Lévi-Strauss, Claude

Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1908-

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anthropologist and philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the leading figures in structuralism, was born in France in 1908. He studied philosophy in Paris and taught sociology at the University of São Paolo, Brazil, from 1934 to 1938. During these years, Lévi-Strauss traveled in Brazil and lived intermittently with the Amazonian tribes, especially the Nambikwara. The result of this early contact of Lévi-Strauss with precapitalist societies formed the basis of his first book, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949). He returned to Paris in 1939 to fulfill his military service requirement but had to flee France and the advancing Nazi threat, a flight that brought him to New York. In New York, he lectured at the New School for Social Research and came into contact with the linguist Roman Jakobson (1896–1982), with the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University and the anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942), and with the fieldwork-and practice-oriented American anthropology.

The encounter with Jakobson proved decisive for the development of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism. Taking from Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) the notion that religion is part of a symbolic system of human understanding of humanity, Lévi-Strauss developed the theory of human culture as a logical, coherent, but unconscious system of interlocking symbolic subsystems (such as religion, kinship, mythology, and economics). Elaborating further on Marcel Mauss’s (1872–1950) theory of gift exchange as a local theory of reciprocity, Lévi-Strauss was able to expand his analysis of symbolic exchange to include marriage and kinship patterns. Jakobson’s theory of structural linguistics brought all these theorizations of Lévi-Strauss into a neat package that claims to explain human behavior and culture as an intricate system of analogies between the tactile and the symbolic universe of humanity. His whole scheme of explanation rests on the fundamental notion of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) of savage nobility, where the true nature of the human is only to be found in the state of nature, prior to the corruption of the human by civilization and the development of private property. Lévi-Strauss’s indebtedness to Rousseau is evident both in his autobiographical work Tristes tropiques (1955), one of the most eloquent and beautifully written books in anthropology, and in The Savage Mind (1962, the English title an inadequate translation of the original French La Pensée sauvage, with its double meaning of “thinking savage” or “wild pansy”).

Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism owes its foundational premise to Jakobson and Russian linguist Nikolai Trubetzkoy’s (1890–1938) elaboration on the significance of phonemes for linguistic structure. Jakobson and Trubetzkoy had shown that phonemes provided linguistic structures with a specific economy of terms of meaning, and that the relationship between those terms is more significant than the terms themselves. Therefore the relationship between the terms that signify death, for instance, is a universal constant, despite the fact that the specific terms are universally different. One way of detecting the significance of the relationship of terms, Lévi-Strauss claims, originally in his three-volume Mythologiques (1964–1968) and later in The View from Afar (1983), is by looking at myths that are universally constituted by mythemes (analogous to the linguistic phonemes). These mythemes, despite the fact that they appear in different terms in the myths encountered throughout in the world, underline the fact that all societies have engaged in the deciphering of the foundational question, which for Lévi-Strauss is always the same, namely, the riddle of the transition from nature to culture, from animality to humanity. Thus myths are the results of unconscious explanations about the origins of humans. The insularity of structuralism as a theory of explanation prompted anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his The Interpretation of Cultures to proclaim that Lévi-Strauss has “made for himself an infernal culture machine” (1973, p. 355).

Lévi-Strauss lives in Paris. He has taught for many years at the Collège de France and in 1973 was elected to the Académie française.

SEE ALSO Anthropology, U.S.; Boas, Franz; Structuralism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY WORKS

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962. La Pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Rev. ed. Trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard Stermer, and Rodney Needham. London: Eyere & Spottiswoode.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1970. The Raw and the Cooked. Vol. 1 of Mythologiques. Trans. John and Doreen Weightman. London: Jonathan Cape.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1973. From Honey to Ashes. Vol. 2 of Mythologiques. Trans. John and Doreen Weightman. London: Jonathan Cape.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1973. Tristes tropiques. Trans. John and Doreen Weightman. London: Jonathan Cape (Orig. Pub. 1955).

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1978. The Origin of Table Manners. Vol. 3 of Mythologiques. Trans. John and Doreen Weightman. London: Jonathan Cape.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1985. The View from Afar. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss. New York: Basic Books.

SECONDARY WORKS

Boon, James A. 1972. From Symbolism to Structuralism: Lévi-Strauss in a Literary Tradition. New York: Harper.

Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.

Neni Panourgiá