Introducing Levi-Strauss E-Book

Boris Wiseman

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Graphic Guides
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 101

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Introducing Lévi-Strauss is a guide to the work of the great French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009). The book brilliantly traces the development and influence of Lévi-Strauss' thought, from his early work on the function of the incest taboo to initiate an exchange of women between groups, to his identification of a timeless "wild" or "primitive" mode of thinking – a pensée sauvage – behind the processes of human culture. Accessibly written by Boris Wiseman and beautifully illustrated by Judy Groves, Introducing Lévi-Strauss also explores the major contribution that Lévi-Strauss made to contemporary aesthetic history – his work on American-Indian mythology provides a key insight into the way in which art itself comes into being. This is an essential introduction to a key thinker.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DPEmail: [email protected] 

ISBN: 978-178578-020-2

Text copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

Illustrations copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

The author and illustrator has asserted their moral rights

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

A Meeting with Lévi-Strauss

Pioneers of Anthropology: Malinowski

Mauss and the Rule of Reciprocity

Cross-Cousin Marriages

Exogamous and Endogamous Marriages

What is the “Elementary Unit”?

The Saussurian Model

Kinship is Communication

The Incest Taboo

The Rule of Incest

Totemism

The Rise and Fall of Totemism

Totemism and Hysteria

Excluding and Classifying

How is “Totemism” Explained?

The Totemic Operator

Species and Systems

The Nature of Thinking

The Instinct for Knowledge

Anthropology is a Psychology

Classification or Taxonomy

Some Properties of Classificatory Systems

What is Thinking?

The Logic of the Concrete

Thinking by Analogies

How Concrete Logic Functions

How Primitive Science Works

Bricolage

Working with Signs

Lévi-Strauss and the Prague Connection

Hot and Cold Societies

Writing and Social Hierarchies

A Writing Lesson

How Cold Societies Resist Change

Games, Rituals and Classifications

History as Linear Time: Hot Societies

Time as a Circle: Cold Societies

Lévi-Straussian Aesthetics

Signs Versus Mimesis

Primitivism in Western Art

Modernist Art

The Relation of Art to Language

The Art of Masks

A System of Links

The Meaning of Masks

Masks and Cosmetics

The Functions of Masks

Symbols and Scale Models

Reduced to Art

Seeing the Whole Before the Parts

The Analogous Object

The Hidden Structure of Things

Myths of the American Indians

What is Myth?

A Sample Myth

Guidelines to a Study of Myths

The Bororo Myth (M1)

The Position of the Jaguar

The Hidden Armatures

Binary Oppositions

From Nature to Culture

Myths and Paradoxes

Do Myths Have Meaning?

The Oedipus Myth

The Interpretation

The Percival Legend

The Interpretation

Myth and Music

Structuralism and the Body

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Index

A MEETING WITH LÉVI-STRAUSS

Claude Lévi-Strauss is one of the most influential thinkers of our time. One of his many achievements has been to place anthropology at the heart of the evolution of contemporary French thought. He set about systematically putting into place, from the ground up, entire new systems for explaining humanity to itself. In effect, he reinvented modern anthropology.

Since I was a child, I have been bothered by, let’s call it the irrational, and have been trying to find an order behind what presents itself to us as a disorder.

During the 1950s and 60s, Lévi-Strauss’s name became associated with a movement known as structuralism which was to influence the entire spectrum of disciplines that makes up the human sciences.

On a snowy afternoon, 19 November 1996, the author of this book interviewed Claude Lévi-Strauss at the Collège de France in Paris.

YOU HAVE REVEALED THE EXISTENCE OF A TIMELESS PENSÉE SAUVAGE, A “WILD” MODE OF THOUGHT, AT WORK AT THE HEART OF HUMAN SOCIETY. I have tried to show that there is not a great difference between the ways of thinking of those cultures we call “primitive” and our own.

When, in our own societies, we notice customs or beliefs that appear strange or that contradict common sense, we explain them as the vestiges or the relics of archaic modes of thought. On the contrary, it seems to me that these modes of thought are still present and alive among us. We often give them free rein of expression, so that they have come to co-exist with other, domesticated, forms of thinking, such as those that come under the heading of science.

Lévi-Strauss has elaborated new theories in nearly all the key domains of anthropology. In doing so, he has also put into place a general theory of culture which emphasizes the importance of hidden structures, analogous to a kind of syntax, operating behind the scenes.

The origins of Lévi-Strauss’s thought lie ultimately in the rainswept forests of the South American continent, home to the Caduveo, the Bororo and the Nambikwara. It was there that his encounter with “primitive” man first took place.

Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in Brussels in 1908. He was brought up in Paris’s 16th arrondissement (where he still lives today) in a street named after the artist Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), whom he came to admire and write about. His father was a portrait painter and his great-grandfather on his father’s side, Isaac Strauss (born in Strasbourg in 1808), was a violinist, composer and conductor who worked with Berlioz and Offenbach.

The atmosphere in which I grew up was an artistic one… In my childhood, the 16th arrondissement was a more bohemian place than it is now. I recollect a farm at the end of our street.

In 1914, when the Great War broke out and his father was conscripted, Lévi-Strauss went to live with his mother and her sisters in the house of his maternal grandfather, the chief rabbi of Versailles.

He studied law, then sat the agrégation in philosophy, which he taught in a secondary school (a subject still taught in French secondary schools today) until 1935.

I began reading Marx for the first time at the age of 17.

Among those preparing for the agrégation at the same time as Lévi-Strauss were Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86). French philosophy at the time was marked by its neo-Kantianism, and many traces of the thought of the great Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) can be found in Lévi-Strauss’s work.

In 1935, disillusioned with philosophy, Lévi-Strauss accepted an offer to become a lecturer in sociology at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

At the end of that academic year, I carried out, together with my wife, my first ethnographic expedition in the Matto Grosso region of Brazil.

This was his first encounter with the Bororo and the Caduveo whose unique mode of artistic expression – a complex form of body painting – he later analyzed in great detail.

“I thought I was re-living the adventures of the first explorers of the 16th century. I was once again discovering, but with my own eyes, the New World. Everything seemed fantastic to me: the landscapes, the animals, the plants.” [CL-S]

It was during a later expedition in 1938 that Lévi-Strauss carried out field research among the Nambikwara, a semi-nomadic group with whom he lived for several months.

They were so destitute that a family’s entire possessions could be contained in a single basket carried on a woman’s back. They went about naked and slept on the bare ground.

Lévi-Strauss had discovered the “noble savages” celebrated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) and other 18th century Enlightenment philosophers.

After these two trips, however, Lévi-Strauss was soon to discover that he was more suited for the work of the cabinet anthropologist (ethnology) than for field work (ethnography).

But I was soon to return to America, this time for a different reason-the Second World War and the Nazi threat!

It was in the New York public library in 1943 that Lévi-Strauss, then a Jewish refugee who had fled the German invasion of France, began work on what became his doctoral thesis and first book: The Elementary Structures of Kinship. This work revolutionized the anthropological study of kinship systems and established his reputation among professional anthropologists.

It was also at this time that Lévi-Strauss began to discover primitive art – not in ethnographic museums, but in the windows of New York antique dealers.

Primitive art was then considered by most anthropologists to have primarily a documentary value, but for me it represented more than that.

On the boat that took him to New York, Lévi-Strauss had encountered André Breton (1896–1966), the leader of the French Surrealist movement.

In New York, Breton introduced Lévi-Strauss to the German Surrealist artist Max Ernst (1891–1976), with whom he was to have a lasting friendship, and the art critic George Duthuit (1891–1973). The four men shared the same keen interest in primitive art, in particular Indian art.

WE SET OUT TO FIND NEW OBJECTS TO COLLECT. WE POOLED OUR RESOURCES WHEN ONE OR OTHER OF US WAS UNABLE TO AFFORD A NEW ITEM.

Many paths crossed at that time in New York. Other encounters with the Surrealists were at the origin of the American artistic movement that became known in the late 1940s as Abstract Expressionism.

In New York I had an important encounter with ROMAN JAKOBSON (1896–1982), the Prague School linguist. I INTRODUCED LÉVI-STRAUSS TO THE AREA OF STRUCTURAL LINGUISTICS.

Within this linguistic discipline, Lévi-Strauss discovered the principles, methods and ideas that were to enable him to crystallize his own conceptions and develop what he was to call structural anthropology.

“New York – and this was the secret of its charm and fascination – was a town where everything seemed possible. Its social and cultural fabric, like the spreading town itself, was riddled with holes. One needed only to choose one, slip into it, and, like Alice on the other side of the looking glass, find oneself in a world so full of enchantments that it seemed unreal.” [CL-S]

PIONEERS OF ANTHROPOLOGY: MALINOWSKI

In 1922, twenty-three years before Lévi-Strauss began his work on kinship systems, Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), the great pioneer of field anthropology, published one of the best-known ethnographic treatises: Argonauts of the Western Pacific. It was the result of two extensive field trips carried out among the inhabitants of the Trobriand islands, an archipelago lying off the Southeastern end of New Guinea.

I BECAME FASCINATED WITH THE FUNCTIONING OF THE KULA RING.

The kula ring is a system of ceremonial gift exchanges, nearly 100 miles across, that links the numerous islands of the archipelago – a kind of early Internet! Malinowski described how, in this carefully regulated system of reciprocity, different types of ornaments (shell necklaces called Soulava and white arm bracelets called Mwali) travelled around the islands in different directions.

SOME FOLLOWED A CLOCKWISE ROUTE, OTHERS ANTI-CLOCKWISE.

MAUSS AND THE RULE OF RECIPROCITY

In his influential essay The Gift (1925), the great French sociologist Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) – nephew of a founder of sociology, Emile Durkheim (1859–1917) – extracted from Malinowski’s vivid field accounts a general theory about the role of gift exchange in human cultures.

I UNCOVERED IN PARTICULAR THE RULE OF RECIPROCITY GOVERNING SUCH EXCHANGES, WITH ITS BINDING TRIPLE OBLIGATION: TO GIVE, TO RECEIVE AND TO RETURN.

Through Mauss’s essay, Lévi-Strauss found the key to a new understanding of what kinship systems are and how they work. He proposed that marital alliances between groups took the classic form of a gift-exchange relationship and that the most important gifts exchanged were women. He thus came to see the function of kinship systems as regulating (and ensuring the continuity of) the exchange of women between groups.

It is exchange, always exchange, that emerges as the fundamental and common basis of all modalities of the institution of marriage.

WHY IS IT WOMEN WHO ARE EXCHANGED AND NOT MEN? One argument is this: while men see the women who belong to their group as potential sexual partners, they recognize that these same women are also desired by men from other groups and are therefore a means of securing alliances with them. DO WOMEN’S SEXUAL DESIRES NOT COME INTO THE PICTURE? ACCORDING TO LÉVI-STRAUSS, NOT MUCH.

Lévi-Strauss also argues that if it is around women and not men that the system of reciprocity is organized, this is because it is through women that the biological continuity of the social group is ensured.

IN THIS RESPECT WOMEN ARE THE GROUP’S MOST VALUABLE ASSETS.

In practice, how do such exchanges work? Lévi-Strauss offers a new solution to an old anthropological problem, that of cross-cousin marriages.

CROSS-COUSIN MARRIAGES

Anthropologists distinguish between parallel cousins, which are children of same-sex siblings (my father’s brother’s child or my mother’s sister’s child) and cross-cousins who are the children of siblings of different sexes (my mother’s brother’s child).

While it is often the case in primitive societies that the union of parallel cousins is considered to be incestuous and their marriage prohibited, marriage between cross-cousins is favoured and even prescribed.

BOTH RELATIONS ARE EQUALLY CLOSE (FIRST COUSINS), SO WHY IS ONE KIND OF UNION CONSIDERED INCESTUOUS AND PROHIBITED AND THE OTHER NOT?