claude lévi-strauss - wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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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 triangleBricolage

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 Emigrantanthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along

with James George Frazer and Franz Boas,[4]

the "father ofmodern anthropology".[5]The work of Lvi-Strauss was alsokey in the development of the theory of structuralism and

structural anthropology.[6]He was honored by universitiesthroughout the world and held the chair of SocialAnthropology at the Collge de France (19591982), and waselected a member of the Acadmie franaise in 1973.

He argued that the "savage" mind had the same structures asthe "civilized" mind and that human characteristics are the

same everywhere.[7][8]

These observations culminated in hisfamous book Tristes Tropiques, which positioned him as oneof the central figures in the structuralist school of thought,where his ideas reached into many fields in the humanities, aswell as sociology and philosophy. Structuralism has beendefined 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 theories2.3 The structuralist approach to myth

2.3.1 The Savage Mind: Bricoleur and

Engineer

2.3.2 Criticism

3 Bibliography

4 Interviews

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

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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]Duringthe 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, 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 visiting professorof 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 hewas 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, wherethey conducted research forays into the Mato Grosso and the Amazon Rainforest. They first studied theGuaycuru and Bororo Indian tribes, staying among them for a couple of days. In 1938 they returned for asecond, more than half-year-long expedition to study the Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib societies. At this timehis wife suffered an injury that prevented her from completing the study, which he concluded. This experiencecemented Lvi-Strauss's professional identity as an anthropologist. Edmund Leach suggests, fromLvi-Strauss's own accounts in Tristes Tropiques, that he could not have spent more than a few weeks in anyone 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 afull 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 bookNous sommes tous des cannibales(2013): "A daywill come when the thought that to feed themselves, men of the past raised and massacred living beings andcomplacently exposed their shredded flesh in displays shall no doubt inspire the same repulsion as that of thetravellers 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 theMaginot Line. After the French capitulation in 1940, he was employed at a lyce in Montpellier, but then was


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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 theNew School for Social Research in New York, and granted admission to the United States. A series of voyagesbrought him, via South America, to Puerto Rico where he was investigated by the FBI after German letters inhis 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 Hautestudes, 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 Jakobsonhelped 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 Americananthropology 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 associationwith 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 Indiansand The Elementary Structures of Kinship.[15]

Structural anthropology

The Elementary Structures of Kinshipwas published the next year and quickly came to be regarded as one ofthe 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 ofDurkheim's famousElementary Forms of the Religious Life,Elementary Structuresre-examined how peopleorganized 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 basedon descentfrom a common ancestor, Lvi-Strauss argued that kinship was based on the alliancebetween 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 considerableprofessional success. On his return to France, he became involved with the administration of the CNRS and theMuse de l'Homme before finally becoming professor (directeur d'tudes) of the fifth section of the colePratique des Hautes tudes, the 'Religious Sciences' section where Marcel Mauss was previously professor, thetitle 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 English in1973, 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, dazzling philosophicalmeditation, and ethnographic analysis of the Amazonian peoples to produce a masterpiece. The organizers ofthe Prix Goncourt, for instance, lamented that they were not able to award Lvi-Strauss the prize because TristesTropiqueswas non-fiction.

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 examples andprogrammatic statements about structuralism. At the same time as he was laying the groundwork for an


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Wikinews has relatednews: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 wordpensemeans both "thought" and "pansy," while sauvagehas 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'sHamlet(ACT IV, Scene V). French editions ofLa Pense Sauvageare often printedwith an image of wild pansies on the cover.

The Savage Minddiscusses not just "primitive" thought, a category defined by previous anthropologists, butforms of thought common to all human beings. The first half of the book lays out Lvi-Strauss's theory ofculture and mind, while the second half expands this account into a theory of history and social change. Thislatter part of the book engaged Lvi-Strauss in a heated debate with Jean-Paul Sartre over the nature of humanfreedom. On the one hand, Sartre's existentialist philosophy committed him to a position that human beingsfundamentally were free to act as they pleased. On the other hand, Sartre also was a leftist who was committedto 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 betweenstructuralism 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, afour-volume study calledMythologiques. In it, he followed a single myth from the tip of South America and allof its variations from group to group up through Central America and eventually into the Arctic Circle, thustracing the myth's cultural evolution from one end of the Western hemisphere to the other. He accomplished thisin a typically structuralist way, examining the underlying structure of relationships among the elements of thestory rather than by focusing on the content of the story itself. While Pense Sauvagewas a statement ofLvi-Strauss's big-picture theory,Mythologiqueswas an extended, four-volume example of analysis. Richlydetailed 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 ofMythologiquesin 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 notableacademies worldwide, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He received the Erasmus Prize in1973, the Meister-Eckhart-Prize for philosophy in 2003, and several honorary doctorates from universities suchas 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 receivedthe XVII Premi Internacional Catalunya (Generalitat of Catalonia). After his retirement, he continued to publishoccasional meditations on art, music, and poetry.

Later life and death

In 2008 he became the first member of the Acadmie franaise to reachthe age of 100 and one of the few living authors to have his workspublished in the Bibliothque de la Pliade. On the death of MauriceDruon on 14 April 2009, he became the Dean of theAcadmie, itslongest-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 historyand 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 DailyTelegraphsaid 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 theAcadmie 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 aself-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 oflinguistic value, families acquire determinate identities only through relations with one another. Thus heinverted 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-Straussnoted that the relation between the uncle and the nephew was to the relation between brother and sister, as therelation between father and son is to that between husband and wife, that is, A is to B as C is to D. Therefore ifwe 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 ofLvi-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. Hiswork is a structuralist theory of mythology which attempted to explain how seemingly fantastical and arbitrarytales, 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 amyth consists of juxtaposed 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 fundamentally inthese binary oppositions and their unification (the thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad), and that these are whatmake meaning possible. Furthermore, he considered the job of myth to be a sleight of hand, an association of anirreconcilable 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 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 social theory.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 old idea,

the view that civilization developed through a series of phases from the primitive to the modern, everywhere inthe same manner. All of the activities in a given kind of society would partake of the same character; some sortof internal logic would cause one level of culture to evolve into the next. On this view, a society can easily bethought 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 individualneeds, 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 praises Boasfor facing squarely.

Historical information seldom is available for non-literate cultures. The anthropologist fills in with comparisonsto other cultures and is forced to rely on theories that have no evidential basis whatsoever, the old notion ofuniversal stages of development or the claim that cultural resemblances are based on some unrecognized pastcontact between groups. Boas came to believe that no overall pattern in social development could be proven; forhim, there was no single history, only histories.

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 beliefs come

The world began without the human raceand 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 theTrobriand Islands, he found the proof of this claim in the rites surrounding abortions and weaving skirts. But inthe same tribes, there is no magic attached to making clay pots even though it is no more certain a business thanweaving. 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 haveinstitutions 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 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 Structural Anthropology).Phonemic analysis reveals features that are real, in the sense that users of the language can recognize andrespond to them. At the same time, a phoneme is an abstraction from languagenot a sound, but a category ofsound defined by the way it is distinguished from other categories through rules unique to the language. Theentire 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 comprehensiveorganization of data that partly had been ordered by other researchers. The overall goal was to find out whyfamily relations differed among various South American cultures. The father might have great authority overthe son in one group, for example, with the relationship rigidly restricted by taboos. In another group, themother's brother would have that kind of relationship with the son, while the father's relationship was relaxedand playful.

A number of partial patterns had been noted. Relations between the mother and father, for example, had somesort of reciprocity with those of father and sonif the mother had a dominant social status and was formal withthe father, for example, then the father usually had close relations with the son. But these smaller patterns joinedtogether 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 the samesex as the son, and so on; the matrilineal uncle was older and of the same sex, but did not produce the son, andso 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 thatis 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 ageexplains 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 acluster of four rolesbrother, sister, father, son. These are the roles that must be involved in any society that hasan 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 sisterto marry exogamously. The underlying demand is a continued circulation of women to keep various clanspeacefully related.

Right or wrong, this solution displays the qualities of structural thinking. Even though Lvi-Strauss frequentlyspeaks of treating culture as the product of the axioms and corollaries that underlie it, or the phonemicdifferences that constitute it, he is concerned with the objective data of field research. He notes that it islogically 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. Thetrouble with this view has been shown by the Australian anthropologist Augustus Elkin, who insisted on thepoint that in a four class marriage system, the preferred marriage was with a classificatory mother' s brother'sdaughter and never with the true one. Lvi-Strauss's atom of kinship structure deals only with consanguinealkin. 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. Lvi-Strauss also developed theconcept of the house society to describe those societies where the domestic unit is more central for socialorganization than the descent group or lineage.

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 biological imperativeunderlying it, but so far as social order is concerned, the taboo has the effect of an irreducible fact. The socialscientist 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 intoexistence 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 and transformationsthat he had discovered in the Brazilian back countryThe Raw and the Cooked, From Honey to Ashes, TheNaked Man(to borrow some titles from theMythologiques). For instance he compares anthropology to musicalserialism and defends his "philosophical" approach. He also pointed out that the modern view of primitivecultures was simplistic in denying them a history. The categories of myth did not persist among them becausenothing had happenedit was easy to find the evidence of defeat, migration, exile, repeated displacements of allthe 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 andthe long cycles in which one set of fundamental mythic patterns dominates and then perhaps another. In thisrespect, 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 JosGaranger's archeological work in central Vanuatu, bringing to the fore the skeletons of former chiefs describedin local myths, who had thus been living persons, shows that there can be some means of ascertaining thehistory of some groups which otherwise would be deemed a-historical. Another issue is the experience that thesame person can tell one a myth highly charged in symbols, and some years later a sort of chronological historyclaiming to be the chronic of a descent line (from examples in the Loyalty islands and New Zealand), the twotexts having in common that they each deal in topographical detail with the land-tenure claims of the saiddescent line (see Douglas Oliver on the Siwai in Bougainville). Lvi-Strauss would agree to these aspects beexplained inside his seminar, but would never touch them on his own. The anthropological data content of themyths was not his problem. He was only interested with the formal aspects of each story, considered by him as


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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 anydiscussion 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 differentcultures are surprisingly similar:

On the one hand it would seem that in the course of a myth anything is likely to happen. [] Buton the other hand, this apparent arbitrariness is belied by the astounding similarity between mythscollected 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 oneparticular 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 becomesapparent, 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 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. The relationshipbetween agriculture and hunting is analogous to the opposition between life and death: agriculture is solelyconcerned 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 betweenagriculture 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 thereforehalfway 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 andbeasts of prey: in other words, they mediate the opposition between herbivores and beasts of prey. As we haveseen, this opposition ultimately is analogous to the opposition between life and death. Therefore, the raven andcoyote ultimately mediate the opposition between life and death. This, Lvi-Strauss believes, explains why thecoyote 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 twopolar 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 mythicalpersonalities 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 allareas 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 in the

realm of mythology, a fortioriit 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-Straussclaims, if even mythical thought obeys universal laws, then allhuman 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 itsorigin in the old French verb bricoler, which originally referred to extraneous movements in ball games,


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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 together innew ways, adapting his project to a finite stock of materials and tools. The Engineer deals with projects in theirentirety, conceiving and procuring all the necessary materials and tools to suit his project. The Bricoleurapproximates "the savage mind" and the Engineer approximates the scientific mind. Lvi-Strauss says that theuniverse of the Bricoleur is closed, and he often is forced to make do with whatever is at hand, whereas theuniverse of the Engineer is open in that he is able to create new tools and materials. But both live within arestrictive reality, and so the Engineer is forced to consider the preexisting set of theoretical and practicalknowledge, 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]Diamondremarks that Lvi-Strauss did not reach such a conclusion by inductive reasoning, but simply by working

backwards from the evidence to the "a priorimediated concepts"[29]of "life" and "death", which he reached byassumption 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 andthe raven also has been known to act as a bird of prey, in contrast to Lvi-Strauss's conception. Nor does thatconception explain why a scavenger such as a bear would never appear as the Trickster. Diamond furtherremarks that "the Trickster names 'raven' and 'coyote' which Lvi-Strauss explains can be arrived at with greatereconomy 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 analysisdoes not appear to be capable of explaining why representations of the Trickster in other areas of the worldmake 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 somewhattongue-in-cheek. Edmund Leach noted that: "The outstanding characteristic of his writing, whether in French orEnglish, 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 hisscholarship 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 explainhis 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 asA

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 asHistoire 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

âbcRothstein, 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.

âbDoland, 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. 224.

âb"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=Structuralism6.

^(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.

Âshbrook, Tom (November 2009). "Claude Levi-Strauss (http://www.onpointradio.org/2009/11/claude-

levi-strauss)". On Point

8.

^Conversation with Jean Jos Marchand9.

^Wiseman, p. 610.

^"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, 17213.


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^Totems and teachers: key figures in the history of anthropology, Sydel Silverman, Rowman Altamira, 2004 p 1614.

^Moore, Jerry D. (2004). Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists. Rowman

Altamira. p. 234

15.

^Boon and Schneider16.

^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.

â

b

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

22.

âbThe Structural Study of Myth (http://courses.essex.ac.uk/lt/lt204/strauss.htm)23.

^Structural Anthropology, p. 20824.

âbThe Raw and the Cooked, p. 1025.

âbStructural Anthropology, p. 22426.

^Structural Anthropology, p. 22627.

^Diamond, p. 30828.

^Diamond, p. 31029.

^Diamond, p. 31130.

^Leach, Edmund (1974), Claude Levi-Strauss(Revised ed.), New York: Viking Press, p. 331.

Ândreski, Stanislav (1972). The Social Sciences as Sorcery, Deutsch, p. 8532.

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).AmericanAnthropologist, 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 Studies123.

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 0-8166-2761-4Pace, 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, 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


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Wikimedia Commons hasmedia 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 theAcadmie franaisesite (http://www.academie-francaise.fr/immortels

/base/academiciens/fiche.asp?param=647) (French)

Excerpts fromLa 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


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/levistrauss.html)

Claude Lvi-Strauss and hisMythologiques --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 alumniLyce Janson de Sailly alumni University of Paris alumni Collge de France faculty

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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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