Re: [xmca] R.I.P. Claude Lévi-Strauss

Alas, poor Yorick... The 20th century is slipping away. I wonder
whether universities these days would allow a guy like Levi-Strauss to
flourish, again.
David

On Nov 3, 2009, at 8:52 PM, Michael Boatright wrote:

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> ------------------------------
> November 4, 2009
> Claude Lévi-Strauss Dies at 100
> By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/edward_rothstein/index.html?inline=nyt-per
> >
>
> Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western
> understanding of what was once called “primitive man” and who
> towered over
> the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and ’70s, has died at 100.
>
> His son Laurent said Mr. Lévi-Strauss died of cardiac arrest Friday
> at his
> home in Paris. His death was announced Tuesday, the same day he was
> buried
> in the village of Lignerolles, in the Côte-d’Or region southeast of
> Paris,
> where he had a country home.
>
> “He had expressed the wish to have a discreet and sober funeral,
> with his
> family, in his country house,” his son said. “He was attached to
> this place;
> he liked to take walks in the forest, and the cemetery where he is now
> buried is just on the edge of this forest.”
>
> A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of
> “structuralism,” a
> school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to
> underlie
> all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and
> creations. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of
> whom
> there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in
> France<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/france/index.html?inline=nyt-geo
> >.
> And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of
> daring
> juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles
> little that had come before in anthropology.
>
> “People realize he is one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th
> century,” Philippe Descola, the chairman of the anthropology
> department at
> the Collège de France, said last November in an interview with The
> New York
> Times <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/books/29levi.html?_r=1> on
> the
> centenary of Mr. Levi-Strauss’s birth. Mr. Lévi-Strauss was so
> revered that
> at least 25 countries celebrated his 100th birthday.
>
> A descendant of a distinguished French-Jewish artistic family, Mr.
> Lévi-Strauss was a quintessential French intellectual, as
> comfortable in the
> public sphere as in the academy. He taught at universities in Paris,
> New
> York and São Paulo and also worked for the United
> Nations<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/united_nations/index.html?inline=nyt-org
> >
> and
> the French government.
>
> His legacy is imposing. “Mythologiques,” his four-volume work about
> the
> structure of native mythology in the Americas, attempts nothing less
> than an
> interpretation of the world of culture and custom, shaped by
> analysis of
> several hundred myths of little-known tribes and traditions. The
> volumes —
> “The Raw and the Cooked,” “From Honey to Ashes,” “The Origin of Table
> Manners” and “The Naked Man,” published from 1964 to 1971 —
> challenge the
> reader with their complex interweaving of theme and detail.
>
> In his analysis of myth and culture, Mr. Lévi-Strauss might contrast
> imagery
> of monkeys and jaguars; consider the differences in meaning of
> roasted and
> boiled food (cannibals, he suggested, tended to boil their friends
> and roast
> their enemies); and establish connections between weird mythological
> tales
> and ornate laws of marriage and kinship.
>
> Many of his books include diagrams that look like maps of interstellar
> geometry, formulas that evoke mathematical techniques, and black-and-
> white
> photographs of scarified faces and exotic ritual that he made during
> his
> field work.
>
> His interpretations of North and South American myths were pivotal in
> changing Western thinking about so-called primitive societies. He
> began
> challenging the conventional wisdom about them shortly after
> beginning his
> anthropological research in the 1930s — an experience that became
> the basis
> of an acclaimed 1955 book, “Tristes Tropiques,” a sort of
> anthropological
> meditation based on his travels in Brazil and elsewhere.
>
> The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually
> unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, basing their
> approaches to
> life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food,
> clothing and
> shelter.
>
> Mr. Lévi-Strauss rescued his subjects from this limited perspective.
> Beginning with the Caduveo and Bororo tribes in the Mato Grosso
> region of
> Brazil, where he did his first and primary fieldwork, he found among
> them a
> dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand
> origins, a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre
> myths,
> and an implicit sense of order and design, even among tribes who
> practiced
> ruthless warfare.
>
> His work elevated the status of “the savage mind, ” a phrase that
> became the
> English title of one of his most forceful surveys, “La Pensée Sauvage”
> (1962).
>
> “The thirst for objective knowledge,” he wrote, “is one of the most
> neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive.’ ”
>
> The world of primitive tribes was fast disappearing, he wrote. From
> 1900 to
> 1950, more than 90 tribes and 15 languages had disappeared in Brazil
> alone.
> This was another of his recurring themes. He worried about the
> growth of a
> “mass civilization,” of a modern “monoculture.” He sometimes expressed
> exasperated self-disgust with the West and its “own filth, thrown in
> the
> face of mankind.”
>
> In this seeming elevation of the savage mind and denigration of
> Western
> modernity, he was writing within the tradition of French Romanticism,
> inspired by the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom
> Mr.
> Lévi-Strauss revered. It was a view that helped build Mr. Lévi-
> Strauss’s
> public reputation in the era of countercultural romanticism in the
> 1960s and
> ’70s.
>
> But such simplified romanticism was also a distortion of his ideas.
> For Mr.
> Lévi-Strauss, the savage was not intrinsically noble or in any way
> “closer
> to nature.” Mr. Lévi-Strauss was withering, for example, when
> describing the
> Caduveo, whom he portrayed as a tribe so in rebellion against nature
> — and
> thus doomed — that it even shunned procreation, choosing to
> “reproduce” by
> abducting children from enemy tribes.
>
> His descriptions of American Indian tribes bear little relation to the
> sentimental and pastoral clichés that have become commonplace. Mr.
> Lévi-Strauss also made sharp distinctions between the primitive and
> the
> modern, focusing on the development of writing and historical
> awareness. It
> was an awareness of history, in his view, that allowed the
> development of
> science and the evolution and expansion of the West. But he worried
> about
> the fate of the West. It was, he wrote in The New York Review of
> Books,
> “allowing itself to forget or destroy its own heritage.”
>
> With the fading of myth’s power in the modern West, he also
> suggested that
> music had taken on myth’s function. Music, he argued, had the
> ability to
> suggest, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and
> ideas that
> lie at the foundation of society.
>
> But Mr. Lévi-Strauss rejected Rousseau’s idea that humankind’s
> problems
> derive from society’s distortions of nature. In Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s
> view,
> there is no alternative to such distortions. Each society must shape
> itself
> out of nature’s raw material, he believed, with law and reason as the
> essential tools.
>
> This application of reason, he argued, created universals that could
> be
> found across all cultures and times. He became known as a
> structuralist
> because of his conviction that a structural unity underlies all of
> humanity’s mythmaking, and he showed how those universal motifs
> played out
> in societies, even in the ways a village was laid out.
>
> For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, for example, every culture’s mythology was built
> around oppositions: hot and cold, raw and cooked, animal and human.
> And it
> is through these opposing “binary” concepts, he said, that humanity
> makes
> sense of the world.
>
> This was quite different from what most anthropologists had been
> concerned
> with. Anthropology had traditionally sought to disclose differences
> among
> cultures rather than discovering universals. It had been preoccupied
> not
> with abstract ideas but with the particularities of rituals and
> customs,
> collecting and cataloguing them.
>
> Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s “structural” approach, seeking universals about
> the human
> mind, cut against that notion of anthropology. He did not try to
> determine
> the various purposes served by a society’s practices and rituals. He
> was
> never interested in the kind of fieldwork that anthropologists of a
> later
> generation, like Clifford Geertz, took on, closely observing and
> analyzing a
> society as if from the inside. (He began “Tristes Tropiques” with the
> statement “I hate traveling and explorers.”)
>
> To his mind, as he wrote in “The Raw and the Cooked,” translated
> from “Le
> Cru et le Cuit” (1964), he had taken “ethnographic research in the
> direction
> of psychology, logic, and philosophy.”
>
> In radio talks for the Canadian Broadcasting
> Corporation<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/canadian_broadcasting_corporation/index.html?inline=nyt-org
> >
> in
> 1977 (published as “Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of
> Culture”), Mr.
> Lévi-Strauss demonstrated how a structural examination of myth might
> proceed. He cited a report that in 17th-century Peru, when the weather
> became exceedingly cold, a priest would summon all those who had
> been born
> feet first, or who had a harelip, or who were twins. They were
> accused of
> being responsible for the weather and were ordered to repent, to
> correct the
> aberrations. But why these groups? Why harelips and twins?
>
> Mr. Lévi-Strauss cited a series of North American myths that
> associate twins
> with opposing natural forces: threat and promise, danger and
> expectation.
> One myth, for example, includes a magical hare, a rabbit, whose nose
> is
> split in a fight, resulting, literally, in a harelip, suggesting an
> incipient twinness. With his injunctions, the Peruvian priest seemed
> aware
> of associations between cosmic disorder and the latent powers of
> twins.
>
> Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s ideas shook his field. But his critics were
> plentiful.
> They attacked him for ignoring history and geography, using myths
> from one
> place and time to help illuminate myths from another, without
> demonstrating
> any direct connection or influence.
>
> In an influential critical survey of his work in 1970, the Cambridge
> University<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/cambridge_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org
> >
> anthropologist
> Edmund Leach wrote of Mr. Lévi-Strauss: “Even now, despite his immense
> prestige, the critics among his professional colleagues greatly
> outnumber
> the disciples.”
>
> Mr. Leach himself doubted whether Mr. Lévi-Strauss, during his
> fieldwork in
> Brazil, could have conversed with “any of his native informants in
> their
> native language” or stayed long enough to confirm his first
> impressions.
> Some of Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s theoretical arguments, including his
> explanation
> of cannibals and their tastes, have been challenged by empirical
> research.
>
> Mr. Lévi-Strauss conceded that his strength was in his
> interpretations of
> what he discovered and thought that his critics did not sufficiently
> credit
> the cumulative impact of those speculations. “Why not admit it?” he
> once
> said to an interviewer, Didier Eribon, in “Conversations with Lévi-
> Strauss”
> (1988). “I was fairly quick to discover that I was more a man for
> the study
> than for the field.”
>
> Claude Lévi-Strauss was born on Nov. 28, 1908, in Belgium to Raymond
> Lévi-Strauss and the former Emma Levy. He grew up in France, near
> Versailles, where his grandfather was a rabbi and his father a
> portrait
> painter. His great-grandfather Isaac Strauss was a Strasbourg
> violinist
> mentioned by Berlioz in his memoirs. As a child, he loved to collect
> disparate objects and juxtapose them. “I had a passion for exotic
> curios,”
> he says in “Conversations.” “My small savings all went to the
> secondhand
> shops.” A large collection of Jewish antiquities from his family’s
> collection, he said, was displayed in the Musée de Cluny; others
> were looted
> after France fell to the Nazis in 1940.
>
>> From 1927 to 1932, Claude obtained degrees in law and philosophy at
>> the
> University of Paris, then taught in a local high school, the Lycée
> Janson de
> Sailly, where his fellow teachers included Jean-Paul
> Sartre<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/jeanpaul_sartre/index.html?inline=nyt-per
> >
> and
> Simone de Beauvoir. He later became a professor of sociology at the
> French-influenced University of São Paulo in Brazil.
>
> Determined to become an anthropologist, he began making trips into the
> country’s interior, accompanied by his wife, Dina Dreyfus, whom he
> married
> in 1932. “I was envisaging a way of reconciling my professional
> education
> with my taste for adventure,” he said in “Conversations,” adding: “I
> felt I
> was reliving the adventures of the first 16th-century explorers.”
>
> His marriage to Ms. Dreyfus ended in divorce, as did a subsequent
> marriage,
> in 1946, to Rose-Marie Ullmo, with whom he had a son, Laurent. In
> 1954 he
> married Monique Roman, and they, too, had a son, Matthieu. Besides
> Laurent,
> Mr. Lévi-Strauss is survived by his wife and Matthieu as well as
> Matthieu’s
> two sons.
>
> Mr. Lévi-Strauss left teaching in 1937 and devoted himself to
> fieldwork,
> returning to France in 1939 for further study. But on the eve of
> war, he was
> drafted into the French Army to serve as a liaison with British
> troops. In
> “Tristes Tropiques,” he writes of his “disorderly retreat” from the
> Maginot
> Line after Hitler<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/adolf_hitler/index.html?inline=nyt-per
> >’s
> invasion of France, fleeing in cattle trucks, sleeping in “sheep
> folds.”
>
> In 1941, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was invited to become a visiting professor
> at the
> New School for Social Research in New York, with help from the
> Rockefeller
> Foundation. He called it “the most fruitful period of my life,”
> spending
> time in the reading room of the New York Public
> Library<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/new_york_public_library/index.html?inline=nyt-org
> >
> and
> befriending the distinguished American anthropologist Franz Boas.
>
> He also became part of a circle of artists and Surrealists,
> including Max
> Ernst, André Breton and Sartre’s future mistress, Dolorès Vanetti. Ms.
> Vanetti, who shared his “passion for objects,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss said
> in
> “Conversations,” regularly visited an antique shop on Third Avenue in
> Manhattan that sold artifacts from the Pacific Northwest, leaving Mr.
> Lévi-Strauss with the “impression that all the essentials of
> humanity’s
> artistic treasures could be found in New York."
>
> After the war, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was so intent on pursuing his
> studies in New
> York that he was given the position of cultural attaché by the French
> government until 1947. On his return to France, he earned a
> doctorate in
> letters from the University of Paris in 1948 and was associate
> curator at
> the Musée de l’Homme in Paris in 1948 and 1949. His first major
> book, “The
> Elementary Structures of Kinship,” was published in 1949. (Several
> years
> later, the jury of the Prix Goncourt, France’s most famous literary
> award,
> said that it would have given the prize to “Tristes Tropiques,” his
> hybrid
> of memoir and anthropological travelogue, had it been fiction.)
>
> After the Rockefeller Foundation gave the École Pratique des Hautes
> Études
> in Paris a grant to create a department of social and economic
> sciences, Mr.
> Lévi-Strauss became the director of studies at the school, remaining
> in the
> post from 1950 to 1974.
>
> Other positions followed. From 1953 to 1960, he served as secretary
> general
> of the International Social Science Council at
> Unesco<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/united_nations_educational_scientific_and_cultural_organization/index.html?inline=nyt-org
> >.
> In 1959, he was appointed professor at the Collège de France. He was
> elected
> to the French Academy in 1973. By 1960, Mr. Lévi-Strauss had founded
> L’Homme, a journal modeled on The American Anthropologist.
>
> By the 1980s, structuralism as imagined by Mr. Lévi-Strauss had been
> displaced by French thinkers who became known as poststructuralists:
> writers
> like Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. They
> rejected the
> idea of timeless universals and argued that history and experience
> were far
> more important in shaping human consciousness than universal laws.
>
> “French society, and especially Parisian, is gluttonous,” Mr. Lévi-
> Strauss
> responded. “Every five years or so, it needs to stuff something new
> in its
> mouth. And so five years ago it was structuralism, and now it is
> something
> else. I practically don’t dare use the word ‘structuralist’ anymore,
> since
> it has been so badly deformed. I am certainly not the father of
> structuralism.”
>
> But Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s version of structuralism may end up surviving
> post-structuralism, just as he survived most of its avatars. His
> monumental
> four-volume work, “Mythologiques,” may ensure his legacy, as a
> creator of
> mythologies if not their explicator.
>
> The final volume ends by suggesting that the logic of mythology is so
> powerful that myths almost have a life independent from the peoples
> who tell
> them. In his view, they speak through the medium of humanity and
> become, in
> turn, the tools with which humanity comes to terms with the world’s
> greatest
> mystery: the possibility of not being, the burden of mortality.
>
> Nadim Audi contributed reporting from Paris.
>
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David Preiss
ddpreiss@me.com
http://web.mac.com/ddpreiss/

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Received on Tue Nov 3 17:52:08 2009