Claude Lévi-Strauss

Social Anthropologist

• Born: November 28, 1908
• Birthplace: Brussels, Belgium
• Died: October 30, 2009
• Place of death: Paris, France

French anthropologist

Lévi-Strauss, one of the founders of structural anthropology, achieved insights into Western civilization by studying non-Western societies. He challenged basic Western assumptions about politics, history, and culture and became one of the major figures in the intellectual history of the twentieth century.

Areas of achievement Anthropology, language and linguistics, philosophy, sociology

Early Life

Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in Brussels, Belgium, where his French parents lived while his father, an artist, painted. When World War I began, his parents took him home to France, where he joined his grandfather, the rabbi of Versailles. In Lévi-Strauss’s youth, he frequented art museums, the opera, and the salons of avant-garde artists. His formal schooling at the Lycée Janson de Sailly proved unsatisfactory, however. He studied law and philosophy at the University of Paris but found both fields sterile and intellectually confining, although he taught philosophy in the early 1930’s.

Outside the formal educational structure, Lévi-Strauss had three important intellectual interests: geology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. (In fact, he became deeply involved in the Socialist movement in France while a student.) He found an underlying similarity in these seemingly disparate modes of thought. Each found surface reality to reflect a truer reality beneath. Each turned the surface chaos of experience into an abstract model that made the deeper reality understandable.

These interests came together around 1934, when Lévi-Strauss read American anthropologist Robert H. Lowie’s Primitive Society (1920). It freed Lévi-Strauss from the claustrophobic atmosphere of the academic philosophy that he was teaching and thrust him into what seemed to him the clear air of anthropology. In 1934, he accepted a professorship in sociology at the University of São Paulo in Brazil and in 1936 began to publish in anthropology. He conduced his first field work during this period, studying and sometimes living with the Guaycuru and Bororo tribes in the Amazon rainforest of Mato Grosso.

David Pace, in Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Bearer of Ashes (1983), found a clear pattern in Lévi-Strauss’s life. He was an outsider, never embracing the artistic or Jewish worlds of his parents, disparaging his education in law and philosophy, distancing himself from Marxism and psychoanalysis by turning them into abstract methodologies, and first finding his true calling in American anthropology practiced in Brazil.

Lévi-Strauss left São Paolo and returned to Paris in 1939. He fought in World War II until France surrendered and then fled Vichy France to teach at the New School for Social Research in New York City. The rise of fascism made the political categories of Western society seem meaningless to him. Unlike Jean-Paul Sartre and other major French intellectuals of his generation, Lévi-Strauss rejected any active political role. While in New York he became friends with Roman Jakobson, a Russian-born structural linguist who helped shape Lévi-Strauss’s conceptual approach to anthropology. With Jakobson and others he founded the École Libre des Hautes Études (free school for advanced study) for expatriates. He also met and was influenced by American anthropologist Franz Boas, whose approach was based in historical analysis.

After serving in 1946 and 1947 as a cultural attaché at the French embassy in Washington, D.C., Lévi-Strauss returned to Paris. There he built on his anthropological work to make himself a central figure in Western intellectual life and received a doctorate from the Sorbonne. He also continued his outsider’s role. He had no social life or friends, he said, and spent half of his life in his laboratory and the other half in his office. His world was abstract: “There is nothing I dread more than a too-close relationship with my fellow men.” Nevertheless, he served as assistant director of the Musée de l’Homme (museum of man), beginning in 1949, and director of studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (school of applied advanced studies).

Lévi-Strauss was married three times: to Dina Dreyfus in 1932; to Rose Marie Ullmo in 1946, with whom he had a son; and to Monique Roman in 1954, with whom he also had a son.

Life’s Work

Lévi-Strauss published his first articles in anthropology in 1936. His first major book was Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949; The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 1969), and it was followed by Race et histoire (1952; Race and History, 1958), Tristes tropiques (1955; English translation, 1964), and Anthropologie structurale (1963; Structural Anthropology, 1963). Recognition came quickly, both within the academic world and in the broader intellectual community.

Anthropology was divided into two broad approaches. One interpretive school was influenced by Marcel Mauss, who searched for cross-cultural patterns that would reveal universal truths about the human mind. In the other school was Bronisław Malinowski, who studied the totality of a particular culture to determine the functional role of its parts. Lévi-Strauss was concerned with the former, which explored universal truths about the human mind as revealed in the structures of culture that reflected a collective unconscious. Humans are categorizing animals whose brains order the phenomena perceived by the senses. The brains of African Bushmen and Parisian intellectuals order reality in the same logical and systemic way, although the phenomena perceived would differ. The surface patterns of human cultures may appear chaotic, but underneath are common structures. For example, although the thousands of American Indian myths seem endless in their variety, all humans confront such contradictions as life and death or male and female, and all minds confronting these contradictions operate similarly. It is in mythology that humans attempt to resolve contradictions that cannot be resolved by reason and logic. For Lévi-Strauss, myths reveal the collective unconscious of the human mind and can be scientifically analyzed.

In studying cultures regarded as primitive, Lévi-Strauss broke sharply with Malinowski and the functionalists, who believed that each element of a culture had an understandable and rational function. Lévi-Strauss turned to structural linguistics for his anthropological insights. Just as speech is composed of arbitrary sign systems that are symbolic of a deeper language structure, so social customs reflected a deeper cultural pattern. The first necessity for a society is to bind itself together by rules, and these rules—kinship customs, for example—can be quite arbitrary and nonfunctional in an immediate sense. Their crucial role is to hold societies together in a system of rules that will appear so natural to those within that they will disappear from consciousness. Taboos against incest, for example, can take many arbitrary forms, but the underlying purpose everywhere is to require an exchange of people among families, binding the larger social group together.

In 1959, Lévi-Strauss became a professor of social anthropology at the Collège de France. To encourage anthropological research in France, he established the Laboratory for Social Anthropology and started the journal L’homme. From the 1960’s into the 1980’s, Lévi-Strauss continued to write his anthropological works: Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (1962; Totemism, 1963), La Pensée sauvage (1962; The Savage Mind, 1966), Mythologiques (1964–1971; Introduction to the Science of Mythology, 1969-1981), Paroles données (1984; Anthropology and Myth, 1987), and others. The Savage Mind was particularly important in establishing his reputation as an intellectual of the first order. It presents his theory of culture in its first half and in the second half generalizes his conclusions as a theory of history and social development. Complementing The Savage Mind by providing detailed analyses in light of his theory is the four-volume Introduction to the Science of Mythology, his collective masterpiece. Its first volume, Le Cru et le cuit (1964), appeared in English as The Raw and the Cooked in 1969 and was followed quickly by three more volumes.

Lévi-Strauss’s work won for him the highest honors in academia, and a survey of literature in the 1970’s revealed that he was the most cited anthropologist in the world. In 1973, France recognized him with its highest honor for an intellectual: election as one of the forty lifetime members of the French Academy. That same year he received the Erasmus Prize, given by the Dutch government to those who have made a notable contribution to European culture.

Lévi-Strauss had a deep sympathy for non-Western peoples. Anthropology had been dominated by cultural evolutionists, who ranked societies from primitive ones at the bottom to Western civilization at the top. Lévi-Strauss rejected such ethnocentrism. Ranking societies was meaningless, since each society specialized in different activities. If Eskimos (Inuits) had devised the scale of measurement, the West might have ranked at the bottom and thus appear as a society unchanged since prehistoric times. The West excelled in industrial technology but lagged far behind India in developing philosophical and religious systems, behind the Polynesians in evolving a freer and more generous way of life, behind the aboriginal people of Australia in elaborating models of kinship, and behind the Melanesians in creating art. Human culture was rich in achievement, and 99 percent of it had occurred outside the West, Lévi-Strauss believed.

This worldview gave Lévi-Strauss a perspective from which to analyze modern Western society. Western civilization was sick at its very center. The West, unleashing rapid technological change, had unbalanced the harmony between nature and culture. Order and beauty disappeared in a cluttered world that thrust together things that should be separate. Western humanism justified using technology in a destructive way by making humans the center of creation and by legitimating their domination of all other life. The so-called primitives understood true humanism, Lévi-Strauss argued, one that “puts the world before life, life before man, and the respect of others before the love of self.”

Lévi-Strauss angered some Westerners by refusing to place their prized achievements on a higher plane than the achievements of, for example, Bushmen or Inuits and by attacking Western conceptions of humanism. He shocked such intellectuals as Sartre by attacking Western conceptions of history. Western intellectual traditions were based on historical reasoning, on the assumption that institutions and ideas could best be understood by studying them over time. Lévi-Strauss argued that history did not evolve along a linear path. History should be regarded as a matrix, not as a linear record of events. For example, the Industrial Revolution did not start in the West because of that region’s unique evolutionary development but because the global cultural division of labor captured all the human possibilities through different specialties in different societies. The Western Industrial Revolution incorporated the inventions of all societies: agriculture, pottery, weaving, and the like. Ancient societies made these achievements using the same processes of reasoning and logic as a scientist in the modern Western world. The Industrial Revolution did not result from the genius of Western Europeans but from the operations of the human mind. The Industrial Revolution occurred in the West by chance of historical accident; it would have occurred elsewhere at another time.

Western ethnocentrism, including its culture-bound view of history, combined with its wealth and power to destroy global balance and to threaten all other cultures with destruction. Lévi-Strauss compared Western civilization with a virus, which entered into living cells (cultures) and caused them to reproduce according to its model, the Western model. This virus threatened the West as well as the non-West. Lévi-Strauss believed that knowledge, including self-knowledge, came through confronting “the other,” not through inward examination. Modern Western civilization started when the Renaissance confronted its own classical tradition and continued in the age of exploration, when it encountered other cultures. Today those cultures, infected by the Western virus, are dying. Their death will end the possibility of Westerners’ gaining perspective on their own civilization, ending forever the possibility of self-knowledge.

Lévi-Strauss retired from the Collège de France in 1982. He continued to publish applications of his structural method. For instance, La Potière jalouse (1985; The Jealous Potter, 1988) concerns the multiple congruencies and “transformational relationships” of symbols in the tales told by North and South American tribes, such as that of the potter’s kiln. Histoire de lynx (1991; The Story of Lynx, 1996) investigates the tangle of myths concerning the enmity between Lynx and Coyote, first in Nez Perce myth and then ranging widely through the mythic motifs of both of the Americas. In 1995 he published 180 photographs documenting his ethnographic research in the Amazon from 1935 to 1939 in Saudades do Brasil: A Photographic Memoir, which has a short preface placing that research in its scientific and historical context. Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture came out the same year; based on interviews in the 1970’s by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, it summarizes his anthropological theories. Regarder, écouter, lire (1993; Look, Listen, Read, 1997) muses on the aesthetics of Western art.

Lévi-Strauss was selected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, the American Academy and Institute of Arts, England’s Royal Academy, and the Norwegian Academy of Letters and Sciences. Among his many honors were honorary doctorates from numerous universities, including Chicago, Yale, Harvard, and Columbia. He also won the Nonino Foundation Prize in 1986, the Aby M. Warburg Prize in 1996, the Meister Eckhart Prize in 2002, and the Prix International Catalunya in 2005. He was a Commandeur de l’ordre national du Mérite and awarded the Grand-Croix de la Légion d’Honneur.

Significance

Lévi-Strauss’s daring anthropological work earned for him the respect of his colleagues, and even those who reject his approach acknowledge the many insights his work has generated. He is also regarded as a major, if often controversial, thinker of the twentieth century. Most of his books, however abstract and difficult, had great impact on the general intellectual community. His legacy as a major thinker began with the publication of Tristes tropiques, a book of spiritual and philosophical meditation; that legacy continued through his later attempts to reach out of the academy and into the general public. His work spoke to the crisis of twentieth-century Western civilization, a crisis reflected in war, ecological disaster, and general malaise.

Critics leveled various charges at Lévi-Strauss for his theories. Socialist activists of 1960s France rejected structuralism, finding it unsuitable for the revolution they sought to bring about in modern French society and a possible impediment to action. Others objected to what they saw as Lévi-Strauss's cultural relativism and glorification of non-Western societies.

Yet Lévi-Strauss dissolved old political concerns, categories, and labels. His work was explosive in its implications for Western civilization’s role in the world. He described his own political position as one of “serene pessimism.” Western reform, even of the most humane and enlightened sort, was part of the Western virus. He refused to join organizations working to protect human rights, because such bodies engaged in a form of imperialism, with one culture imposing its conception of such rights on others. He rejected the concept of progress, challenged the ethnocentrism of the West, and brought the growing concerns with ecology to a level deeper than mere attention to a clean environment; sanity itself required balance, distance, and self-limitation. Westerners had to preserve the cultures of primitive people and the existence of other species, he believed, not because they had the right to exist but because they possessed a wisdom on which survival of the West depended. Among those scholars whose work was informed by Lévi-Strauss's theories were social theorist and historian Michel Foucault, semioticist and literary critic Roland Barthes, and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

Bibliography

Badcock, C. R. Lévi-Strauss: Structuralism and Sociological Theory. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1975.

Champagne, Roland A. Claude Lévi-Strauss. Boston: Twayne, 1987.

Johnson, Christopher. Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Formative Years. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Leach, Edmund. Lévi-Strauss. Reprint. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Massenzio, Marcello. “An Interview with Claude Lévi-Strauss.” Current Anthropology 42 (June, 2001): 419-425.

Meaney, Thomas. "Library Man: On Claude Lévi-Strauss." Nation. Nation, 19 Jan. 2011. Web. 17 Mar. 2016.

Pace, David. Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Bearer of Ashes. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.

Shalvey, Thomas. Claude Lévi-Strauss: Social Psychotherapy and the Collective Unconscious. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979.

Wilcken, Patrick. Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. Print.