Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009)

Quotes
"The world began without the human race and will certainly end without it." Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1955

Biography and History
Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in Belgium and trained in Law and Philosophy. In the late 1930s, he did ethnographic fieldwork in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest with various indigenous people. After completing this fieldwork, he began to write as an anthropologist. He was especially influential in France, where he played a central role in the development of anthropology as an academic discipline.

Work
Claude Lévi-Strauss is the founding figure of French Structuralism. His initial research focused on kinship, (published as The Elementary Structures of Kinship in 1949), a central topic of discussion in anthropology at the time. Inspired by Ferdinand de Saussure’s Structure of the Sign, Lévi-Strauss attempted to describe kinship by focusing on the logics and relationships that kinship entailed. This was a departure from the Functionalist approach favoured by the social sciences (e.g.; A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Brownislaw Malinowski), which aimed to explain aspects of culture in terms of their purpose.

In Structural Anthropology (1958), Lévi-Strauss establishes that he considers culture to be a system governed by universal laws, and that the goal of his theory is to describe culture as units governed by overarching principles. He extends his structuralism to myths

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Influences
Claude Lévi-Strauss was directly influenced by structural linguistics, especially swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. De Saussure's structure of the sign theorized the sign as a relationship between an object in the world and a concept in the mind. De Saussure is considered to be one of the founding figures of 20th century linguistics and semiotics, and most adaptations of Structuralism in other disciplines can be traced back to him. Lévi-Strauss' theory involves a focus on the relationship between units.

Lévi-Strauss was also influenced by Roman Jackobson, another linguist and one of his contemporaries, who further generalized De Saussure’s structural analysis.

Lévi-Strauss was familiar with sociologist Émile Durkheim’s work on religion and totemism and Marcel Mauss’s elaborations of that work. The title of Lévi-Strauss’ first book, The Elementary Forms of Kinship, is a play on the title of Durkheim’s 1912 book, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

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Analysis
Since the Enlightenment period, the humanities have had to respond to cultural and financial pressure to be formalistic. By the first half of the twentieth century, when Levi-Strauss was a student and scholar, "evidence" meant something that was either based in classical logic or that could be measured and expressed with numbers, coefficients, and graphs. You weren't doing anything useful (and you weren't going to get any money or recognition) unless you were measuring units of stuff. Structuralism is, in a sense, the ultimate formalistic approach to the study of culture.

To Lévi-Strauss, it was not only possible but crucial that anthropology found a way into mathematical representation. What was so attractive to him in structural linguistics was the way that linguists were responding to Western culture's lust for math and universal theories by developing synchronic analyses of language. That is to say, they were describing language as a system of units (phonemes, morphemes, etc...) as a strategy to posit universal principles while still accounting for all the complexities and varieties of languages found throughout history and all over the world.

Lévi-Strauss sought, just like the functionalists at the time, to describe societies in terms of structure and organization (although his structures crosscut societies in pointedly different ways than the functionalists). But where he really differed from the functionalists was with the method of analysis and expression of these structures. The functionalists had inherited their methods from biology, whereas structuralists like De Saussure were doing something much closer to mathematics and physics. Following the structural linguists, Lévi-Strauss conceptualized culture as a system, made up of units of culture (like the mytheme, a "unit of myth") which meant that it could be counted and measured. This is the right game to play if one is looking to discover overarching principles, which Lévi-Strauss hoped to find by comparing cultures (which, to him, were systems) to find patterns that underlie any cultures. He was guided by questions like: How can we scientifically account for the similarities and differences between cultures? For example, how can we explain that myths tend to be almost identical, despite the fact that they belong to cultures which have never been in contact?

Critique
After a few years on the academic workbench, Structuralism received a ton of criticism by a slew of European philosophers under the banner of Post-Structuralism. These writers (people like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, etc...) argued that no matter what, and for a number of reasons, culture and human experience are just too complex to describe objectively with unchanging universal principles.

One of the major criticisms of structuralism is its ahistorical approach. To post-structuralist authors, it means that structuralism doesn't work because it assumes that culture never changes. To political economists, it means that structuralism doesn't work because it pretends that nothing has ever changed throughout the history of the people that structuralism is attempting to describe.

The Political Economy school is closely influenced by Marxism, especially by the philosophy of historical materialism. For political economists, the ahistorical approach of structuralism refers to how it sees the cultures it describes as pure, untouched by "civilization", and as having no history of its own (this perspective is also called essentializing). As Political Economists (and many others) would point out, by the time structuralism became popular in the social sciences, Europe and the cultures studied by anthropologists had a long and deeply entangled history known as colonialism. The South American indigenous cultures studied by anthropologists like Lévi-Strauss have an ancestry that was brutally oppressed and enslaved by European explorers, soldiers, colonists and businessmen as far back as the 16th century. Political economists argue that this history of slave labour and colonial oppression is not only an integral part of how non-European cultures came to be the way they are, but also what made it possible for 20th century European scholars to travel across the globe and study them. For Political Economists, any analysis of culture that doesn't take this history into account has no credibility.

For philosophers like Derrida, the "ahistorical approach of structuralism" refers to how structuralism is a synchronic analytic philosophy, meaning that it looks at its object of study as though it was frozen in time. In other words, the post-structuralists pointed out that structuralism is a tool that sucks at describing something that changes all the time, like people. A related problem for Derrida was that structuralism, being a search for universal and stable structures that guide all of human existence, would be unable to account for the origin of whatever structures it hypothetically found. In other words, Derrida argued that the logical basis of structuralism would be problematic even if successful in describing culture with unchanging overarching structures, because structuralists would basically have to claim that these structures simply popped into existence, and that the reason that these structures don't change is because they just don't.

From this point of view, Derrida developed the method of déconstruction, a method of critical analysis that starts from the premise that the interpretation of meaning varies based on the subjecthood of the interpreter, and that whatever meaning is being interpreted bears the intentions of its author. (An interesting thing to note here is that central to Derrida's déconstruction is the Saussurian sign, the same from which Lévi-Strauss devised structuralism.) When applied to structuralism, déconstruction concludes that structuralists could never claim objectivity over principles that govern human experience because structuralists are themselves human subjects. Moreover, whatever principles structuralists hypothetically found, they would arrive at them by some form of language, which means that their discovery of pure universal laws would inevitably be tainted by the use of language to grapple with them.