Born into a Parisian bourgeois family almost exactly one hundred years ago last week, Claude Lévi-Strauss is France’s most cherished intellectual. Lévi-Strauss’s father was a painter, and the boy grew up a highly cultured environment where art, music and voracious reading nourished a fervent curiosity which culminated in the study of law and philosophy in the Sorbonne in Paris.
Born into a Parisian bourgeois family almost exactly one hundred years ago last week, Claude Lévi-Strauss is France’s most cherished intellectual. Lévi-Strauss’s father was a painter, and the boy grew up a highly cultured environment where art, music and voracious reading nourished a fervent curiosity which culminated in the study of law and philosophy in the Sorbonne in Paris.
Tiring of the limits of pure philosophical research in the French capital, Lévi-Strauss took up a position at São Paulo University in Brazil to teach sociology in 1935. It was there that he first came into contact with the Guayacuro and Bororo tribes living in the depths of the Amazon forest. This overwhemling experience led to rigorous ethnological fieldwork, which he recounted in his famous book Tristes Tropiques.
Lévi-Strauss the philosopher turned more and more to anthropological and ethnographical research. He was convinced that the customs and myths of these primitive tribes contained universal structures common to all mythologies and civilisations.
When he return to Paris in 1939, Nazism has taken hold in Europe and Lévi-Strauss, who was of Jewish ancestry, was forced to flee to the United States. In New York, he teamed up with a group of French writers and artists, including the charismatic André Breton and Georges Bataille. The Surrealist artists were exploring visualisations of the unconscious and primordial sexual impulses. This search for the origins of human civilisation mirrored Lévi-Strauss’s approach to art and ritual. And it was also in New York where Lévi-Strauss met the linguist Roman Jakobson, whose structural theory of language was to have a profound influence on this thought.
When he returned to Paris after the war, Lévi-Strauss submitted a major and minor thesis for a doctorate, respectively The Family and Social Life of the Nambikwara Indians and The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Later, in 1962, he published the groundbreaking book La Pensée Sauvage, in which he outlined the structural elements governing the way both primitive and modern societies think. Lévi-Strauss tried to show that there were universal laws common to primitive and modern societies.
Strauss’s development of structural anthropology is far too complex to be explained here. His books combine concepts such as art, music, mathematics and philosophy. One of his central ideas, however, concerning the differences between primitive and modern civilisations is that primitive societies have a different notion of time to our own. In primitive civilisations, time is experienced as circular rather than linear. In other words, the rules governing customs and the mythologies which sustain them preclude the possibility of innovation. In this sense, primitive societies are structurally frozen and are as such non-historical. It is as though they live in a perpetual present, while modern societies structured by a linear view of time are continuously driven by change and innovation.
To explain this idea, Lévi-Strauss uses the example of the engineer to describe the logic of modern civilisation, while the bricoleur describes the logic of primitive thought. ‘Bricoleur’ is a French word denoting one who puts things to together. The bricoleur is a craftsman who makes use of whatever tools and objects that readily available, combining them to create something new. The engineer, however, creates new tools and materials. The bricoleur is principally concerned with maintaining the social order, while the engineer is concerned with transformation.
Lévi-Strauss spent years studying world mythologies, compiling complex lists of their most basic elements which he claimed were structured like the components of language. For Lévi-Strauss, it wasn’t the components themselves which counted but the relations between them. He concluded that these relations were common to all mythologies and that they revealed the universal structures of human thought. In spite of the fact that mythologies recount stories of an extremely varied and fantastic nature, the similarities between world mythologies was an obsession for him.
Claude Lévi-Strauss is one of the greatest intellectuals of his time and our whole approach to the study of culture will remain to a certain extent determined by whether or not we agree with his theories. However, the triumph of destructive capitalism, and the global poverty and overpopulation brought with it, has left him in the twilight of his life deeply pessimistic about the future of humanity.
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