Levi Strauss - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

Lvi-Strauss in 2005

Born 27 November 1908Brussels, Belgium

Died 30 October 2009 (aged 100)Paris, France

School Structuralism

Main interests AnthropologySocietyKinshipLinguistics

Notable ideas StructuralismMythographyCulinary triangleBricolage

Signature

Claude Lvi-Strauss

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Claude Lvi-Strauss (French pronunciation: [klod levistos]; (28 November 1908 30 October 2009)[1][2][3]was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and hasbeen called, along with James George Frazer, the "fatherof modern anthropology".[4]

He argued that the "savage" mind had the samestructures as the "civilized" mind and that humancharacteristics are the same everywhere.[5][6] Theseobservations culminated in his famous book TristesTropiques, which positioned him as one of the centralfigures in the structuralist school of thought, where hisideas reached into fields including the humanities,sociology and philosophy. Structuralism has beendefined as "the search for the underlying patterns ofthought in all forms of human activity."[2]

He was honored by universities throughout the worldand held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collgede France (19591982); he was elected a member of theAcadmie Franaise in 1973.

1 Biography1.1 Early life, education, and career1.2 Dpaysement1.3 Structural Anthropology1.4 Later life and death

2 Theories2.1 Summary2.2 Anthropological theories2.3 The structuralist approach to myth

2.3.1 The Savage Mind: Bricoleurand Engineer2.3.2 Criticism

3 Commentary on contemporary human culture4 Bibliography5 Interviews6 See also7 Notes8 References9 Further reading10 External links

Influenced by

Influenced

Claude Lvi-Strauss - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Lvi-Strauss

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Early life, education, and career

Claude Lvi-Strauss was born to French parents who were living in Brussels at the time, where his fatherwas working as a painter.[7] He grew up in Paris, living on a street of the 16th arrondissement named afterthe artist Claude Lorrain, whose work he admired and later wrote about.[8] During the First World War, helived with his maternal grandfather, who was the rabbi of the synagogue of Versailles.[9] He attended theLyce 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, butagrgated in philosophy in 1931. In 1935, after a few years of secondary-school teaching, he took up alast-minute offer to be part of a French cultural mission to Brazil in which he would serve as a visitingprofessor of sociology at the University of So Paulo while his wife, Dina, served as a visiting professor ofethnology.

The couple lived and did their anthropological work in Brazil from 1935 to 1939. During this time, while hewas a visiting professor of sociology, Claude undertook his only ethnographic fieldwork. He accompaniedDina, a trained ethnographer in her own right who was also a visiting professor at the University of SoPaulo, where they conducted research forays into the Mato Grosso and the Amazon Rainforest. They firststudied the Guaycuru and Bororo Indian tribes, staying among them for a couple of days. In 1938 theyreturned for a second, more than half-year-long expedition to study the Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahibsocieties. At this time his wife suffered an injury that prevented her from completing the study, which heconcluded. This experience cemented Lvi-Strauss's professional identity as an anthropologist. EdmundLeach suggests, from Lvi-Strauss's own accounts in Tristes Tropiques, that he could not have spent morethan a few weeks in any one place and was never able to converse easily with any of his native informants intheir native language, which is uncharacteristic of anthropological research methods of participatoryinteraction with subjects to gain a full understanding of a culture.

Dpaysement

He returned to France in 1939 to take part in the war effort, and was assigned as a liaison agent to theMaginot Line. After the French capitulation in 1940, he was employed at a lyce in Montpellier, but thenwas dismissed under the Vichy racial laws. (Lvi-Strauss's family, originally from Alsace, was of Jewishancestry.) By the same laws, he was denaturalized (stripped of French citizenship)[citation needed]. Hemanaged to escape Vichy France by boat to Martinique,[10] from where he was finally able to travel on. In1941, he was offered a position at the New School for Social Research in New York, and granted admissionto the United States. A series of voyages brought him, via South America, to Puerto Rico where he wasinvestigated 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 atthe New School for Social Research. Along with Jacques Maritain, Henri Focillon, and Roman Jakobson, hewas a founding member of the cole Libre des Hautes tudes, a sort of university-in-exile for Frenchacademics.

The war years in New York were formative for Lvi-Strauss in several ways. His relationship with Jakobsonhelped shape his theoretical outlook (Jakobson and Lvi-Strauss are considered to be two of the centralfigures on which structuralist thought is based). In addition, Lvi-Strauss was also exposed to the Americananthropology espoused by Franz Boas, who taught at Columbia University. In 1942, while having dinner atthe Faculty House at Columbia, Boas died of a heart attack in Lvi-Strauss's arms. This intimate associationwith Boas gave his early work a distinctive American inclination that helped facilitate its acceptance in theU.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 bysubmitting, in the French tradition, both a "major" and a "minor" thesis. These were The Family and SocialLife of the Nambikwara Indians and The Elementary Structures of Kinship.


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Structural Anthropology

The Elementary Structures of Kinship was published the next year and quickly came to be regarded as oneof the most important anthropological works on kinship. It was even reviewed favorably by Simone deBeauvoir, who viewed it as an important statement of the position of women in non-western cultures. A playon the title of Durkheim's famous Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Elementary Structuresre-examined how people organized their families by examining the logical structures that underlayrelationships rather than their contents. While British anthropologists such as Alfred ReginaldRadcliffe-Brown argued that kinship was based on descent from a common ancestor, Lvi-Strauss arguedthat kinship was based on the alliance between two families that formed when women from one groupmarried men from another.[11]

Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lvi-Strauss continued to publish and experienced considerableprofessional success. On his return to France, he became involved with the administration of the CNRS andthe Muse de l'Homme before finally becoming professor (directeur d'tudes) of the fifth section of thecole Pratique des Hautes tudes, the 'Religious Sciences' section where Marcel Mauss was previouslyprofessor, 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 knownintellectuals by publishing Tristes Tropiques, published in Paris that year by Plon (and translated into Englishin 1973, published by Penguin). Essentially, this book was a memoir detailing his time as a French expatriatethroughout the 1930s, and his travels. Lvi-Strauss combined exquisitely beautiful prose, dazzlingphilosophical 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-Straussthe prize because Tristes Tropiques was non-fiction.[citation needed]

Lvi-Strauss was named to a chair in Social Anthropology at the Collge de France in 1959. At roughly thesame time he published Structural Anthropology, a collection of his essays which provided both examplesand programmatic statements about structuralism. At the same time as he was laying the groundwork for anintellectual 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. Thetitle is a pun untranslatable in Englishin English the book is known as The Savage Mind, but this title failsto capture the other possible French meaning of 'Wild Pansies'. In French pense means both 'thought' and'pansy,' the flower, while sauvage means 'wild' as well as 'savage' or 'primitive'. The book concerns primitivethought, forms of thought all humans use. (Lvi-Strauss suggested the English title be Pansies for Thought,riffing off 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 Lvi-Strauss's theory of culture and mind, while the second half expandsthis account into a theory of history and social change. This latter part of the book engaged Lvi-Strauss in aheated debate with Jean-Paul Sartre over the nature of human freedom. On the one hand, Sartre'sexistentialist philosophy committed him to a position that human beings fundamentally were free to act asthey pleased. On the other hand, Sartre also was a leftist who was committed to ideas such as that individualswere constrained by the ideologies imposed on them by the powerful. Lvi-Strauss presented his structuralistnotion of agency in opposition to Sartre. Echoes of this debate between structuralism and existentialismwould 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, afour-volume study called Mythologiques. In it, he followed a single myth from the tip of South America andall 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. Heaccomplished this in a typically structuralist way, examining the underlying structure of relationships among


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the elements of the story rather than by focusing on the content of the story itself. While Pense Sauvagewas a statement of Lvi-Strauss's big-picture theory, Mythologiques was an extended, four-volume exampleof analysis. Richly detailed and extremely long, it is less widely read than the much shorter and moreaccessible 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 theAcadmie Franaise, France's highest honour for an intellectual.[12] He was a member of other notableacademies worldwide, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He received the Erasmus Prizein 1973, the Meister-Eckhart-Prize for philosophy in 2003, and several honorary doctorates from universitiessuch as Oxford, Harvard, and Columbia. He also was the recipient of the Grand-croix de la Lgiond'honneur, was a Commandeur de l'ordre national du Mrite, and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. Afterhis 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 fewliving authors to have his works published in the Bibliothque de la Pliade. On the death of Maurice Druonon 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 dayslater.[1] French President Nicolas Sarkozy described him as "one of the greatest ethnologists of all time".[13]

Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister, said Lvi-Strauss "broke with an ethnocentric vision ofhistory and humanity [...] At a time when we are trying to give meaning to globalisation, to build a fairer andmore humane world, I would like Claude Lvi-Strauss's universal echo to resonate more strongly".[4] TheDaily Telegraph said in its obituary that Lvi-Strauss was "one of the dominating postwar influences inFrench intellectual life and the leading exponent of Structuralism in the social sciences".[14] Permanentsecretary of the Acadmie Franaise Hlne Carrre d'Encausse said: "He was a thinker, a philosopher [...]We will not find another like him".[15]

Summary

Lvi-Strauss sought to apply the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure to anthropology. At the time,the family was traditionally considered the fundamental object of analysis, but was seen primarily as aself-contained[citation needed] 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 toSaussure's notion of linguistic value, families acquire determinate identities only through relations with oneanother. Thus he inverted the classical view of anthropology, putting the secondary family members first andinsisting on analyzing the relations between units instead of the units themselves.[16]

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 brotherand sister, as the relation between father and son is to that between husband and wife, that is, A is to B as Cis 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 Band C. The goal of Lvi-Strauss's structural anthropology, then, was to simplify the masses of empirical datainto generalized, comprehensible relations between units, which allow for predictive laws to be identified,such as A is to B as C is to D.[16]

Similarly, Lvi-Strauss identified myths as a type of speech through which a language could be discovered.This theory attempted to explain how seemingly fantastical and arbitrary tales, could be so similar across


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Claude Lvi-Strauss, 1955

cultures. Because he believed there was not one "authentic" version of a myth, rather that they were allmanifestations 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 relationbetween a function and a subject. Sentences with the same function were given the same number andbundled together. These are mythemes.[17]

What Lvi-Strauss believed he had discovered when he examined the relations between mythemes was thata myth consists of nothing but binary oppositions. Oedipus, for example, consists of the overrating of bloodrelations and the underrating of blood relations, the autochthonous origin of humans and the denial of theirautochthonous origin. Influenced by Hegel, Lvi-Strauss believed that the human mind thinks fundamentallyin these binary oppositions and their unification (the thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad), and that these arewhat make meaning possible. Furthermore, he considered the job of myth to be a sleight of hand, anassociation of an irreconcilable binary opposition with a reconcilable binary opposition, creating the illusion,or belief, that the former had been resolved.[17]

Anthropological theories

Lvi-Strauss's theories are set forth in Structural Anthropology(1958). Briefly, he considers culture a system of symboliccommunication, to be investigated with methods that others haveused 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 socialtheory. He wrote about this relationship for decades.

A preference for "functionalist" explanations dominated the social sciences from the turn of the twentiethcentury through the 1950s, which is to say that anthropologists and sociologists tried to state the purpose of asocial act or institution. The existence of a thing was explained, if it fulfilled a function. The only strongalternative to that kind of analysis was historical explanation, accounting for the existence of a social fact bystating how it came to be.

The idea of social function developed in two different ways, however. The English anthropologist AlfredReginald 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 religiouscreed or a set of rules about marriage did for the social order as a whole. Behind this approach was an oldidea, 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 samecharacter; some sort of internal logic would cause one level of culture to evolve into the next. On this view, asociety 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 ofindividual 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, thepreference was for historical accounts. This approach had obvious problems, which Lvi-Strauss praisesBoas for facing squarely.

Historical information seldom is available for non-literate cultures. The anthropologist fills in withcomparisons to other cultures and is forced to rely on theories that have no evidential basis whatsoever, theold notion of universal stages of development or the claim that cultural resemblances are based on someunrecognized past contact between groups. Boas came to believe that no overall pattern in socialdevelopment could be proven; for him, there was no single history, only histories.

The world began without the human raceand will certainly end without it.


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There are three broad choices involved in the divergence of these schoolseach had to decide what kind ofevidence to use; whether to emphasize the particulars of a single culture or look for patterns underlying allsocieties; 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 supplementinformation about a society with information about others. So some idea of a common human nature wasimplicit in each approach.

The critical distinction, then, remained: does a social fact exist because it is functional for the social order, orbecause it is functional for the person? Do uniformities across cultures occur because of organizational needsthat 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 theinconsistencies and triviality of individualistic accounts. Malinowski said, for example, that magic beliefscome into being when people need to feel a sense of control over events when the outcome was uncertain. Inthe 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 abusiness than weaving. So, the explanation is not consistent. Furthermore, these explanations tend to be usedin 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 haveinstitutions that were similar in many obvious ways and yet, served different functions. Many tribal culturesdivide the tribe into two groups and have elaborate rules about how the two groups may interact. But exactlywhat they may dotrade, intermarryis different in different tribes; for that matter, so are the criteria fordistinguishing the groups.

Nor will it do to say that dividing-in-two is a universal need of organizations, because there are a lot of tribesthat thrive without it.

For Lvi-Strauss, the methods of linguistics became a model for all his earlier examinations of society. Hisanalogies 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 StructuralAnthropology). Phonemic analysis reveals features that are real, in the sense that users of the language canrecognize 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 tothe language. The entire sound-structure of a language may be generated from a relatively small number ofrules.

In the study of the kinship systems that first concerned him, this ideal of explanation allowed acomprehensive organization of data that partly had been ordered by other researchers. The overall goal wasto find out why family relations differed among various South American cultures. The father might havegreat authority over the son in one group, for example, with the relationship rigidly restricted by taboos. Inanother group, the mother's brother would have that kind of relationship with the son, while the father'srelationship was relaxed and playful.

A number of partial patterns had been noted. Relations between the mother and father, for example, hadsome sort of reciprocity with those of father and sonif the mother had a dominant social status and wasformal with the father, for example, then the father usually had close relations with the son. But thesesmaller 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 severaldimensions. For example, the father was older than the son, the father produced the son, the father had thesame sex as the son, and so on; the matrilineal uncle was older and of the same sex, but did not produce the


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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 chartthat 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 explainstheir relations). Furthermore, it doesn't explain anything. The explanation it offers is tautologicalif age iscrucial, then age explains a relationship. And it does not offer the possibility of inferring the origins of thestructure.

A proper solution to the puzzle is to find a basic unit of kinship which can explain all the variations. It is acluster of four rolesbrother, sister, father, son. These are the roles that must be involved in any society thathas an incest taboo requiring a man to obtain a wife from some man outside his own hereditary line. Abrother may give away his sister, for example, whose son might reciprocate in the next generation byallowing his own sister to marry exogamously. The underlying demand is a continued circulation of womento keep various clans peacefully related.

Right or wrong, this solution displays the qualities of structural thinking. Even though Lvi-Straussfrequently speaks of treating culture as the product of the axioms and corollaries that underlie it, or thephonemic differences that constitute it, he is concerned with the objective data of field research. He notesthat it is logically possible for a different atom of kinship structure to existsister, sister's brother, brother'swife, 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 onthe point that in a four class marriage system,the preferred marriage was with a classificatory mother' sbrother's daughter and never with the true one. Lvi-Strauss's atom of kinship stricture deals only with truekin. There is a big difference between the two situations, in that the kinship structure involving theclassificatory 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.

The purpose of structuralist explanation is to organize real data in the simplest effective way. All science, hesays, is either structuralist or reductionist. In confronting such matters as the incest taboo, one is facing anobjective limit of what the human mind has accepted so far. One could hypothesize some biologicalimperative underlying it, but so far as social order is concerned, the taboo has the effect of an irreduciblefact. 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 relationsinto 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 otherscholars. He believed that modern life and all history was founded on the same categories andtransformations that he had discovered in the Brazilian back countryThe Raw and the Cooked, From Honeyto Ashes, The Naked Man (to borrow some titles from the Mythologiques). For instance he comparesanthropology to musical serialism and defends his "philosophical" approach. He also pointed out that themodern view of primitive cultures was simplistic in denying them a history. The categories of myth did notpersist 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 hadencompassed these changes.

He argued for a view of human life as existing in two timelines simultaneously, the eventful one of historyand the long cycles in which one set of fundamental mythic patterns dominates and then perhaps another. Inthis respect, his work resembles that of Fernand Braudel, the historian of the Mediterranean and 'la longuedure,' the cultural outlook and forms of social organization that persisted for centuries around that sea. He isright in that history is difficult to build up in non literate society, nevertheless, Jean Guiart's anthropologicaland Jos Garanger's archeological work in central Vanuatu, bringing to the fore the skeletons of formerchiefs described in local myths, who had thus been living persons, shows that there can be some means of


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ascertaining the history of some groups which otherwise would be deemed a-historical. Another issue is theexperience that the same person can tell one a myth highly charged in symbols, and some years later a sortof chronological history claiming to be the chronic of a descent line (from examples in the Loyalty islandsand New Zealand), the two texts having in common that they each deal in topographical detail with theland-tenure claims of the said descent line (see Douglas Oliver on the Siwai in Bougainville). Levi-Strausswould agree to these aspects be explained inside his seminar, but would never touch them on his own. Theanthropological data content of the myths was not his problem. He was only interested with the formalaspects of each story, considered by him as the result of the workings of the collective unconscious of eachgroup, which idea was taken from the linguists, but cannot be proved in anyway although he was adamantabout 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 andunpredictable: the content of myth seems completely arbitrary. On the other hand, the myths of differentcultures 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 betweenmyths collected in widely different regions. Therefore the problem: If the content of myth iscontingent [i.e., arbitrary], how are we to explain the fact that myths throughout the world areso similar?[18]

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 oneparticular instance of a universal law of human thought. In studying myth, Lvi-Strauss tries "to reduceapparently arbitrary data to some kind of order, and to attain a level at which a kind of necessity becomesapparent, underlying the illusions of liberty".[19]

According to Lvi-Strauss, "mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions towardtheir resolution".[20] In other words, myths consist of:

elements that oppose or contradict each other and1.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. Therelationship 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 withproducing death. Furthermore, the relationship between herbivores and beasts of prey is analogous to therelationship between agriculture and hunting: like agriculture, herbivores are concerned with plants; likehunting, beasts of prey are concerned with catching meat. Lvi-Strauss points out that the raven and coyoteeat carrion and are therefore halfway between herbivores and beasts of prey: like beasts of prey, they eatmeat; like herbivores, they don't catch their food. Thus, he argues, "we have a mediating structure of thefollowing type":[20]


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By uniting herbivore traits with traits of beasts of prey, the raven and coyote somewhat reconcile herbivoresand beasts of prey: in other words, they mediate the opposition between herbivores and beasts of prey. Aswe have seen, this opposition ultimately is analogous to the opposition between life and death. Therefore, theraven 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 mythicaltrickster:

The trickster is a mediator. Since his mediating function occupies a position halfway betweentwo polar terms, he must retain something of that dualitynamely an ambiguous and equivocalcharacter.[21]

Because the raven and coyote reconcile profoundly opposed concepts (i.e., life and death), their ownmythical personalities must reflect this duality or contradiction: in other words, they must have acontradictory, "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, itssupposedly spontaneous flow of inspiration, and its seemingly uncontrolled inventiveness [areruled by] laws operating at a deeper level [] if the human mind appears determined even inthe realm of mythology, a fortiori it must also be determined in all its spheres of activity.[19]

Out of all the products of culture, myths seem the most fantastic and unpredictable. Therefore, Lvi-Straussclaims, 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" hasits origin in the old French verb bricoler, which originally referred to extraneous movements in ball games,billiards, hunting, shooting and riding, but which today means do-it-yourself building or repairing things withthe tools and materials on hand, puttering or tinkering as it were. In comparison to the true craftsman, whomLvi-Strauss calls the Engineer, The Bricoleur is adept at many tasks and at putting preexisting things


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together in new ways, adapting his project to a finite stock of materials and tools. The Engineer deals withprojects 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 withwhatever is at hand, whereas the universe of the Engineer is open in that he is able to create new tools andmaterials. But both live within a restrictive reality, and so the Engineer is forced to consider the preexistingset 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 byanthropologists. Stanley Diamond notes that while the secular civilized often consider the concepts of lifeand death to be polar, primitive cultures often see them "as aspects of a single condition, the condition ofexistence."[22] 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"[23] 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 wellknown to hunt in addition to scavenging and the raven also has been known to act as a bird of prey, incontrast to Lvi-Strauss's conception. Nor does that conception explain why a scavenger such as a bearwould 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 clevernessof the animals involved, their ubiquity, elusiveness, capacity to make mischief, their undomesticatedreflection of certain human traits."[24] Finally, Lvi-Strauss's analysis does not appear to be capable ofexplaining why representations of the Trickster in other areas of the world make use of such animals as thespider and mantis.

Ironically, the criticism of playing the trickster was levelled by some at Lvi-Strauss himself, albeitsomewhat 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 bafflingcomplexity with overwhelming erudition. Some readers even suspect that they are being treated to aconfidence trick".[25]

The following translated statement by Claude Lvi-Strauss was broadcast on National Public Radio in theremembrance produced by All Things Considered on November 3, 2009:

There is today a frightful disappearance of living species, be they plants or animals. And it'sclear that the density of human beings has become so great, if I can say so, that they havebegun to poison themselves. And the world in which I am finishing my existence is no longer aworld that I like.[26]

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. *RodneyNeedham, trans. J. H. Bell, J. R. von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham, 1969) Online preview of 1970Traviston paperback (http://books.google.com/books?id=C6YOAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22Claude+L%C3%A9vi-Strauss%22&hl=en&ei=Z2LUTIqaEY70vQOlpKnQBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false)


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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 AWorld on the WaneAnthropologie structurale (1958, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and BrookeGrundfest 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, 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, retrieved 5 November 2010 Paperback ISBN0-415-25394-2; Master e-book ISBN 0-203-16472-5; Adobe e-Reader Format ISBN 0-203-25895-9Paroles 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, 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, retrieved 5 November 2010 Paperback ISBN0-226-47472-0Regarder, couter, lire (1993, Look, Listen, Read, trans. Brian Singer, 1997)Saudades do Brasil, Paris, Plon, 1994Le Pre Nol supplici, Pin-Balma, Sables, 1994LAnthropologie face aux problmes du monde moderne, Paris: Seuil, 2011LAutre face de la lune, Paris: Seuil, 2011

De prs et de loin, interviewed by Didier Eribon (1988, Conversations with Claude Levi-Strauss,trans. Paula Wissing, 1991)Loin du Brsil, interviewed by Vronique Mortaigne, Paris, Chandeigne, 2005Jean-Louis de Rambures, "Comment travaillent les crivains", Paris 1978 (interview with C.Lvi-Strauss)


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James George FrazerAlliance theoryComparative mythologyEvolutionary 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. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/world/europe/04levistrauss.html?em. 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.http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091104/ap_on_re_eu/eu_obit_france_levi_strauss. 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. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aY43vBHLDM6I. Retrieved 3 November 2009.

3.

^ 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. http://www.euronews.net/2009/11/03/death-of-french-anthropologist-claude-levi-strauss/. Retrieved 3 November 2009.

4.

^ (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.

5.

^ Ashbrook, Tom (November 2009). "Claude Levi-Strauss (http://www.onpointradio.org/2009/11/claude-levi-strauss) ". On Point

6.

^ Conversation with Jean Jos Marchand7.^ Wiseman, p. 68.^ "Catherine Clment raconte le grand ethnologue qui fte ses 99 ans," interview, Le Journal du Dimanche, 25November 2007

9.

^ Jennings, Eric (2002) Last Exit from Vichy France: The Martinique Escape Route and the Ambiguities ofEmigration, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 74, No. 2 (Jun., 2002), pp. 289-324

10.

^ Boon and Schneider11.^ http://www.academie-francaise.fr/immortels/base/academiciens/fiche.asp?param=647 Acadmie Franaise -Les Immortels

12.

^ "Anthropologist Levi-Strauss dies" (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8340936.stm) . BBC. 3 November2009. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8340936.stm. Retrieved 3 November 2009.

13.

^ "Claude Lvi-Strauss" (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/science-obituaries/6496558/Claude-Levi-Strauss.html) . The Daily Telegraph. 3 November 2009. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/science-obituaries/6496558/Claude-Levi-Strauss.html. Retrieved 3 November 2009.

14.

^ 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.http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/nov/03/claude-levi-strauss-dies. Retrieved 3 November 2009.

15.

^ a b Structural Linguistics and Anthropology (http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/anthropology.htm#Structural%20Anthropology)

16.

^ a b The Structural Study of Myth (http://courses.essex.ac.uk/lt/lt204/strauss.htm)17.^ Structural Anthropology, p. 20818.^ a b The Raw and the Cooked, p. 1019.^ a b Structural Anthropology, p. 22420.^ Structural Anthropology, p. 22621.^ Diamond, p. 30822.^ Diamond, p. 31023.^ Diamond, p. 31124.^ Leach, Edmund (1974), Claude Levi-Strauss (Revised ed.), New York: Viking Press, p. 325.^ http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120066035 assessment of contemporary human impactupon the world

26.


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Boon, James, and David Schneider. Kinship vis-a-vis Myth Contrasts in Levi-Strauss' Approaches toCross-Cultural Comparison (http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7294(197410)2%3A76%3A4%3C799%3AKVMCIL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y) . AmericanAnthropologist, New Series 76.4(1974): 799817Diamond, Stanley. In Search of the Primitive. New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1974. ISBN0-87855-045-3Doja, 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",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 frombook (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.

Dick, Marcus (2008), Welt, Struktur, Denken. Philosophische Untersuchungen zu ClaudeLvi-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 2011Hnaff, Marcel (Translated by Mary Baker) (1998), Claude Lvi-Strauss and the Making ofStructural 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 MinnesotaPress, ISBN 0-8166-2760-6, 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, retrieved 5 November 2010 Paperback ISBN0-8166-2761-4Pace, 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, 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,retrieved 5 November 2010Taylor, 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, 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, retrieved 5 November 2010Wilcken, 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, http://www.bloomsbury.com/Claude-L233vi-


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Strauss/Patrick-Wilcken/books/details/9781408817728, retrieved 20 November 2011

Profile of Lvi-Strauss in The Nation (http://www.thenation.com/article/157879/library-man-claude-levi-strauss) ."Interview with Claude Lvi Strauss" (1972) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u73chpnKKhQ)video, 1 hour (in French with English subtitles)[apparently this video is no longer available onYouTube because of a copyright claim by Editions Montparnasse]Various excerpts from Structural Anthropology (http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/levistra.htm) at marxists.orgExtract (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 Pensee 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 Film Super 16Obituary, 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 2009Lecture: 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 andwritten linguistic exchangesPhilippe Descola, "Claude Lvi-Strauss: a Career Spanning a Century", in The Letter of the Collgede France (http://www.college-de-france.fr/media/college_english/UPL7694_J4ENGLISH.pdf) n4,2009, p. 36.

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