Claude Lévi-Strauss, 100, Dies; Altered Western Views of the ‘Primitive’
By Edward Rothstein
Nov. 4, 2009
Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist whose revolutionary studies of what was once called “primitive man” transformed Western understanding of the nature of culture, custom and civilization, 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, in studying the mythologies of primitive tribes, transformed the way the 20th century came to understand civilization itself. Tribal mythologies, he argued, display remarkably subtle systems of logic, showing rational mental qualities as sophisticated as those of Western societies.
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Mr. Lévi-Strauss rejected the idea that differences between societies were of no consequence, but he focused on the common aspects of humanity’s attempts to understand the world. He became the premier representative 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.
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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. 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 on the centenary of Mr. Levi-Strauss’s birth. Mr. Lévi-Strauss was so revered that the occasion was celebrated in at least 25 countries.
A descendant of a distinguished French-Jewish artistic family, he 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, Brazil, and also worked for the United Nations and the French government.
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Mr. Lévi-Strauss in Brazil in the 1930s.Credit...Apic/Getty Images
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.
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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.
‘The Savage Mind’
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).
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“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. From 1900 to 1950, more than 90 tribes and 15 languages had disappeared in Brazil alone. This was another of Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s 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.”
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Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist and father of structuralism, has died at the age of 100.Credit...Pascal Pavani/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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, and the cultural relativism that developed in later decades, 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 North and South 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.
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But Mr. Lévi-Strauss rejected Rousseau’s idea that humankind’s problems derive from society’s distortions of nature. In his 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, 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.”)
Ideas That Shook His Field
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.”
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Mr. Lévi-Strauss at home in Paris on Nov. 28, 2008, his 100th birthday, being visited by President Nicolas Sarkozy.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In radio talks for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 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. But why these groups? Why harelips and twins?
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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 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 he 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 Brussels to Raymond Lévi-Strauss and the former Emma Levy, who were living in Belgium at the time. 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 said in “Conversations.” “My small savings all went to the secondhand shops.” A collection of Jewish antiquities from his family’s collection, he said, was displayed in the Musée de Cluny in Paris; 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 and Simone de Beauvoir. He later became a professor of sociology at the French-influenced University of São Paulo in Brazil.
A Taste for Adventure
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.”
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His marriage to Ms. Dreyfus ended in divorce, as did a subsequent marriage, in 1946, to Rose-Marie Ullmo, with whom he had his 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 by 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 World War II, 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’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 and befriending the distinguished German-born American anthropologist Franz Boas and the Russian-born linguist (and structuralist) Roman Jakobson.
He also became part of a circle of artists and Surrealists, including Max Ernst, André Breton and Jean-Paul Sartre’s future mistress, Dolorès Vanetti. Ms. Vanetti shared his “passion for objects,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss said in “Conversations,” and the two regularly visited an antique shop in Manhattan that sold artifacts from the Pacific Northwest. The excursions left 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 school’s director of studies, remaining in the post from 1950 to 1974.
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Other positions followed. From 1953 to 1960, he served as secretary general of the International Social Science Council at Unesco. 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 poststructuralism, just as he survived most of its proponents. His monumental work “Mythologiques” may even 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, myths 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.
Related Coverage
The Influence of Claude Lévi-StraussNov. 3, 2009
Other Voyages in the Shadow of Lévi-StraussNov. 4, 2009
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Two-Part HarmoniesNov. 7, 2009
AN APPRAISAL
Other Voyages in the Shadow of Lévi-Strauss
By Larry Rohter
Nov. 4, 2009
His most celebrated work, “Tristes Tropiques,” begins with the words “I hate traveling and explorers.” But what made the anthropologist and philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century was precisely his eagerness to explore — not just remote jungles and isolated societies, but also the far reaches of the human mind.
As one of the fathers of the school of thought that came to be known as “structuralism,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss, who died Friday, a month short of his 101st birthday, was always looking for universal patterns, links and modes of organization and thought. To find them he would go anywhere, and with a remarkably open mind and attentive eye and ear, all of which were on display in “Tristes Tropiques.”
In 1978 I made my first reporting trip to the Brazilian Amazon, with an orange-and-white Penguin paperback edition of “Tristes Tropiques” as the only book squeezed into my gear. Some 40 years had elapsed since Mr. Lévi-Strauss, then in his late 20s, first plunged into that same jungle, and I was curious to see what, if anything, remained of the world he had encountered and described in such beautifully bittersweet prose. Much had changed of course. Instead of the precarious telegraph trail he had followed, there was now a rutted highway, BR-364, that was increasingly crowded with impoverished peasant families from the south of Brazil that the military dictatorship then in power was encouraging to settle in the Amazon basin.
But along the margins of the highway, it was still possible to find members of the indigenous Nambikwara people, often sitting sullen, drunk or bewildered. Of the four tribal groups that Mr. Lévi-Strauss spent time with — the Bororo, Caduveo and Kawahib were the others — he seemed particularly moved by the plight of the Nambikwara, whose family and social life became the subject of his doctoral thesis after he returned to Europe in 1939.
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In writing of the Nambikwara, Mr. Lévi-Strauss foresaw the drama and tragedy of a people whose culture and way of life even then were clearly doomed. So he was meticulous in documenting as many aspects of their lives as he could, from relations between the sexes and construction of shelter to diet, pets and pearl gathering. Brazilian anthropologists say that even today Nambikwara oral history recalls the visit of “Professor Levi.”
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The man Claude Lévi-Strauss described as his “best informant.”Credit...From: “Tristes Tropiques,” by Claude Lévi-Strauss (Atheneum)
Mr. Lévi-Strauss may have been even more perceptive in his observations of the caboclos, the assimilated Portuguese-speaking mestiços who were the region’s dominant group. His descriptions of their behavior and manner of dress were astonishingly accurate, and in my own travels I would often hear some impossibly colorful locution that I had first encountered in “Tristes Tropiques” and attributed to what I thought must be his imperfect command of Portuguese.
One example from another reporting trip remains vivid all these years later. Traveling down the Amazon by boat in 1979, I found that the crew members believed the river was infested with mermaids and monsters and recognized many of the myths that I read them from “Tristes Tropiques.” One morning we stopped at a settlement called Santo Antônio do Iça to take on a cargo of rubber and offload a consignment of toilet paper and soft drinks.
Whiling away the time in the hamlet’s one general store, I remarked to the proprietor that his shelves seemed empty. “Aqui so falta o que ñao tem,” he replied: “Here we lack only what we don’t have,” a phrase that I had first run across in “Tristes Tropiques” just a few days earlier.
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Ever since Francisco de Orellana sailed the Amazon in 1541, the world’s largest rain forest has seen more than its share of European adventurers. But Mr. Lévi-Strauss did not come looking for gold, the mythical city of El Dorado, rivers and mountains on which to bestow the name of royal patrons back home, or even to find flora and fauna that he could name after himself. More than the jungle, what interested him was the people who lived there, a profoundly humanist approach.
“Tristes Tropiques” is not a perfect work, and Mr. Lévi-Strauss had imperfections of his own, some acknowledged, some not. He misspelled the names of some of the places he visited, and, writing 15 years after his travels, he was not generous to his first wife, Dina, a formidable researcher in her own right who traveled with him, or eager to acknowledge the role she had played in his work.
But “Tristes Tropiques” is nonetheless that rarest of artifacts: a book that manages to be both a work of scholarship and a work of art. It began as a novel, but Mr. Lévi-Strauss soon realized he did not have the right tools to write fiction. But its prose is luminous, and the story it tells, of the voyager adrift in strange latitudes, dates back to Homer.
To the layman, much of the debate between structuralists and existentialists, which raged from the 1950s into the 1980s, now seems incomprehensible, if not sterile and outdated. But no matter what one thinks of Mr. Lévi-Strauss and his theories, it is hard today to undertake the serious study of anthropology, ethnology, sociology, philosophy or linguistics without at least acknowledging him or trying to debunk him.
For those of us who continue to practice humbler crafts, like journalists working in societies not their own, there is nothing ambiguous about Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s legacy. The lessons one learns from reading him are timeless and invaluable: because the distinctions between the cognitive processes of the “primitive mind” and its modern “civilized” counterpart may be fewer than we would like to think, it is always worthwhile to look at the familiar as if it were foreign and search for the familiar in what appears to be hopelessly foreign.
Back in France, and also during the years he spent in New York City at the New School for Social Research, Mr. Lévi-Strauss continued to do that. One of his books, for example, examines the Santa Claus myth cleverly and thoroughly, but also dispassionately, as if he were a Nambikwara anthropologist.
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After returning from my first Amazon trip, my copy of “Tristes Tropiques” by then heavily underlined and annotated, I tried to devour as much of Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s work as I could find, in whatever language was available. “The Elementary Structures of Kinship” proved too dry, written too much for specialists, but “The Raw and the Cooked” and “From Honey to Ashes,” though far less poetic than “Tristes Tropiques,” elaborated on many of the insights present there.
There is also “The Savage Mind,” a major work, though its title can be misleading. Mr. Lévi-Strauss obviously did not subscribe to Rousseau’s myth of the “noble savage.” But neither did he fall into the trap of believing that Western modes of thought and behavior were somehow superior to those of the societies we label as primitive or “savage.”
I recalled Mr. Lévi-Strauss while visiting the Cinta-Larga tribe as a correspondent for The New York Times in November 2006, near an area he had visited 70 years before. I was talking with a chief who had ordered the killing of 29 miners after they intruded on the tribe’s reservation when the chief halted the interview to ask me a question: “Why are your people so warlike?” In my head I thought I heard the old man chuckling.
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 5, 2009, Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Other Voyages In the Shadow Of Lévi-Strauss. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Two-Part Harmonies
By Larry Rohter
Nov. 7, 2009
Millions of words have been written trying to explain or apply the theories of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss since the publication of his work “Structural Anthropology” in 1958. More than a few of the resulting texts in disciplines as varied as sociology and philosophy are dense, turgid and jargon ridden, or so the complaint goes. But Mr. Lévi-Strauss himself could be simple, direct and elegant when he wanted to be. Structuralism, he once said, is simply “the search for unsuspected harmonies” across cultures.
In fact, his life’s work was dedicated to detecting and codifying what he believed to be the underlying structures common to all societies. Working among Amerindian tribes in the Amazon and elsewhere from the 1930s onward, he found those harmonies to be especially manifest in mythology. In any society, he maintained, “the purpose of a myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction.”
As he saw it, the human mind tends to organize thought and culture around binary opposites, and to try to resolve the resulting tension through the creative act of mythmaking. Here are four pairs that, explicitly or implicitly, are important in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who died a little over a week ago just shy of 101.
THE RAW AND THE COOKED “Raw” and “cooked” are shorthand terms meant to differentiate what is found in nature from what is a product of human culture. That dichotomy, Mr. Lévi-Strauss believed, exists in all human societies. Part of what makes us human, however, is our need to reconcile those opposites, to find a balance between raw and cooked. But where is the dividing line between nature, which is emotional and instinctive, and culture, which is based on rules and conventions? In a metaphoric sense, a cook is a kind of mediator between those realms, transforming an object originally from the natural world into an item fit for human consumption. So by “cooked,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss means anything that is socialized from its natural state. Yes, the definition of what is considered edible varies from one society or religious group to another. But all have binary structures that separate the raw and the cooked, the fresh and the rotten, the moist and the dry or burned.
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THE TINKERER AND THE ENGINEER In “The Savage Mind” (1962), Mr. Lévi-Strauss proposes a distinction between modes of conception, design and manufacture. The “tinkerer” or “artisan,” two possible renderings of the somewhat ambiguous French word that he used, “bricoleur,” works mainly with his hands, using materials that already exist, which he tries to put together in different ways. The “engineer,” in contrast, is a proto-scientist. He has a more abstract mental universe, which allows him to invent tools, devices or materials and transcend the boundaries that society imposes. Though both the tinkerer and the engineer face comparable obstacles, they navigate them in dissimilar fashion, with the tinkerer being more typical of the approach of “the savage mind.” One way is spontaneous, the other methodical. “A truly scientific analysis must be real, simplifying and explanatory,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss wrote, while the tinkerer is confined to a more narrow and immediate focus.
THE I AND THE WE Mr. Lévi-Strauss was loath to accept the notion of “us versus them,” because it didn’t conform to his belief in societies’ shared structures. Instead, he often focused on the distinction between “I” and “we.” In looking at kinship patterns, for example, especially among the Amerindian peoples who provided much of his research material, he was more attentive to the rules governing relationships between different family groups than the roles of the individuals making up those families. Examining both Oedipus and Amerindian myths, Mr. Lévi-Strauss suggests that the universal incest taboo is the way human societies resolve the opposing dangers of excessive love and hatred for close blood relations. He also rejected one of the fundamental features of Western thought: seeing individual self-expression as the height of creativity. Because he was so interested in mythmaking, a collective process that occurs incrementally over time, he favored the notion of a communal approach to making culture, writing in “Tristes Tropiques,” “The I is hateful.”
THE LANGUAGE AND THE WORD From the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Mr. Lévi-Strauss borrowed the distinction between “langue” (tongue, or language) and “parole” (word), and then gave it a twist. The tongue, the underlying system of language, is something “belonging to a reversible time,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss wrote, outside a particular moment. A word, in contrast, is a specific utterance that, once expressed, cannot be reversed. Think of a piece of sheet music: it can be read or played from left to right, from one page to another, in a horizontal, linear fashion leading to a coda, a definite conclusion. That is “parole.” Or it can be studied vertically, in hopes of discerning harmony and other structural relationships between the notes in the treble and bass clefs. That is what Mr. Lévi-Strauss considered “langue.”
Illustrations by Leif Parsons.
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 8, 2009, Section WK, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Two-Part Harmonies. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
By Edward Rothstein
Nov. 4, 2009
Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist whose revolutionary studies of what was once called “primitive man” transformed Western understanding of the nature of culture, custom and civilization, 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, in studying the mythologies of primitive tribes, transformed the way the 20th century came to understand civilization itself. Tribal mythologies, he argued, display remarkably subtle systems of logic, showing rational mental qualities as sophisticated as those of Western societies.
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Mr. Lévi-Strauss rejected the idea that differences between societies were of no consequence, but he focused on the common aspects of humanity’s attempts to understand the world. He became the premier representative 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.
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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. 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 on the centenary of Mr. Levi-Strauss’s birth. Mr. Lévi-Strauss was so revered that the occasion was celebrated in at least 25 countries.
A descendant of a distinguished French-Jewish artistic family, he 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, Brazil, and also worked for the United Nations and the French government.
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Mr. Lévi-Strauss in Brazil in the 1930s.Credit...Apic/Getty ImagesHis 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.
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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.
‘The Savage Mind’
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).
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“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. From 1900 to 1950, more than 90 tribes and 15 languages had disappeared in Brazil alone. This was another of Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s 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.”
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Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist and father of structuralism, has died at the age of 100.Credit...Pascal Pavani/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn 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, and the cultural relativism that developed in later decades, 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 North and South 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.
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But Mr. Lévi-Strauss rejected Rousseau’s idea that humankind’s problems derive from society’s distortions of nature. In his 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, 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.”)
Ideas That Shook His Field
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.”
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Mr. Lévi-Strauss at home in Paris on Nov. 28, 2008, his 100th birthday, being visited by President Nicolas Sarkozy.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn radio talks for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 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. But why these groups? Why harelips and twins?
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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 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 he 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 Brussels to Raymond Lévi-Strauss and the former Emma Levy, who were living in Belgium at the time. 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 said in “Conversations.” “My small savings all went to the secondhand shops.” A collection of Jewish antiquities from his family’s collection, he said, was displayed in the Musée de Cluny in Paris; 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 and Simone de Beauvoir. He later became a professor of sociology at the French-influenced University of São Paulo in Brazil.
A Taste for Adventure
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.”
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His marriage to Ms. Dreyfus ended in divorce, as did a subsequent marriage, in 1946, to Rose-Marie Ullmo, with whom he had his 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 by 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 World War II, 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’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 and befriending the distinguished German-born American anthropologist Franz Boas and the Russian-born linguist (and structuralist) Roman Jakobson.
He also became part of a circle of artists and Surrealists, including Max Ernst, André Breton and Jean-Paul Sartre’s future mistress, Dolorès Vanetti. Ms. Vanetti shared his “passion for objects,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss said in “Conversations,” and the two regularly visited an antique shop in Manhattan that sold artifacts from the Pacific Northwest. The excursions left 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 school’s director of studies, remaining in the post from 1950 to 1974.
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Other positions followed. From 1953 to 1960, he served as secretary general of the International Social Science Council at Unesco. 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 poststructuralism, just as he survived most of its proponents. His monumental work “Mythologiques” may even 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, myths 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.
Related Coverage
The Influence of Claude Lévi-StraussNov. 3, 2009
Other Voyages in the Shadow of Lévi-StraussNov. 4, 2009
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Two-Part HarmoniesNov. 7, 2009
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Other Voyages in the Shadow of Lévi-Strauss
By Larry Rohter
Nov. 4, 2009
His most celebrated work, “Tristes Tropiques,” begins with the words “I hate traveling and explorers.” But what made the anthropologist and philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century was precisely his eagerness to explore — not just remote jungles and isolated societies, but also the far reaches of the human mind.
As one of the fathers of the school of thought that came to be known as “structuralism,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss, who died Friday, a month short of his 101st birthday, was always looking for universal patterns, links and modes of organization and thought. To find them he would go anywhere, and with a remarkably open mind and attentive eye and ear, all of which were on display in “Tristes Tropiques.”
In 1978 I made my first reporting trip to the Brazilian Amazon, with an orange-and-white Penguin paperback edition of “Tristes Tropiques” as the only book squeezed into my gear. Some 40 years had elapsed since Mr. Lévi-Strauss, then in his late 20s, first plunged into that same jungle, and I was curious to see what, if anything, remained of the world he had encountered and described in such beautifully bittersweet prose. Much had changed of course. Instead of the precarious telegraph trail he had followed, there was now a rutted highway, BR-364, that was increasingly crowded with impoverished peasant families from the south of Brazil that the military dictatorship then in power was encouraging to settle in the Amazon basin.
But along the margins of the highway, it was still possible to find members of the indigenous Nambikwara people, often sitting sullen, drunk or bewildered. Of the four tribal groups that Mr. Lévi-Strauss spent time with — the Bororo, Caduveo and Kawahib were the others — he seemed particularly moved by the plight of the Nambikwara, whose family and social life became the subject of his doctoral thesis after he returned to Europe in 1939.
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In writing of the Nambikwara, Mr. Lévi-Strauss foresaw the drama and tragedy of a people whose culture and way of life even then were clearly doomed. So he was meticulous in documenting as many aspects of their lives as he could, from relations between the sexes and construction of shelter to diet, pets and pearl gathering. Brazilian anthropologists say that even today Nambikwara oral history recalls the visit of “Professor Levi.”
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The man Claude Lévi-Strauss described as his “best informant.”Credit...From: “Tristes Tropiques,” by Claude Lévi-Strauss (Atheneum)Mr. Lévi-Strauss may have been even more perceptive in his observations of the caboclos, the assimilated Portuguese-speaking mestiços who were the region’s dominant group. His descriptions of their behavior and manner of dress were astonishingly accurate, and in my own travels I would often hear some impossibly colorful locution that I had first encountered in “Tristes Tropiques” and attributed to what I thought must be his imperfect command of Portuguese.
One example from another reporting trip remains vivid all these years later. Traveling down the Amazon by boat in 1979, I found that the crew members believed the river was infested with mermaids and monsters and recognized many of the myths that I read them from “Tristes Tropiques.” One morning we stopped at a settlement called Santo Antônio do Iça to take on a cargo of rubber and offload a consignment of toilet paper and soft drinks.
Whiling away the time in the hamlet’s one general store, I remarked to the proprietor that his shelves seemed empty. “Aqui so falta o que ñao tem,” he replied: “Here we lack only what we don’t have,” a phrase that I had first run across in “Tristes Tropiques” just a few days earlier.
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Ever since Francisco de Orellana sailed the Amazon in 1541, the world’s largest rain forest has seen more than its share of European adventurers. But Mr. Lévi-Strauss did not come looking for gold, the mythical city of El Dorado, rivers and mountains on which to bestow the name of royal patrons back home, or even to find flora and fauna that he could name after himself. More than the jungle, what interested him was the people who lived there, a profoundly humanist approach.
“Tristes Tropiques” is not a perfect work, and Mr. Lévi-Strauss had imperfections of his own, some acknowledged, some not. He misspelled the names of some of the places he visited, and, writing 15 years after his travels, he was not generous to his first wife, Dina, a formidable researcher in her own right who traveled with him, or eager to acknowledge the role she had played in his work.
But “Tristes Tropiques” is nonetheless that rarest of artifacts: a book that manages to be both a work of scholarship and a work of art. It began as a novel, but Mr. Lévi-Strauss soon realized he did not have the right tools to write fiction. But its prose is luminous, and the story it tells, of the voyager adrift in strange latitudes, dates back to Homer.
To the layman, much of the debate between structuralists and existentialists, which raged from the 1950s into the 1980s, now seems incomprehensible, if not sterile and outdated. But no matter what one thinks of Mr. Lévi-Strauss and his theories, it is hard today to undertake the serious study of anthropology, ethnology, sociology, philosophy or linguistics without at least acknowledging him or trying to debunk him.
For those of us who continue to practice humbler crafts, like journalists working in societies not their own, there is nothing ambiguous about Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s legacy. The lessons one learns from reading him are timeless and invaluable: because the distinctions between the cognitive processes of the “primitive mind” and its modern “civilized” counterpart may be fewer than we would like to think, it is always worthwhile to look at the familiar as if it were foreign and search for the familiar in what appears to be hopelessly foreign.
Back in France, and also during the years he spent in New York City at the New School for Social Research, Mr. Lévi-Strauss continued to do that. One of his books, for example, examines the Santa Claus myth cleverly and thoroughly, but also dispassionately, as if he were a Nambikwara anthropologist.
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After returning from my first Amazon trip, my copy of “Tristes Tropiques” by then heavily underlined and annotated, I tried to devour as much of Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s work as I could find, in whatever language was available. “The Elementary Structures of Kinship” proved too dry, written too much for specialists, but “The Raw and the Cooked” and “From Honey to Ashes,” though far less poetic than “Tristes Tropiques,” elaborated on many of the insights present there.
There is also “The Savage Mind,” a major work, though its title can be misleading. Mr. Lévi-Strauss obviously did not subscribe to Rousseau’s myth of the “noble savage.” But neither did he fall into the trap of believing that Western modes of thought and behavior were somehow superior to those of the societies we label as primitive or “savage.”
I recalled Mr. Lévi-Strauss while visiting the Cinta-Larga tribe as a correspondent for The New York Times in November 2006, near an area he had visited 70 years before. I was talking with a chief who had ordered the killing of 29 miners after they intruded on the tribe’s reservation when the chief halted the interview to ask me a question: “Why are your people so warlike?” In my head I thought I heard the old man chuckling.
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 5, 2009, Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Other Voyages In the Shadow Of Lévi-Strauss. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Two-Part Harmonies
By Larry Rohter
Nov. 7, 2009
Millions of words have been written trying to explain or apply the theories of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss since the publication of his work “Structural Anthropology” in 1958. More than a few of the resulting texts in disciplines as varied as sociology and philosophy are dense, turgid and jargon ridden, or so the complaint goes. But Mr. Lévi-Strauss himself could be simple, direct and elegant when he wanted to be. Structuralism, he once said, is simply “the search for unsuspected harmonies” across cultures.
In fact, his life’s work was dedicated to detecting and codifying what he believed to be the underlying structures common to all societies. Working among Amerindian tribes in the Amazon and elsewhere from the 1930s onward, he found those harmonies to be especially manifest in mythology. In any society, he maintained, “the purpose of a myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction.”
As he saw it, the human mind tends to organize thought and culture around binary opposites, and to try to resolve the resulting tension through the creative act of mythmaking. Here are four pairs that, explicitly or implicitly, are important in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who died a little over a week ago just shy of 101.
THE RAW AND THE COOKED “Raw” and “cooked” are shorthand terms meant to differentiate what is found in nature from what is a product of human culture. That dichotomy, Mr. Lévi-Strauss believed, exists in all human societies. Part of what makes us human, however, is our need to reconcile those opposites, to find a balance between raw and cooked. But where is the dividing line between nature, which is emotional and instinctive, and culture, which is based on rules and conventions? In a metaphoric sense, a cook is a kind of mediator between those realms, transforming an object originally from the natural world into an item fit for human consumption. So by “cooked,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss means anything that is socialized from its natural state. Yes, the definition of what is considered edible varies from one society or religious group to another. But all have binary structures that separate the raw and the cooked, the fresh and the rotten, the moist and the dry or burned.
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THE TINKERER AND THE ENGINEER In “The Savage Mind” (1962), Mr. Lévi-Strauss proposes a distinction between modes of conception, design and manufacture. The “tinkerer” or “artisan,” two possible renderings of the somewhat ambiguous French word that he used, “bricoleur,” works mainly with his hands, using materials that already exist, which he tries to put together in different ways. The “engineer,” in contrast, is a proto-scientist. He has a more abstract mental universe, which allows him to invent tools, devices or materials and transcend the boundaries that society imposes. Though both the tinkerer and the engineer face comparable obstacles, they navigate them in dissimilar fashion, with the tinkerer being more typical of the approach of “the savage mind.” One way is spontaneous, the other methodical. “A truly scientific analysis must be real, simplifying and explanatory,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss wrote, while the tinkerer is confined to a more narrow and immediate focus.
THE I AND THE WE Mr. Lévi-Strauss was loath to accept the notion of “us versus them,” because it didn’t conform to his belief in societies’ shared structures. Instead, he often focused on the distinction between “I” and “we.” In looking at kinship patterns, for example, especially among the Amerindian peoples who provided much of his research material, he was more attentive to the rules governing relationships between different family groups than the roles of the individuals making up those families. Examining both Oedipus and Amerindian myths, Mr. Lévi-Strauss suggests that the universal incest taboo is the way human societies resolve the opposing dangers of excessive love and hatred for close blood relations. He also rejected one of the fundamental features of Western thought: seeing individual self-expression as the height of creativity. Because he was so interested in mythmaking, a collective process that occurs incrementally over time, he favored the notion of a communal approach to making culture, writing in “Tristes Tropiques,” “The I is hateful.”
THE LANGUAGE AND THE WORD From the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Mr. Lévi-Strauss borrowed the distinction between “langue” (tongue, or language) and “parole” (word), and then gave it a twist. The tongue, the underlying system of language, is something “belonging to a reversible time,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss wrote, outside a particular moment. A word, in contrast, is a specific utterance that, once expressed, cannot be reversed. Think of a piece of sheet music: it can be read or played from left to right, from one page to another, in a horizontal, linear fashion leading to a coda, a definite conclusion. That is “parole.” Or it can be studied vertically, in hopes of discerning harmony and other structural relationships between the notes in the treble and bass clefs. That is what Mr. Lévi-Strauss considered “langue.”
Illustrations by Leif Parsons.
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 8, 2009, Section WK, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: Two-Part Harmonies. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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