Claude Lévi-Strauss: Science, myths and the mystical
Patrick Wilcken examines a thinker who applied the rigour of science and the technical models of linguistics to social phenomena
In 1965, at the height of his fame, Claude Lévi-Strauss gave an interview to the journalist Henri Stierlin for the television show Personnalités de notre temps. Talking in his study against the backdrop of an ornate Indian mural, he was asked whether it was really possible to study man scientifically. The endeavour, he replied, was like studying a mollusc. The amorphous jelly secretes a mathematically perfect shell, in the same way as the chaos of human society produces structurally perfect cultural artefacts. He left the glutinous base to sociologists and psychologists, while the task of anthropology was to understand the geometric beauty of the shell.
While much of Lévi-Strauss’s voluminous academic work was technical, and at times difficult for the lay reader to understand, it rested on a handful of quite simple principles. Throughout his long career (he published his last book at the age of eighty-five, and lived past 100) Lévi-Strauss sought, as he put it, “the invariant elements among superficial differences”. His key idea, drawn from mid-century linguistics, was that these “invariant elements” were not to be found in the study of individual cultural artefacts, but in the relationships between them, and the structural variations these relationships generated. The consistency of these structures ultimately arose from characteristics of the human brain, which was primed to categorize and order its environment systematically, combining natural elements into rigorously logical cultural configurations.
In exhaustive studies of kinship and myth, and his book-length theoretical interventions on religious thought, he mined for what he called the “hidden harmonies” from a morass of random-seeming data sets. What transformed this arid-sounding undertaking into a fertile intellectual exercise was on one hand the raw material – the fantastic diversity of the ethnographic minutiae Lévi-Strauss obsessively ranged over; and on the other, the eclectic influences Lévi-Strauss brought to bear on this rich seam of material.
The animating idea of structuralism was drawn from linguistics; but Lévi-Strauss also used the arts – particularly music – philosophy, biology, mathematics, early computing and modernist techniques to illustrate and bolster his arguments. What began as an appeal to scientific rigour in the humanities in the 1950s ended as an interpretative philosophical exercise. The grand demonstration of the structuralist method, Lévi-Strauss’s four-volume study on Amerindian myth, promised science, but would conclude in the early 1970s on an agnostic, meditative, even mystical note.
Lévi-Strauss was born in Belgium in 1908, while his artist father Raymond was painting a portrait on commission, and grew up on the edge of Paris’s sixteenth arrondissement – then a semi-urbanized bohemian neighbourhood peppered with artisanal workshops and brocantes. A tight-knit secular Jewish family originating from the Alsace, the Lévi-Strausses were of modest means, a shadow of their ancestor Isaac Strauss’s nineteenth-century successes as a well-known composer and orchestra director under Napoleon III. It was in this bohemian environment of faded glory that Lévi-Strauss grew up surrounded by his father’s easels, tubes of paint and photographic equipment. Fascinated by the avant-garde, he dabbled in the arts, trying his hand at painting Cubist canvases, developing his own photographs and composing trios for piano and violin. He has described the enormous aesthetic and intellectual impact Stravinsky and Picasso had on him as an adolescent.
But family financial difficulties drove him in a more conventional direction: to study law and philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he passed the notoriously difficult philosophy agrégation in 1928 at his first attempt. Disillusioned with philosophy, Lévi-Strauss read the American anthropologist Robert Lowie and began turning towards a discipline that was in its infancy in France. Unlike the dense empirical work that was being carried out in the Anglophone world, French anthropology, such as it was, was a strange amalgam of Durkheimian social science and the avant-garde, combining the synthetic studies of Marcel Mauss (Durkheim’s nephew) and the collection, aesthetic appreciation and display of ethnographic artefacts.
In pursuit of this embryonic discipline, in 1935 Lévi-Strauss accepted an offer to teach at the newly formed University of São Paulo as a sociology lecturer. In breaks from teaching he explored the Brazilian interior, accompanied by his then wife and fellow philosophy agregée, Dina Dreyfus. There, he carried out the brief but intensive spells of ethnographic fieldwork – first among the Caduveu and the Bororo and then, in a large-scale expedition, the Nambikwara of Mato Grosso state – that he would later make famous in his best-selling memoir Tristes Tropiques (1955). After his return to France and the outbreak of the Second World War, Lévi-Strauss was forced to flee to New York where he taught at the New School for Social Research and the French university in exile, the École Libre des Hautes Études, later becoming France’s cultural attaché to the US.
The New York years were hugely influential. Between lectures Lévi-Strauss would spend hundreds of hours in the New York Public library, hoovering up its great store of US ethnography. “What I know of anthropology, I learnt in those years”, he later recalled. At the same time, he found a theoretical point of entry into this mass of inchoate empirical material, as he began an intense intellectual relationship with the Russian poet and linguist Roman Jakobson.
Through Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss was exposed to the history of structural linguistics, from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure to the Prague School and Jakobson’s own contributions. Seeing languages as inventories of sounds and meanings had led nowhere, but breaking language into minimal units – phonemes – and studying their features and relationships had opened up a method for systematically studying not just a single language, or closely related languages, but structures common to a wide variety of languages, such as the sound oppositions compact/diffuse and acute/grave. Lévi-Strauss’s originality was to take this technical linguistic idea and apply it to complex social phenomena – first kinship, and then religious and mythic thought.
Lévi-Strauss’s periods in the New York Public Library presented him with what seemed like endless permutations in the way small-scale societies married, reproduced and defined who their relatives were, lacking any coherent shape or logic. Encouraged by Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss saw that kinship systems, like languages, could be broken down into discrete elements: male/female; in-marriage/out-marriage; and diagrammatic regularities – opposing moiety, clan and grade arrangements, for instance – that gave the field a systematizable aspect.
The resulting proto-structuralist work, Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949; The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 1969) looked at a subset of simple systems that either prescribed marriage with a certain type of relative, or divided relatives into two groups – eligible and prohibited spouses. Lévi-Strauss proposed two binding rules: the first was the incest prohibition, seen by Lévi-Strauss as the social rule – marking the passage from nature to culture – from which all kin systems ultimately flowed. The second, reciprocity, was taken from Marcel Mauss’s pioneering work Essai sur le don (1925; The Gift, 1954), which argued that gift-giving was not mere custom, but deep-rooted and intuitive in human society.
Combining the two, Lévi-Strauss argued that incest drove out-marriage, and that women operated as gifts, necessitating their circulation between groups. (When later challenged by feminists, Lévi-Strauss casually inverted his terms, saying that “one could just as well say women exchange men – all you would have to do is to replace the plus sign with the minus sign as vice versa – the structure would not change”.) Lévi-Strauss redescribed diverse kinship arrangements drawn from across the Asian subcontinent, Siberia and Oceania as variations on simple systems of exchange in which women moved back and forth down the generations between moieties or were passed along chains of interlinking groups. Although The Elementary Structures would remain his favourite book, Lévi-Strauss never completed his proposed companion piece Les Structures complexes de la parenté, and aside from the odd essay, would largely leave the field of kinship studies, pivoting instead to religious thought and myth.
Back in post-war France and competing at first unsuccessfully to enter the prestigious Collège de France, he took up a post at the École Pratique des Hautes Études where he taught a course on the “Comparative Religion of Non-Literate Peoples”. It was during this stalled period of his academic career that Lévi-Strauss wrote his classic memoir Tristes Tropiques, which recounted his intellectual formation, his fieldwork in Brazil and his laments on the corrosive effects, both environmental and cultural, of Western expansion. The book brought him fame outside the academy, and he secured a chair at the Collège de France on his third attempt in 1959. After setting up the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale and founding its house journal L’Homme, by the early 1960s Lévi-Strauss was ideally set up to devote himself to scholarly life.
Before embarking on the centrepiece of his structuralist project, the myth quartet, Lévi-Strauss cleared the theoretical ground with two books of ideas – Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (1962; Totemism, 1963) and La Pensée sauvage (1962; The Savage Mind, 1966) which were published almost simultaneously. The concept of totemism was a loose designation associated with the identification with and veneration of animals, features of landscape, objects. It had been variously seen as a forerunner to religion or dismissed as superstition. In the twentieth century, functionalists had tried to rationalize totemism, arguing that it existed to foster social cohesion or that its associated taboos protected valuable plants and animals.
Lévi-Strauss argued that to see totemism as an institution was an illusion. It was instead an aspect of and a tool for logical thought. On the one hand there were human relationships, on the other there were conceptual differences between plant and animal species. Related clans chose contrasting totems – sea-eagle/fish-hawk or salmon/bear, for instance – to build abstract models of difference; these were used as tools for thinking about sociological relationships between themselves and other groups. The anthropologist’s task was to find the similarities between these two sets of differences. “Natural species are chosen not because they are good to ‘eat’,” Lévi-Strauss famously wrote, “but because they are good to think.”
An unclassifiable book of ideas, La Pensée sauvage delved deeper into the functioning of “primitive thought”. While Lévi-Strauss argued strongly and consistently for the cognitive unity of humanity, he also believed that because of their direct and unmediated relationship to their environment, small-scale “pre-literate” cultures had favoured a particular mode of thinking. He termed this “the science of the concrete” which he set against modern scientific thought.
In contrast to science’s rejection of the senses and incremental approach to inquiry, the pre-literate societies used direct, sensual experience – of plants, animals, rivers, mountains, tastes, smells, the night sky, etc – to build abstract models which explained their world in its totality. Modern thought had been “domesticated” through writing, formal education and systematic inquiry; the primitive mind roamed free, combining and recombining natural elements in elaborate structural contrasts and transformations. In this sense, the ethnographic record built up over the first half of the twentieth century provided a particularly clear window on the workings of the human mind, unclouded by the distorting effects of modernity’s conscious systematization.
The boldness, imagination and sheer originality of Lévi-Strauss’s thought was certainly on display throughout La Pensée sauvage, as was his ultimate conceptual debt to Saussurian linguistics. But there were also other, more classical influences. Lévi-Strauss included a section on the Scottish biologist and mathematician D’Arcy Thompson’s morphological treatise, On Growth and Form (1917) which he had read during the war in the New York Public library. “Behind Thompson was Goethe’s botany”, wrote Lévi-Strauss, “and behind Goethe, Albrecht Dürer and his Treatise on the Proportions on the human body”. In interviews, he also spoke of his debt to the French “noble savage” philosophical tradition of Rousseau and Montaigne. Yet Lévi-Strauss’s romanticism was given a modern, cognitive edge, through his appeals to linguistics, the hard sciences and abstract modelling. It was this combination – which the French academic Vincent Debaene has termed “formal classicism with methodological modernism” – that gave Lévi-Strauss’s thought its distinctiveness.
The grand exposition of structuralism was Lévi-Strauss’s examination of indigenous mythology which initially spanned four books – over 2,000 pages of dense analysis of 813 myths, along with 1,000 variants, predominantly sourced from across the Americas. Lévi-Strauss’s commitment to the project was total: “I work 10 hours a day”, he said at the time, “Saturday and Sunday included”. When he finished, at the age of sixty-three, he was exhausted. “I’m written out”, he said, but he would in fact go on to produce a further three books, the petites mythologiques, which explored various additional aspects of the myth project.
For Lévi-Strauss, mythic thought represented the untrammelled workings of the mind par excellence. Unencumbered by the strictures of narrative realism or the written text, the mind wandered free. Lévi-Strauss would go as far as arguing that in some sense mythic thought was the mind, unveiling itself through its own impulsive workings. This reasoning lent an almost mystical flavour to Lévi-Strauss’s work in the 1960s, with pronouncements like “myths think one another”, and the oft-quoted line from the first volume of the quartet: “it is in the last resort immaterial whether in this book the thought processes of the South American Indians take shape through the medium of my thought, or whether mine takes place through the medium of theirs”.
Lévi-Strauss set out his task in the very first sentence of the first volume, Le cru et le cuit, proposing “to show how empirical categories – such as … the raw and the cooked, the fresh and the decayed, the moistened and the burned … can … be used as conceptual tools with which to elaborate abstract ideas and combine them to form propositions”. Over the next 2,000 pages he took apart the often surreal and contradictory narratives of myths, breaking them down into “mythemes” (after phonemes) and ordering these elements into binary oppositions, be they characteristics (raw/cooked; wet/dry; clothed/naked), formal properties (empty/full; contained/container) spacial orientations (e.g. east/west; upstream/downstream; above/below) or time (continuous/discontinuous). As the project proceeded, more and more layers of logic were added; with the addition of each myth, structural relationships between individual myths and clusters of myths became apparent, as the “mythic substance” began to coalesce.
Lévi-Strauss used many analogies to describe myths – he likened them to nebula, molecules, corals, crystal and fragments of glass in a kaleidoscope. But the one comparison he returned to again and again was music. Mythic narrative could seem like a juddering series of repetitions and non sequiturs, just like the parts in an operatic or orchestral score when read from left to right. But when mythic elements were aligned vertically, like multiple parts in a musical score, features akin to melodic resonances, variations and leitmotifs emerged. Like music, mythic narratives were temporal, but worked to suspend, even obliterate the sense of time passing.
In the final chapter of the last volume, L’Homme nu, Lévi-Strauss concluded that there was only one myth – a meditation on man’s passage from nature to culture – that unfurled in multiple structural forms and variations across the Americas. But what was the goal of this highly complex, labour-intensive yet ultimately quixotic project? “Each matrix of meanings refers to another matrix, each myth to other myths”, wrote Lévi-Strauss, “and if it is now asked to what final meaning these mutually significative meanings are referring … the only reply … is that myths signify the mind that evolves them by making use of the world of which it is itself apart.” The project ultimately folded back on itself.
Yet, as Lévi-Strauss’s thought became more and more difficult to understand – he said that even he struggled to understand his own reasoning in the third volume of the myth quartet – his fame grew. This was partly to do with the vogue for structuralism in the 1960s, and the media narrative that a new group of thinkers – including Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault – had taken the stage, displacing the post-war existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Yet as the historian François Dosse has argued, almost as soon as talk of a structuralism as a movement emerged in the media, all the main protagonists hastily distanced themselves from the label and from each other.
But there was some intellectual commonality between these thinkers, and at different times Lacan, Barthes and Foucault spoke of the influence of Lévi-Strauss on their work and ideas. The common denominators, which Lévi-Strauss presaged, was the adoption of linguistic models and a privileging of the underlying system – be it the literary text, historical processes or the subconscious – over the subject. The idea that meaning itself might be a mere epiphenomenon arising from structural properties – “a sort of surface effect, a shimmer, a foam” as Foucault put it – recast the philosophical terms of debate.
Lévi-Strauss had picked up one of the most fundamental shifts in twentieth-century thought in the humanities: from meaning to form; the self to the system, heralding a belated modernist turn in the social sciences and philosophy. And it was precisely the idea of abstract, disembodied, free-floating systems, divorced from the indeterminacy of the subject, from power relationships and historical forces, that generated the backlash to structuralism in the 1970s and 1980s, as post-structuralism and postcolonial theorists began challenging Lévi-Strauss’s quiet world of complex yet equipoised anonymous models.
In its heyday, the very word “structuralism” came across as something solid, programmatic: a movement or a school of thought. But Lévi-Strauss denied that it was a theory or even a philosophy, saying that it was merely a method of analysis. He anchored his work in linguistic and cognitive models, but he was surprisingly incurious about the rapid developments in both fields during his lifetime, and never adapted his own models and thinking to reflect these advances.
Lévi-Strauss said that his lifelong project was to reconcile the “sensible” and the “intelligible” – that is to say how raw sensory experience, which is especially rich in oral cultures, relates to abstract intellectual understanding. Many classical thinkers had looked to indigenous societies for philosophical insight, but none had had the breath, complexity and detail that twentieth-century ethnography generated to play with. What Lévi-Strauss ended up producing was a unique body of work, loosely framed by linguistic and neurological intuitions, which stood somewhere between science and art, theory and aesthetic interpretation.
Patrick Wilcken is the author of Claude Lévi-Strauss: the poet in the laboratory, 2010; and Empire Adrift: The Portuguese court in Rio de Janeiro 1808-1821, 2005
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