Copyright © 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The most remarkable aspect of the French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss's (1908 -) undertaking is his ambition to take seriously the very idea of anthropology. His aim has been to develop anthropology not just as an inventory of human cultures or of types of institutions (kinship, myths, rituals, arts, technologies, knowledge systems), but also as an investigation of the mental equipment common to all humans. This has not always been understood. It has been seen as an over-ambitious philosophical project when in fact it is better understood as a cognitivist project.
Lévi-Strauss develops this approach by taking up the concept of structure and by proposing a new use of this concept in anthropology. He abandons the notion of social structure (promoted by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and G. P. Murdock) as the totality of directly observable relations in a society (a notion that still refers to the traditional understanding of "structure" as architectural frame or organic system). Lévi-Strauss's conception of structure as a model stems directly from linguistics (particularly from Troubetskoi and JAKOBSON) where structure refers to a recurring relation between terms (such as phonemes) considered as minimal units. The second source is mathematics where it refers to constant relations between elements regardless of what the set in question is. Lévi-Strauss admits that this kind of stable relations only appears in certain objects and under certain conditions. In other words, in the field of social sciences, a structural analysis is productive and legitimate only in such cases as phonology, kinship, taxonomies, "totemic" phenomena, rituals, mythical narratives, and certain artifacts. It is better avoided in domains where probabilistic factors prevail over the mechanical order.
From a cognitivist point of view, Lévi-Strauss's most interesting contribution is linked to his conviction that there is a continuity between forms of organization of external reality (matter, living organisms, social groups, artifacts) and the human mind. To understand a specific field of objects is to show how that field produces its own rationality, that is, how it is regulated by a spontaneous intelligible order. This is the epistemological presupposition behind Lévi-Strauss's analyses of kinship systems. This aim dominates the following inquiries he has conducted on the traditional forms of classification of objects in the natural world. He began his research by going back to an old controversial and seemingly insoluble problem, that of so-called totemism, and by showing that it was a nonissue, first because it was badly stated. In fact, totemism is not a one-to-one correspondence between the human and the natural world but a way of establishing and expressing a system of differences between humans (individuals and groups), with the help of a system of differences between things (animals, plants, or artifacts). What resembles each other are not humans and things but their differential relations.
Of course, this presupposes that the human mind has the capacity and a disposition to recognize differences and to classify things themselves. In fact, traditional forms of knowledge show that this spontaneous work of classification is very sophisticated. This means that it is not primarily guided by vital need (such as food or survival) but indeed by the desire to understand and interpret the world; in short, as Lévi-Strauss reminds us, things are not just "good for eating," but also "good for thinking." From this perspective it is therefore important not to underestimate the power of "untamed thinking" (literally: la pensée sauvage). There, the flourishing symbolic systems are based on the differential values themselves that have come out of the operations of classification of the observed world.
What is finally the difference between "untamed thinking" and "domesticated thinking," between traditional forms of knowledge and modern reason? According to Lévi-Strauss, it stems from the progressive branching out of two types of society at the end of the neolithic period: some evolved toward the pursuit and preservation of a stable equilibrium between the human and the natural world, while others turned toward change by developing technologies for mastery over nature, which involved the explicit recognition and formalization of abstract representations, as was the case of the civilizations of writing, particularly those where alphabetical writing developed.
This exercise of traditional knowledge appears particularly in the production of mythical narratives. According to Lévi-Strauss, myths are a complex expression of forms of thought inherent in a culture or a group of cultures (which refers back to an empirical corpus); at the same time they reveal mental processes that are verifiable everywhere (this concerns operations that are part of the basic equipment of every human mind). In the interpretation of myths it is therefore impossible to maintain a purely functionalist approach (which seeks an explanation of narrative based on need alone), or a symbolist approach (which seeks for keys of universal interpretation), or a psychological approach (which seeks archetypes). To be sure, myths do refer back to an empirical environment (geographical, technical, social) and express it directly or not, but above all they construct representations where through the categorial use of sensory elements (such as diversity of species, places, forms, colors, materials, directions, sounds, temperatures) emerges a symbolic order of things and humans (cosmogony, sociogony) and where, above all, the logical faculties of the mind are at work -- for example, opposition, symmetry, contradiction, disjunction, negation, inclusion, exclusion, complementarity. Hence the surprising character of certain myths that do not correspond to any etiology, that is, to any specific referential situation, but seem to arise and develop just for the sake of pure speculative play. Therefore a narrative cannot be interesting in itself. Some elements reappear from one myth to another (mythemes or segments); there are clusters of narratives related in various ways (symmetrical, oppositional, etc.); and finally there are whole cycles with groups of myths that are linked in networks and constitute complete systems of representation. Lévi-Strauss's most original and ambitious theoretical contribution has been to demonstrate that those networks consist of transformation groups (in the mathematical sense of the term).
The recourse to the structural model stemming from linguistics and mathematics allowed Lévi-Strauss to bring to the fore invariants hitherto only seen as simple empirical recurrences, if not residues of lost history -- invariants that he attributes to the propensitites of the human mind. This is unquestionably pioneering work for a cognitivist approach to traditional societies and for the elaboration of a global theory of the human mind.
Works by Lévi-Strauss
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1969). The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Translated by J. Bell, J. von Sturmer, and R. Needham. Boston: Beacon Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1974). Tristes Tropiques. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Athenaeum.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963). Structural Anthropology, vol. 1. Translated by C. Jacobson and B. Graundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963). Totemism. Translated by Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1966). The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1969). Mythologiques I: The Raw and the Cooked. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper and Row.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1973). Mythologiques II: From Honey to Ashes. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. London: Cape.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1978). Mythologiques III:The Origin of Table Manners. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. London: Cape.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1981). Mythologiques IV: The Naked Man. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper and Row.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1976). Structural Anthropology, vol. 2. Translated by M. Layton. New York: Basic Books.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1985). The View from Afar. Translated by J. Neugroschel and P. Hoss. New York: Basic Books.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1988). The Jealous Potter. Translated by Benedicte Chorier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1995). The Story of Lynx. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Badcock, C. R. (1975). Lévi-Stauss, Structuralism and Sociological Theory. London: Hutchinson.
Hénaff, M. (1998). Lévi-Strauss and the Making of Structural Anthropology. University of Minnesota Press.
Leach, E. (1970). Claude Lévi-Strauss. New York: Viking Press.
Sperber, D. (1973). Le Structuralisme en Anthropologie. Paris: Seuil.
Sperber, D. (1985). On Anthropological Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Copyright © 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology