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.
Read Full Article »