[BRIEF NOTE] On Claude Lévi-Strauss

[rfmcdonald]

It says something sad about my relationship to my Anthropology major that I didn't learn about the death of Claude Lévi-Strauss until a couple of days after it happened. What a genius the man was.

Claude Levi-Strauss, widely considered the father of modern anthropology for work that included theories about commonalities between tribal and industrial societies, has died. He was 100.

The French intellectual was regarded as having reshaped the field of anthropology, introducing the concept of structuralism – concepts about common patterns of behaviour and thought, especially myths, in a wide range of human societies. Defined as the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity, structuralism compared the formal relationships among elements in any given system.

During his six-decade career, Mr. Levi-Strauss authored literary and anthropological classics including “Tristes Tropiques” (1955), “The Savage Mind” (1963) and “The Raw and the Cooked” (1964).

Jean-Mathieu Pasqualini, chief of staff at the Academie Francaise, said an homage to Levi-Strauss was planned for Thursday, with members of the society – of which Mr. Levi-Strauss was a member – standing during a speech to honour his memory.

Born on Nov. 28, 1908, in Brussels, Belgium, Mr. Levi-Strauss was the son of French parents of Jewish origin. He studied in Paris and went on to teach in Sao Paulo, Brazil and conduct much of the research that led to his breakthrough books in the South American giant.

The Guardian's Jonathan Jones goes into somewhat more detail about his importance.

For young would-be intellectuals in the 1980s, his books The Savage Mind and The Raw and the Cooked had a biblical status. Lévi-Strauss was the high priest of structuralism. Building on the linguistic ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure, he argued that all myth, and hence all pre-scientific thought, can be understood in terms of binary oppositions – such as, er, raw and cooked.

The strange and troubling grandeur of Lévi-Strauss lay in his insistence on the "synchronic" and contempt for the "diachronic": that is, he was interested in structures of thinking that endure over the very long term. He was apparently not interested in history, in change. Paradoxically, his ideas were of great interest to historians.

I first encountered his work through a history book by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie that applied his methods to an 18th-century French folk tale. Other French thinkers, notably Michel Foucault in The Order of Things, sought to switch attention to the violent breaks and transformations of one intellectual order into another. But Lévi-Strauss reflected a deep, and great, tendency in French historiography to draw attention to the "longue durée".

History and art history really demand to be thought of in this way. When you read a story about, say, the marriages of Henry VIII or the life of Caravaggio, it's easy to fool yourself into believing you are glimpsing a world much like our own. To grasp the real, radical differences between one moment and another, you need to comprehend the vast web of everyday phenomena (food, illness, buildings ...) that shaped everyone's existence. These things tend to change very slowly (at any time before 1900) and Claude Lévi-Strauss directed our attention to them. His influence is subtle and will endure.