, lire (1993, Look, Listen, Read, trans. Brian Singer, 1997)
Saudades do Brasil, Paris, Plon, 1994
Le Pre Nol supplici, Pin-Balma, Sables, 1994
LAnthropologie face aux problmes du monde moderne, Paris: Seuil, 2011
LAutre face de la lune, Paris: Seuil, 2011
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De prs et de loin, interviewed by Didier Eribon (1988, Conversations with Claude Lvi-Strauss, trans.
Paula Wissing, 1991)
Loin du Brsil, interviewed by Vronique Mortaigne, Paris, Chandeigne, 2005
Jean-Louis de Rambures, "Comment travaillent les crivains", Paris 1978 (interview with C.
Lvi-Strauss)
List of important publications in anthropology
James George Frazer
Alliance theory
Comparative mythology
Evolutionary Principle
^
a

b

c
Rothstein, Edward (3 November 2009). "Claude Lvi-Strauss dies at 100" (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11
/04/world/europe/04levistrauss.html?em). The New York Times. Retrieved 4 November 2009.
1.
^
a

b
Doland, Angela (3 November 2009). "Anthropology giant Claude Levi-Strauss dead at 100"
(http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091104/ap_on_re_eu/eu_obit_france_levi_strauss). Associated Press. Retrieved 4
November 2009.
2.
^ "Claude Levi-Strauss, Scientist Who Saw Human Doom, Dies at 100" (http://www.bloomberg.com
/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aY43vBHLDM6I). Bloomberg. 3 November 2009. Retrieved 3 November 2009.
3.
^ Pinker, Steven. (2003) The Blank Slate. p. 22 4.
^
a

b
"Death of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss" (http://www.euronews.net/2009/11/03/death-of-french-
anthropologist-claude-levi-strauss/). Euronews. 3 November 2009. Retrieved 3 November 2009.
5.
^ http://www.anthropology.ua.edu/cultures/cultures.php?culture=Structuralism 6.
^ (Portuguese) "Claude Lvi-Strauss - Biografia (http://educacao.uol.com.br/biografias/ult1789u642.jhtm)". Uol
Educao Brasil (http://educacao.uol.com.br/). Access date: December 9, 2009.
7.
^ Ashbrook, Tom (November 2009). "Claude Levi-Strauss (http://www.onpointradio.org/2009/11/claude-
levi-strauss)". On Point
8.
^ Conversation with Jean Jos Marchand 9.
^ Wiseman, p. 6 10.
^ "Catherine Clment raconte le grand ethnologue qui fte ses 99 ans," interview, Le Journal du Dimanche, 25
November 2007
11.
^ Jennings, Eric (2002) Last Exit from Vichy France: The Martinique Escape Route and the Ambiguities of
Emigration, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 74, No. 2 (Jun., 2002), pp. 289-324
12.
^ Johnson, C. (2003). Claude levi-strauss: the formative years. Cambridge University Press. pp. 1, 92, 172 13.
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^ Totems and teachers: key figures in the history of anthropology, Sydel Silverman, Rowman Altamira, 2004 p 16 14.
^ Moore, Jerry D. (2004). Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists. Rowman
Altamira. p. 234
15.
^ Boon and Schneider 16.
^ http://www.academie-francaise.fr/immortels/base/academiciens/fiche.asp?param=647 Acadmie franaise - Les
Immortels
17.
^ "Anthropologist Levi-Strauss dies" (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8340936.stm). BBC. 3 November 2009.
Retrieved 3 November 2009.
18.
^ "Claude Lvi-Strauss" (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/science-obituaries/6496558/Claude-
Levi-Strauss.html). The Daily Telegraph. 3 November 2009. Retrieved 3 November 2009.
19.
^ Lizzy Davies (3 November 2009). "French anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss dies aged 100"
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/nov/03/claude-levi-strauss-dies). The Guardian. Retrieved 3 November
2009.
20.
^ Moore, Jerry D. 2009. "Claude Levi-Strauss: Structuralism" in Visions of Culture: an Introduction to
Anthropological Theories and Theorists, Walnut Creek, California: Altamira. pp. 231-247
21.
^
a

b
Structural Linguistics and Anthropology (http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp
/anthropology.htm#Structural%20Anthropology)
22.
^
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b
The Structural Study of Myth (http://courses.essex.ac.uk/lt/lt204/strauss.htm) 23.
^ Structural Anthropology, p. 208 24.
^
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b
The Raw and the Cooked, p. 10 25.
^
a

b
Structural Anthropology, p. 224 26.
^ Structural Anthropology, p. 226 27.
^ Diamond, p. 308 28.
^ Diamond, p. 310 29.
^ Diamond, p. 311 30.
^ Leach, Edmund (1974), Claude Levi-Strauss (Revised ed.), New York: Viking Press, p. 3 31.
^ Andreski, Stanislav (1972). The Social Sciences as Sorcery, Deutsch, p. 85 32.
Boon, James, and David Schneider. Kinship vis-a-vis Myth Contrasts in Levi-Strauss' Approaches to
Cross-Cultural Comparison (http://links.jstor.org
/sici?sici=0002-7294(197410)2%3A76%3A4%3C799%3AKVMCIL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y). American
Anthropologist, New Series 76.4(1974): 799817
Diamond, Stanley. In Search of the Primitive. New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1974. ISBN
0-87855-045-3
Doja, Albert (2008): "Claude Lvi-Strauss at his Centennial: toward a future anthropology", Theory,
Culture & Society, 25(7-8): 321340, doi:10.1177/0263276408097810 (http://dx.doi.org
/10.1177%2F0263276408097810) (http://archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00405936).
Doja, Albert (2010): "Claude Lvi-Strauss (1908-2009): The apotheosis of heroic anthropology",
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Anthropology Today, 26(5): 1823, doi:10.1111/j.1467-8322.2010.00758.x (http://dx.doi.org
/10.1111%2Fj.1467-8322.2010.00758.x) (http://archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00523837).
Leach, Edmund, Lvi-Strauss (1970) Fontana/Collins ISBN 0-00-632255-7 Chapter excerpt from book
(http://www.colorado.edu/envd/courses/envd4114-001/Fall07/ENVD%204310/Levi-Strauss.pdf)
Wiseman, Boris. Introducing Lvi-Strauss. Totem Books, 1998.
Wiseman, Boris, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Lvi-Strauss. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Doran, Robert (2013), editor: Rethinking Claude Lvi-Strauss: 1908-2009 (http://yalepress.yale.edu
/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300190205), Yale French Studies 123.
Dick, Marcus (2008), Welt, Struktur, Denken. Philosophische Untersuchungen zu Claude Lvi-Strauss
(http://books.google.de/books?id=Cn7QRE8x69gC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22marcus+dick%22&
source=bl&ots=9H0_qHDz_V&sig=K76kLPRRXZ7YgecL3eIeYFrqMsg&hl=de&
ei=mMi0TcbkJ8bBswaC-LnkCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&
ved=0CEwQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q&f=false), Wrzburg, Germany: Knigshausen & Neumann, ISBN
978-3-8260-4018-4, retrieved 25 April 2011
Hnaff, Marcel (Translated by Mary Baker) (1998), Claude Lvi-Strauss and the Making of Structural
Anthropology (http://books.google.com/books?id=Gr9JO6j3luAC&printsec=frontcover&
dq=%22Claude+L%C3%A9vi-Strauss%22&hl=en&ei=aV7UTNrQC4LEvQPAjJnGBA&
sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDsQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false), Originally
published 1991 as Claude Lvi-Strauss, Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press,
ISBN 0-8166-2760-6, retrieved 5 November 2010 Paperback ISBN 0-8166-2761-4
Pace, David (1983), Claude Levi-Strauss: The Bearer of Ashes (http://books.google.com
/books?id=p809AAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22bearer+of+ashes+%22&hl=en&
ei=MW3UTO6fCISGvgOnqsHBBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&
ved=0CCUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false), Boston, Massachusetts & London, UK: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, ISBN 0-7100-9297-0, retrieved 5 November 2010
Taylor, Mark Kline (1986), Beyond Explanation: Religious Dimensions in Cultural Anthropology
(http://books.google.com/books?id=aqAISCe8CkoC&printsec=frontcover&
dq=%22Beyond+explanation%22&hl=en&ei=wHDUTLWKH4mIvgPQjOGOBQ&
sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false), Macon,
Georgia: Mercer University Press, ISBN 0-86554-165-5, retrieved 5 November 2010
Wilcken, Patrick (2011), Claude Lvi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (http://www.bloomsbury.com
/Claude-L233vi-Strauss/Patrick-Wilcken/books/details/9781408817728), London, UK: Bloomsbury,
ISBN 978-0-7475-8362-2, retrieved 20 November 2011
15 of 17 7/25/2014 11:28 PM
Wikimedia Commons has
media related to Claude
Lvi-Strauss.
Wikiquote has a collection
of quotations related to:
Claude Lvi-Strauss
Profile of Lvi-Strauss in The Nation (http://www.thenation.com
/article/157879/library-man-claude-levi-strauss).
"Interview with Claude Lvi Strauss" (1972)
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u73chpnKKhQ) on YouTube
video, 1 hour (in French with English subtitles)[apparently this
video is no longer available on YouTube because of a copyright
claim by ditions Montparnasse]
Various excerpts from Structural Anthropology (http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy
/works/fr/levistra.htm) at marxists.org
Extract (http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1310/is_2001_Dec/ai_82066713/pg_1) from "Race
and History" (1952 see also The Race Question, 1950, UNESCO)
List of works by Claude Lvi-Strauss (http://varenne.tc.columbia.edu/bib/auth/levstcld0.html)
Strauss.html Overview (http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/claude_levi),
in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory (subscriber access only)
Claude Lvi-Strauss's profile on the Acadmie franaise site (http://www.academie-francaise.fr/immortels
/base/academiciens/fiche.asp?param=647) (French)
Excerpts from La Pense Sauvage (http://varenne.tc.columbia.edu/bib/info/levstcld066savamind.html)
NYTimes commemoration at age 100 (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/books/29levi.html)
Documentaire 52': About "Tristes Tropiques" (http://www.documen.tv/asset
/About_Tristes_Tropiques.html), 1991 Super 16 Film
Obituary, Daily Telegraph 4 Nov 2009 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/science-obituaries
/6496558/Claude-Levi-Strauss.html)
Claude Lvi-Strauss (http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14843571),
Obituary, The Economist, Nov 12th 2009
Lecture: The Birth of Historical Societies (Hitchcock Lectures) (http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/VideoTest
/levi.ram), 3 and 4 October 1984, UC Berkeley (audio file)
Linguistic and Commodity Exchanges (http://www.egwald.com/ubcstudent/aboriginal/exchanges.php)
Examines the structural differences between barter and monetary commodity exchanges and oral and
written linguistic exchanges
Philippe Descola, "Claude Lvi-Strauss: a Career Spanning a Century", in The Letter of the Collge de
France (http://www.college-de-france.fr/media/college_english/UPL7694_J4ENGLISH.pdf) n4, 2009,
p. 36.
Claude Lvi-Strauss: Tristes Tropiques (https://archive.org/stream/tristestropiques000177mbp), in
English, translated by John Russell, 1961
"Claude Lvi-Strauss, social constructivism and syllables across languages" (http://website2.net
16 of 17 7/25/2014 11:28 PM
/levistrauss.html)
Claude Lvi-Strauss and his Mythologiques -- An interdisciplinary internet project by scholars of the
University of Hildesheim (http://www.uni-hildesheim.de/fachbereiche/) (Germany):
http://www.mythologica.eu (versions in English and French are available soon)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Claude_Lvi-Strauss&oldid=614725271"
Categories: 1908 births 2009 deaths People from Brussels Lyce Condorcet alumni
Lyce Janson de Sailly alumni University of Paris alumni Collge de France faculty
University of So Paulo faculty The New School faculty French anthropologists French ethnologists
Anthropologists of religion Social anthropologists Structuralists Brazilianists Critical theorists
Continental philosophers French centenarians French Jews Jewish scientists Jewish writers
Mythographers 20th-century French philosophers Members of the Acadmie franaise
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Erasmus Prize winners
Grand Croix of the Lgion d'honneur
Recipients of the Great Cross of the National Order of Scientific Merit (Brazil)
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