Concrete Academic

Just a couple of weeks ago Claude Lévi-Strauss—the father of modern cultural anthropology, not the blue jeans guy—died in Paris.  There will be no memorial concert or film (well, maybe in France), which is too bad because I consider his contributions to the world more significant than the moonwalk or “Thriller.” I have had an interest in the subject since I read Beyond Culture by Edward T. Hall, which I still have, my first semester in college. That book brought things my subliminal self ‘knew,’ having grown up with one foot in the old country and one in the new, into conscious knowledge. For the most part Hall helps you appreciate the cultural contexts for human interaction; that’s the phenomenon of culture, how it appears to us. Lévi-Strauss’ work is on the noumenon, how it really is underneath.

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about the school of thought of Lévi-Strauss and his intellectual progenitor Ferdinand de Saussure. I think the briefest introduction into this thinking is provided by literary critic Terry Eagleton. Indecently, if anyone wants to donate a copy of his Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate for review on Concrete Academic, by all means contact the editors. He writes:

“If I say to you in certain circumstances, ‘Close the door!’ and when you have done so impatiently add, ‘I meant of course open the window’, you would be quite entitled to point out that the English words ‘Close the door’ mean what they mean whatever I might have intended them to mean. This is not to say that one could not imagine contexts in which ‘Close the door’ meant something entirely different from its usual meaning: it could be a metaphorical way of saying, ‘Don’t negotiate any further’. The meaning of the sentence, like any other, is by no means immutably fixed: with enough ingenuity one could probably invent contexts in which it could mean a thousand different things. But if a gale is ripping through the room and I’m wearing only a swimming costume, the meaning of the words would probably be situationally clear; and unless I had made a slip of the tongue or suffered some unaccountable lapse of attention it would be futile for me to claim that I had ‘really’ meant ‘Open the window’. This is one evident sense in which the meaning of my words is not determined by my private intentions—in which I cannot just choose to make my words mean anything at all, as Humpty-Dumpty in Alice mistakenly thought he could. The meaning of language is a social matter: there is a real sense in which language belongs to my society before it belongs to me.” (Literary Theory: An Introduction, 61)

It’s easy to make the mistake, going back to Hall, of thinking that the solution is simply to understand the cultural context of “Close the door.” But Eagleton is pointing out a deeper problem. There are rules that govern how language works—to use the wording of Chomskyan linguistics , a universal grammar—and those do not belong to us, but to society as a whole. In fact not even society can change those rules, which is why, according to the structuralist school of Saussure, we should look at that structure to find meaning, not at the superstructure.

Claude Lévi-Strauss took this insight and applied it to culture directly, particularly religious mythos.  He found that there is a underlying language to myths, particular relationships of primary symbols, or mythemes (a concept remarkably similar to memes). It is beyond me to go into the details of his analysis, but let me just give an indication of his findings. Not only did Lévi-Strauss find connections between disparate mythologies, but he was also able to find a common root of religious inquiry, even in ‘primitive’ religious languages (myths, rites, etc.).

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).

“The thirst for objective knowledge,” he wrote, “is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive.’ ” (New York Times, November 4, 2009)

This we now take for granted, but what a significant contribution to culture in itself. Surely more than the moonwalk.