The Ideas Guy
Richard Handler
The myth and meaning of Claude Levi-Strauss
Last Updated: Tuesday, November 10, 2009 | 1:14 PM ET
By Richard Handler CBC News
The great French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss died on Oct. 30, at the sagacious age of 100. But word of his death wasn't announced until several days later.
By then, he had been buried and CBC Radio's Massey Lectures were being broadcast. This is no doubt coincidence but a fortuitous one that I trust students of the great thinker would appreciate.
As an anthropologist, Levi-Strauss revelled in the complexity of so-called primitive societies. As does this year's Massey lecturer, Wade Davis, whose lectures and book are called The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World.
Davis, it is fair to say, is an intellectual descendent of the great Frenchman who employed a scientific method called structuralism in his research.
Claude Levi-Strauss in 1967. (Associated Press) Its influence has been wide ranging, principally in the social sciences.
For a short, neat definition of structuralism, try Edward Rothstein's in The New York Times: Structuralism is "the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity."
It seeks meaning in the way humans and their ideas, stories and institutions all connect.
This and That
If you think that sounds a lot like Web 2.0, you may be right.
For a structuralist like Levi-Strauss, native myth in Brazil is as equivalent a human artifact as any prize-winning novel or TV commercial. They all employ intricate human relationships that spin out like a spider's web.
(One other relationship between anthropologist Wade Davis and Levi-Strauss: The French thinker was also a Massey lecturer.)
After I heard of Levi-Strauss's death, I went to my bookshelf and picked out a thin volume, published in 1978, called Myth and Meaning. It has a red jacket that features a totemic, West Coast emblem and a price, etched in pencil, of $2.95.
It's been a long time since a book cost that little. But its voice still speaks to us today.
"Since I was a child," Levi-Strauss wrote, "I have been bothered by, let's call it the irrational, and have been trying to find an order behind what is given to us as a disorder."
Order from chaos. A universal ambition and Levi-Strauss does this by seeing patterns, perhaps the greatest one being the binary nature of human thought. This and that. Us and them.
Binary beauty
For Levi-Strauss, humans divide their culture into oppositions. Hot and cold, raw and cooked (the title of one of his books), animal and human, among others.
Later in his career, Strauss would speak of the binary nature of computer logic with its with beautifully simple 0 and 1, yes and no.
It was a pattern utilized throughout the ages, from ancient myths to the emerging world of digital technology.
In Levi-Strauss's view, it is by these opposing binary concepts that humans make sense of the world. If you believe that, you are half way to becoming a structuralist.
Levi-Strauss looked to see the underlying principles in a mass of detail, the lush, tropical forest of tangled fact.
He told us in his 1977 Massey talk that, as a child, his obsession was geology. In his 1955 memoir, Tristes Tropiques, he tells us of the importance in his life of not only geology, but Marxism and Freud's psychoanalysis.
All three envision reality in a subterranean manner. They look for hidden meanings and processes.
Geology is essentially the study of the natural and invisible history of our planet, as it is carved largely by wind, water, sand and tectonic forces. Marxism sees history as class structure, opposition and transformation.
And Freud, perhaps the man Levi-Strauss felt closest to (by education and birth), saw the human mind as an unconscious sea, a tumult of churning passions.
See the web
For his part, Levi-Strauss was more a theoretician than a feet-on-the-ground anthropologist like Wade Davis.
"I hate travelling and explorers," he famously spouted in Tristes Tropiques, which dealt with his own fieldwork among indigenous people in Brazil in the 1930s. He was more comfortable writing and thinking in his study, synthesizing the work of others.
In his Massey talk, he was modest about his accomplishments. He told us that the search for underlying structures was not new, that it has been going on since at least the Renaissance.
He also said that "science has only two ways of proceeding: Either it is through reductionism or structuralism.
The first reduces complex phenomenon to simpler levels. For example, reducing life to biological and chemical processes.
Or you can see things as structures and search for relationships.
That's what Levi-Strauss tried to do, whether studying kinship systems or mythologies.
He was one of the first to show us that so-called primitive people were solving problems in intricate ways. It was a very modern way of looking at the world.
The Last Garden
In another Massey lecture, the literary critic George Steiner's beautiful, elegiac Nostalgia for the Absolute in 1974, Steiner devotes a chapter to Levi-Strauss, which he calls "The Last Garden."
It is a mournful piece because it taps into Levi-Strauss's great pessimism and his horror at the plundering of the natural world and the extinction of native people.
Decades later, in fact in one of Levi-Strauss's last interviews, he says: "It's clear that the density of human beings is so great, they have begun to poison themselves. And the world on which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world I like."
It was as if Levi-Strauss was lining up with his great predecessor, Sigmund Freud, another towering pessimist.
There's no sugar coating these last sentiments. No doubt Levi-Strauss could appreciate the binary division right in front of us — the endless talk of happiness (look at the book shelves) amid fears of climate and global catastrophe. No doubt both would earn a frosty Gallic shrug.
