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.

At stake are questions of religious hypocrisy, religio-economic and -educational stereotypes, and even the very morality of religion, Christianity in particular. Science does a far better job at insulating itself from politics than religion does. Religion wallows in it. Nevertheless, even when someone is speaking from the hallowed halls of science, we still have to think carefully about what we read and watch for agendas just as closely. The “democratization” of news in the age of the Internet, and more recently “Web 2.0,” has increased our awareness of effect of mediation: the news is most certainly filtered, it’s only the degree that’s in question. With the plurality of sources available we can even filter it ourselves, pumping only the sources that agree with our point of view.

But in this case there is further complicating factor beyond the media. Those involved in higher levels of study in the sciences or the humanities know that there generally is a significant disparity between the state-of-the-art in the academy and the state of public understanding. This is a fitting subject for Concrete Academic, I should think. Scientific findings have to be interpreted, and when they are not contextualized responsibly—forgive me this cliché—a little knowledge can become a dangerous thing.

So much for the preface. The study, “Religiosity and teen birth rate in the United States,” is only fourteen pages long, so it is worth reading. The authors begin by noting the influence of religiosity in the debate over sex education in school, and the importance of such education along with contraception, as opposed to teaching “abstinence only,” for lowering the birth rate. Given this, the relationship between religiosity and birth rate should be examined. After reviewing a few previous studies, which did not speak univocally, they explained their own research.

So far so good, but now a couple of things give me pause. First, they did not do their own field work but rather mined existing data. Sometimes this is necessary, and it’s certainly easier logistically, but it’s harder to get fix on what you’re looking for. The data they worked with came from two separate banks: birth rates from the Center for Disease Control, and a poll on religious feelings by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (plus another, negligible, to control for income). Both were done at the state level. Using one study they compiled a ‘religiosity score’ for each state, and then using the other they looked at birth rates for teens. The hard statistical work came in correlating the numbers. They no doubt did good work with what they had. But this is not a very close look at the issue. Certainly it is not close enough to account for a plurality of sociological factors, such as the propensity for the religious to marry younger than the irreligious.

The authors admirably warn against over-interpretation of their statistics at the end of the paper, so much so that one wonders about the usefulness of the work. I think it is suggestive, but far from impressive. The media’s coverage of it wasn’t either. It’s hard to fault the AP and others for reporting the ‘facts,’ which they did, but they lacked sufficiant context. The professionals reading the journal know how to weigh the article, and they speak the language well enough to understand what the authors can and can’t do with it; the general public does not. This requires us as readers to be aware of our own ignorance and to be modest in drawing conclusions.

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