French is not a language I ever attempted seriously, but even I can understand this headline. Last year for Claude Lévi-Strauss' 100th birthday I did a series of posts about him and his works. (I even learned how to type the accent mark on my Mac keyboard -option 'e' - doing that series.) He would have been 101 on November 28, 2009.

After  recently spending several weeks in LA in the company of people ranging from 87 to 94, I think that wishing someone to live to 101 is more of a curse than a blessing. There are exceptions, and even those with the most challenging problems, can still live a meaningful life if they have some purpose, some task, some relationship to which they are still dedicated. And Peter Dunlap-Shohl's Parkinson's blog reminds me that life, not as we expected it or idealized it, still has great value to those who know how to find its blessings.

Good bye, Professor Lévi-Strauss. You've made great contributions to what humans know about humans.

From Le Monde:

L'ethnologue Claude Lévi-Strauss est mort

LEMONDE.FR | 03.11.09 | 17h20  •  Mis à jour le 03.11.09 | 20h07

L'ethnologue et anthropologue Claude Lévi-Strauss est mort dans la nuit du samedi 31 octobre au dimanche 1^er novembre à l'âge de 100 ans, selon le service de presse de l'Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) contacté par Le Monde.fr. Plon, la maison d'édition de l'auteur de Tristes Tropiques, a également confirmé l'information diffusée par Le Parisien.fr en fin d'après-midi. Claude Lévi-Strauss, qui a renouvelé l'étude des phénomènes sociaux et culturels, notamment celle des mythes, aurait eu 101 ans le 28 novembre.


Here's how the LA Times started off their report for those, like me, who need an English version:

OBITUARY
Claude Levi-Strauss dies at 100; French philosopher's ideas transformed anthropology


By Thomas H. Maugh II November 4, 2009

Claude Levi-Strauss, the French philosopher widely considered the father of modern anthropology because of his then-revolutionary conclusion that so-called primitive societies did not differ greatly intellectually from modern ones, died Friday at his home in Paris from natural causes. He was 100.

Part philosopher, part sociologist and entirely humanist, he studied tribes in Brazil and North America, concluding that virtually all societies shared powerful commonalities of behavior and thought, often expressing them in myths. Towering over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and 1970s, he founded the school of thought known as structuralism, which holds that common features exist within the enormous varieties of human experience. Those commonalities are rooted partly in nature and partly in the human brain itself.

The rest of the French and English articles can be found at the links.  A more eclectic perspective of his life and work can be found in last year's 100th Anniversary series on this blog.  Thanks PM for the alert. 

Claude Lévi-Strauss One Hundredth Birthday - Happy Birthday!

Today - November 28, 2008 - is finally the day Claude Lévi-Strauss turns 100. And yes, he is still alive. I've tried during this last week to offer a glimpse of what he's written and what others have said about him. It's stayed on the fairly heavy side, so for today, here's something everyone can relate to. This takes place in 1941 (I think) when he arrived in the US to teach at Columbia University.

...I arrived in the spring and classes were already over. I went to introduce myself at the New School where I was told all of a sudden, "You can't posibly call yourself Lévi-Strauss. Here you'll say your name is Claude L. Strauss." I asked why, and they said, "The students would find it funny." Because of the blue jeans! So for several years I lived in the States with a mutilated last name.

Ever since, this unfortunate coincidence has continued to haunt me. Like a ghost! Hardly a year goes by without my receiving, usually from Africa, an order for jeans. Shortly after 1950, in Paris, a total stranger came to my door, saying he sold fabric. He had found my name in the telephone book and wanted to propose my name for a pants factory. I objected, saying my position at the university and as a scholar was incompatible with that sort of undertaking. He told me not to worry and explained that the affair would never see the light of day, all he would have to do was suggest it. "Rather than lose exclusive rights to their brand-name, the company would pay handsomely to halt the project. All we would have to do is split the proceeds." I declined.

A few years ago I was at Berkeley as a visiting professor. One evening my wife and I wanted to have dinner in a restaurant where we didn't have reservations. There was a line. A waiter asked for our name so he could call us when our turn came. The moment he heard it, he asked, "The pants or the books?"

One has to admire the level of education of the waiters in California, for in Paris, when my wife leaves her name in a store for an order and people exclaim because it is such a well-known name, it's always because of the pants, never the books

From Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon (1988) Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 30

The rest of the posts in honor of Lévi-Strauss' birthday are here.

I've seen almost nothing in the mainstream media about this 100 birthday. Googling today, I did find this audio report on National Public Radio.

[Update 9:30pm: Anthropologi has a list of web tributes to Lévi-Strauss.]

Claude Lévi-Strauss One Hundredth Birthday - Post 7: Friendly Ciriticism

[All my Lévi-Strauss Birthday posts are here.]
None of these Lévi-Strauss posts are intended to be accurate reflections individually or as a whole. They are basically snippets from a small pile of books and from websites that I find interesting and perhaps someone else will too.

From Edmund Leach (1970) Claude Lévi-Strauss, New York: Viking Press, pp. 11-13

This search for "fundamental properties" is a recurrent theme in all Lévi-Strauss' writings, but it is not just a matter of antiquarian curiosity. The point is rather that what is fundamental and universal must be the essence of our true nature, and we can use an understanding of that nature to improve ourselves:

The second phase of our undertaing is that while not clinging to elements from any one particular society, we make use of all of them in order to distinguish those principles of social life which may be applied to reform our own customs and not those of customs foreign to our own. . . . Our own society is the only one which we can transform and yet not destroy, since the changes which we should introduce would come from within. (Tristes Tropiques, pp. 391-92)

As this passage shows, Lévi-Strauss is a visionary, and the trouble with those who see visions is that they find it very difficult to recognize the plain matter-of-fact world which the rest of us see all around. Lévi-Strauss pursues his anthropology because he conceives of primitive peoples as "reduced models" of what is essential in all mankind, but the resulting Rousseau-like noble savages inhabit a world very far removed from the dirt and squalor that are the field anthropologist's normal stamping ground.

This is important. A careful study of Tristes Tropiques reveals that, in the whole course of his Brazilian travels, Lévi-Strauss can never have stayed in one place for more than a few weeks at a time and that he was never able to converse easily with any of his native informants in their native language.

There are many kinds of anthropological inquiry, but Malinowski-style intensive field work employing the vernacular, which is now the standard research technique employed by nearly all British and American social anthropologists, is an entirely different procedure from the careful but uncomprehending description of manners and customs, based on the use of special informants and interpreters, which was the original source for most of the ethnographic observations on which Lévi-Strauss, like his Frazerian predecessors, has chosen to rely.

It is perfectly true that an experienced anthropologist, visiting a "new" primitive society for the first time and working with the aid of competent interpreters, may be able, after a stay of only a few days, to develop in his own mind a fairly comprehensive "model" of how the social system works, but it is also true that if he stays for six months and learns to speak the local language very little of that original "model" will remain. Indeed, the task of understanding how the system works will by then appear even more formidable than it did just two days after his first arrival.

Well, I certainly can relate to this. When I had been in Thailand six months, I thought I was just figuring it all out. But after a while, the longer I stayed, the less I knew. Not because I actually knew less, but because my awareness of what I didn't know was growing at a much faster pace than what I did know.

Lévi-Strauss himself has never had the opportunity to suffer this demoralizing experience, and he never comes to grips with the issues involved.

In all of his writings Lévi-Strauss assumes that the simple, first stage "model" generated by the observer's first impressions corresponds quite closely to a genuine (and very important) ethnographic reality - the "conscious model" which is present in the minds of the anthropologist's informants. In contrast, to the anthropologists who have had a wider and more varied range of field experience, it seems all too obvious that this initial model is little more than an amalgam of the observer's own prejudiced presuppositions.

On this account many would argue that Lévi-Strauss, like Frazer, is insufficiently critical of his source material. He always seems to be able to find just what he is looking for. Any evidence, however dubious, is acceptable so long as it fits with logically calculated expectations; but wherever the data runs counter to the theory Lévi-Strauss will either bypass the evidence or marshal the full resources of his powerful invective to have the heresy thrown out of court. So we need to remember that Lévi-Strauss' prime training was in philosophy and law; he consistently behaves like an advocate defending a cause rather than a scientist searching for ultimate truth.

But the philosopher is also a poet. William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1933) belongs to a class of literary criticism which is wholly antipathetic to contemporary structuralists, but none the less it makes excellent introductory reading for any would-be student of Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss has not actually published poetry, but his whole attitude to the sounds and meanings and combinations and permutations of language elements betrays his nature. His grand four-volume study of the structure of American Indian mythodoly is not entitled Mythologies but Mythologiques - the "logics of myth" - and the object of the exercise is to explore the mysterious interconnections between these myth-logics and other logics. This is poet's country, and those who get impatient with the tortuous gymnastics of Lévi-Straussian argument - as most of us do - need to remember that he shares with Freud a most remarkable capacity for leading us all unawares into the innermost recesses of our secret emotions.

I'm not sure if this is damning with faint praise, or, what I would rather see it as, an acknowledgment that while Lévi-Strauss does not practice what most anthropologists practice, it's because he is doing something else. I'd go on to say something more sublime, but I'm like that anthropologist who has visited this Lévi-Straussian village for a few weeks. All my impressions are suspect. But there is a lot to churn the brain cells.

Claude Lévi-Strauss One Hundredth Birthday - Post 5[6]: Myth, History, Stevens' Legacy, and Palin's Turkeys

[All the Lévi-Strauss Birthday posts are here.]
OK, I've got a post title, but can I put it all together so it makes sense to readers? I've titled this blog "What Do I Know?" because I think the question is a critical one for us all to ponder, all the time. The Lévi-Strauss quotes at the beginning of this post look at how anthropologists gather indigenous myths and then how they give them meaning. After the quotes, I look at two current Alaskan (but also national) stories and try to give perspective on how we - mainstream journalists and bloggers as well as general citizens - create our own cultural myths and write our history. I'm the first to acknowledge that I'm not necessarily interpreting Lévi-Strauss accurately, but I think it is still legitimate to let his writing stimulate ideas that can then be used to see 'today' from a different perspective. How do we know?

Lévi-Strauss, in Myth and Meaning ponders in a chapter called "When Myth Becomes History" how we should interpret the meaning of the collected mythology of 'primitive' peoples. In this book he is particularly looking at North and South American myths. The ones in this chapter are particularly relevant to Alaskans since they are about Indians living on the edges of Alaska. I'll try to pick out a few quotes and then make a huge leap and relate this to current Alaska myth making.

Lévi-Strauss begins the chapter raising two problems for the mythologist:

1. There are two different types of mythic material
   -one type of collection is "like shreds and patches...disconnected stories are put one after the other without any clear relationship"
   -the other type is "coherent mythological stories, all divided into chapters following each other in a quite logical order."
2. What does the collection mean?
   

Dealing with the second question, he discusses who collects the myths using what framework.

This second problem is, though still theoretical, of a more practical nature. In former times, let's say in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, mythological material was collected mostly by anthropologists, that is people from the outside. Of course, in many cases, and especially in Canada, they had native collaborators. Let me, for instance, quote the case of Franz Boas, who had a Kwakiutl assistant, George Hunt (as a matter of fact, he was not exactly Kwakiutl because he was born of a Scottish father and Tlingit mother, but he was raised among the Kwakiutl, married among the Kwakiutl, and completely identified with the culture). And for the Tsmishian, Boas had Henry Tate, who was a literate Tsimshian, and Marius Barbeau had William Benyon, who was also a literate Tsimshian. So native co-operation was secured from the beginning, but nevertheless the fact is Hunt, Tate, or Benyon worked under the guidance of the anthropologists, that is they were turned into anthropologists themselves. Of course, they knew the best legends, the traditions belonging to their own clan, their own lineage, but nevertheless they were equally interested in collecting data from other families, other clans, and the like.

When we look at this enormous corpus of Indian mythology, such as, for instance Boas' and Tate's Tsimshian Mythology, or the Kwakiutl texts collected by Hunt, and edited, published, and translated too by Boas, we find more or less the same organization of the data, because it is one which was recommended by the anthropologists: for instance, in the beginning, cosmological and cosmogonic myths, and later on, much later on, what can be considered as legendary tradition and family histories.

It has so happened that this task, started by the anthropologists, the Indians are taking now up themselves, and for different purposes, for instance, to have their language and mythology taught in elementary schools for Indian children. That is very important, I understand, at the moment. Another purpose is to use legendary tradition to validate claims against the white people - territorial claims, political claims, and so on.

So it is extremely important to find out if there is a difference and, if there is, what kind of difference between traditions collected from the outside from those collected on the inside, though as if they were collected from the outside. Canada is fortunate, I should say, in that books about its own mythology and legendary traditions have been organized and published by the Indian specialists themselves. This began early: there is Legends of Vancouver by Pauline Johnson, issued before the First World War. Later on, we had books by Marius Barbeau, who was, of course, not Indian at all, but who tried to collect historical or semi-historical material and make himself the spokesman of his Indian informants; he produced, so to speak, his own version of that mythology.

More interesting, far more interesting, are books such as Men of Medeek published in Kitimat in 1962, which is supposedly the verbatim account collected from the mouth of Chief Walter Wright, a Tsimshian chief of the middle Skeena river, but collected by somebody else, a white field worker who was not even a professional. And even more important is the recent book by Chief Kenneth Harris, who is also a Tsimshian chief, published in 1974 by himself.

So we can, with this kind of material, make a kind of experiment by comparing the material collected by anthropologists, and the material collected and published directly by the Indians. I should not say 'collected,' as a matter of fact, because instead of being traditions from several families, several class, several lineages put together and juxtaposed to each other, what we have in these two books is really the history of one family or one clan, published by one of its descendants.

I'm skipping an interesting chunk that compares Chief Wright's and Chief Harris' histories.

It is practically the same story in both books: it explains that the city was destroyed, that the remnants of the people went on the move, and started difficult peregrinations along the Skeena.

This, of course, could be a historical event, but if we look closely at the way it is explained, we see that the type of event is the same, but not exactly the details. For instance, according to the version, there can be at the original a fight between two villages or two towns, a fight which originated in an adultery; but the story can be either that a husband killed the lover of his wife, or that brothers killed their sister's lover, or that a husband killed his wife because she had a lover. So, you see, we have an explanatory cell. Its basic structure is the same, but the content of the cell is not the same and can vary, so it is a kind of mini-myth if I may say so, because it is very short and very condensed, but it has still the property of a myth in that we can observe it under different transformations. When one element is transformed, the other elements should be rearranged accordingly. This is the first aspect of these clan stories that interests me.

...What we discover by reading these books is that the opposition - the simple opposition between mythology and history which we are accustomed to make - is not at all a clear-cut one, and that there is an intermediary level. Mythogology is static, we find the same mythical elements combined over and over again, but they are in a closed system, let us say, in contradistinction with history, which is, of course, an open system.

The open character of history is secured by the innumerable ways according to which mythical cells, or explanatory cells which were originally mythical, can be arranged and rearranged. It shows us that by using the same material, because it is a kind of common inheritance or common patrimony of all groups, of all clans, or of all lineages, one can nevertheless succeed in building up an original account for each of them. [From Claude Lévi-Strauss (1979) Myth and Meaning, New York: Schocken Books. pp. 35-41]

So, as I understand this, basically Lévi-Strauss is asking questions about how basic stories are told - how they are framed, interpreted, and turned into history. He starts right at the very beginning, how the person - whether outsider or insider - just in the very act of writing down the story, has to make choices of how to organize it. And later he relates the issue of why they write it - is there some purpose it is going to serve? To help secure an anthropology reputation? To keep the attention and funding of the anthropologist? To make land claims?

So when we read the accounts of modern day 'chiefs' like Chief Stevens and Chief Palin, even the most careful recorder will be distorting the stories. Less scrupulous recorders are consciously or unconsciously radically skewing the story to promote their interests. Of course, this conceit is nothing new to any of us. But it is also true that we often tend to forget that our stories aren't 'the truth' but rather they are 'our truth.'

Right now there are two stories being written in Alaska. The Palin story is more at the cell level as Alaskan blogs (and others - the first Alaska blog to show up when I googled the turkey story was on page 5) are taking on seemingly small, trivial incidents, such as the Thanksgiving Turkey Pardoning story (See Celtic Diva, Mudflats, and Immoral Minority for example.) And challenging the story-making power of the mainstream media. In this story, two of the Alaskan bloggers were on the scene of the turkey pardoning and have vigorously challenged the versions of the incident from the Governor's office and the television and newspapers.

(Double click to enlarge)

In the second instance, the Anchorage Daily News editorial section carried a full page of five writers speculating or advocating how history will (or should) remember Ted Stevens. It seems that this corresponds more to Lévi-Strauss's anthropologist taking the existing collections and trying to give them meaning. For all of his career - save for the last couple of years - the cells of the Stevens myth have been written by the mainstream media in Alaska, which have ranged from fawning - the Anchorage Times - to the ADN, which has been basically positive bordering on timid, with just a few recent (last several years) but seriously in depth questioning articles usually authored or co-authored by Rich Mauer. Today's spread is 60% hagiography, 20% laudatory, and only the last of the five pieces raises, fairly gingerly, serious issues.

I'm using the Lévi-Strauss material in part because I'm reading it this week. But I think it informs what we are doing today, by getting us to step back and look at ourselves as we document (and have documented) Alaska history. As a blogger I've tended to do more interpreting of existing stories than actually writing the stories - the Anderson, Kott, and Kohring trials being the major exception where I was documenting the stories.

In this blog I've tried to keep from jumping to conclusions about Palin. I've tried to present the facts (including the facts of how I knew what I knew) to let the readers make their own conclusions. Though sometimes I've revealed my own conclusions. Occasionally, I've wondered whether the constant in-your-face reporting wasn't getting carried away with its own importance while essentially dealing with basically trivial material while key policy issues go unexamined.

But in the context of Lévi-Strauss' thoughts on myth and history, it's clear the 'cells, ' on which history is built, need to be carefully examined. The careful examination of the Palin stories documents alternative interpretations of what the mainstream media report. While there are bloggers, in Alaska even, whose writing is merely thoughtless venting, there is a core of Alaskan bloggers who have vigorously fought to bring out what they have seen as the truths that weren't otherwise being told. I've watched them with admiration, even if I've winced now and then, as they tenaciously dug into the details of a story and put them out for the world to see. Thanks folks.

In Stevens' case, the cells were never challenged until the very end of his career, and so we have a mass of cells that add up to the interpretation of "Stevens the great man of Alaska History" or "Stevens the great man who whose final days are a footnote."

Only the Michael Carey piece today hints at why, if Stevens was so great and formidable, he wasn't able to keep himself in the Senate. There are lots of things Stevens could have done - straightening up the Republican Party in Alaska; legitimately securing his economic future (Senators make a fair amount of money and their retirement programs would be welcomed by most Americans); standing up for principles besides winning and 'bring home the bacon for Alaskans' - such as the rule of law. (Recent stories in the ADN talk about him bragging about breaking the law to lobby for Alaskan statehood for instance while working for the federal government.  If 'the ends justify the means' is your motto, anything is acceptable if the prize is good enough. And eventually, the law is seen as technicality not to worry about.

So, while it is clear that Ted Stevens' intelligence and tenacity on behalf of Alaska have put roads, schools, hospitals, airports, and museums across Alaska as well as securing Alaska Natives significant land and cash through ANCSA, today's stories will, I suspect, be followed up by more careful analysis as time goes by. There are lots of stories to be written. Why, for example, did the FBI and the Public Integrity Section under a rabidly partisan Republican administration, in a Justice Department that fired attorneys for not vigorously investigating Democrats on flimsy evidence, or for investigating Republicans at all, take on the senior Republican in the US Senate?

Unfortunately, bloggers weren't around to challenge the Stevens myths earlier in his career, challenges that might have made him more self reflective, less accepting of the misdeeds of the Republican money folks, less likely to take the good old boy perks for granted, generally more thoughtful about what and how he did things. Challenges that would have corrected the record that historians will use to eventually write the history of Alaska and Stevens' place in it.

Claude Lévi-Strauss One Hundredth Birthday - Post 5: Criticism

[All the Lévi-Strauss Birthday posts are here.]

An anthropologist friend of mine with whom I shared a quote from Levi-Strauss wrote the following in an email:

I have never been a fan of Claude Levi-Strauss in spite of his nice quote. His work has little credibility among most anthropologists who understand cultures as being bound to place. His universalism has little relationship to meaning as understood by the people he writes about.

Critiques of Lévi-Strauss certainly belong in this series of pre-birthday posts on the anthropologist, but I'm having trouble finding them on line. When I got this message I called another anthropologist and while he was more receptive to Lévi-Strauss, he agreed with the general message of this criticism. I'm a little wary of trying to paraphrase him, but what I understood him to say was that Lévi-Strauss was more interested in using information about various cultures to develop his theory of universalism and that he wasn't focused on understanding the meaning of things in a culture as the culture itself interpreted that.

So I'm digesting this. Basically, I'm a strong proponent of the necessity of understanding the what words, actions, etc. mean to the actors themselves, so I should basically be of the same view as these two anthropologists towards Lévi-Strauss. But what I've read so far doesn't seem to be at odds to the perspective they say he doesn't have. I respect both these people's professionalism so I have to ponder on this. I'm trying to find critiques that will help me see what they are pointing at.

My basic response is to resist - but... are these two mutually exclusive? But he writes with intelligence and sensitivity that makes me believe that he had to understand this issue. But maybe his intent - to create this universalist theory, to extract commonalities among people around the world - is simply different from anthropologists who work with people. Certainly the 'binary opposition' that is clearly a part of Lévi-Strauss' work at first raised questions for me. But, he seems to understand the dangers of binary choices.

As I looked for something critical of Lévi-Strauss I found The Ethnological Imagination

by Fuyuki Kurasawa which talks a little about some of these topics, but the writer is supportive, not critical. I'll see if I can nail down some of the criticism. My second source did point out that some people were pointing to Lévi Strauss as an early forerunner of Chaos theory and fractals and pointed me to On the Order of Chaos by Mark S. Mosko, Frederick H. Damon - particularly Chapter 2: From Lévi-Strauss to Chaos and Complexity by Jack Morava - but I'm not even going to try to get into that here.

So, here's part of the Kurasawa book, which seems to me to be an attempt to address Lévy-Strauss' detractors, but I obviously need to do some more work here. If you can read these screen captures, fine, otherwise you can go to the link for The Ethnological Imagination above.

Claude Lévi-Strauss One Hundredth Birthday - Post 4: Surrealism, New York, Native American Artifacts

[All the Lévi-Strauss Birthday posts are here.]

The following is from Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon (1991) (translated by Paula Wissing) Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

[Prior to this passage, he returns to France after spending 1935-39 in Brazil. He gets drafted into the army, but through some lucky events, does not end up in battle. He got demobilized and assigned to a college. But the racial laws are coming and he gets fired. Through help from an aunt in the US, he gets invited to the New School for Social Research and comes to New York in late 1940 or early 1941.]

D.E. Once you arrived, you got to know the surrealists in exile in New York.
C.L-S. Breton and I kept up our friendship. He introduced me to his old circle.
D.E. You were a young, unknown university professor, and you became part of a group of famous artists - stars, even - Breton, Tanguy, Duchamp...
C.L-S. And Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Matta, Wifredo Lam. . . Masson and Calder were living in the country. I went to see them on a few weekends.
D.E. Did you like the members of the group?
C.L-S. Some of them. I liked Max Ernst right away, and he is the one I stayed closest to. Tanguy, whose painting I admired a great deal, was not an easy person. Duchamp had great kindness, and for awhile Masson and I were very close. I also became friends with Patrick Waldberg. Our friendship continued after the war ended.
D.E. Peggy Guggenheim was financing the existence of the group?
C.L-S. She helped this or that one out financially, but Max Ernst, whom she married, was more affluent than the others. They were leading the Bohemian life in Greenwich Village. Until Max Ernst left Peggy Guggenheim. One day, Breton called to ask me if I had a small sum of money to buy back one of his Indian objects from Max Ernst, who was now broke. This historic object is now in the Musée de l'Homme.
D.E. This little world had its social side, too?
C.L-S. We saw one another at various people's homes. The "truth game" was very fashionable.[Footnote 4: A kind of psychoanalytic parlor game, of which André Breton was said to be particularly fond, the object of which was to elicit the participants' intimate feelings. Peggy Guggenheim mentions it in her memoir Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (New York: Universe Books, 1979). -trans.] And we would go out to sample the exotic restaurants of New York.
D.E. Playing the "truth game" with people like that must not have been easy!
C.L-S. There was a lot of consideration for outsiders: myself, Pierre Lazareff, who sometimes came, also Denis de Rougemont.
D.E. How did you meet Lazareff?
C.L-S. Breton, Duthuit, and I needed extra money and were working for the radio service directed by Lazareff at the OWI, the Office of War Information, on broadcasts for France. There we all were, among people from different backgrounds, and sometimes we would get together outside of work. There I became friends with Dolores Vanetti, with whom Sartre was later to fall in love.
D.E. Describe your radio work.
C.L-S. I'd already had some experience with radio. To be less of a burden to my parents, I found a job as a student reading the bulletin for the Bureau International du Travail over the microphone at Radio Tour Eiffel in the basement of the Grand Palais. This was why my father painted me as a speaker when he made the huge (30X5m.) murals for the Madagascar Pavillion (a country where he'd never set foot) for the Colonial Exposition.
Two or three times a week in New York, André Breton, Georges Duthuit, Robert Lebel, and I would read the news and propaganda texts issued by Lazareff's offices. I was given Roosevelt's speeches to read because it seemed that my voice could be heard best over the jamming.
D.E. How did you happen to find the work?
C.L-S. Through Patrick Waldberg, whom I've already mentioned. He worked there too. He was both a poet and art critic. Later he wrote about Max Ernst and published some charming books on the turn of the century epoch. At the time we never would have guessed that back in Paris he would become a corresponding member of the Institute de France! He used to drink and lead a wild life, going to little bars in Harlem where he would sometimes bring me along.

D.E. If I'm to believe your essay on New York, one of your main activities at this time was acquiring artwork.
C.L-S. Max Ernst had a passion for primitive art. On Third Avenue - which was very different from what it is now - he discovered a little German antique dealer who sold him an Indian artifact. At that time you almost never saw such things for sale. Max Ernst told us about the dealer. We had very little money, and whoever had a few dollars would purchase the coveted object. Since our antique dealer had found an outlet, more and more objects became available. In fact - I can tell the story now because it has been published - they came from a major museum that was selling them because they were considered duplicates of works in their collection. As if there could be duplicates! When the dealer discovered he had a market, he became the intermediary between the museum and ourselves.
D.E. Did you know that at the time?
C.L-S. We very soon found out. With the help of the guard, he took us into the museum storehouses, in an isolated building in the New York suburbs. We would make our selection, and a few days later the objects would appear in his shop.
D.E. What became of the things you bought?
C.L-S. I brought them back with me to France. But I had personal problems and had to sell them at Drouot's in 1951. The Musée de l'Homme and the museum in Leiden bought several of them. Also private individuals, such as Lacan and, I believe, Malraux, bought a few others. I have two or three of them.
D.E. Did you maintain your ties with the surrealists after the war?
C.L-S. With Ernst, Breton, and Waldberg, yes. I lost track of the others.
André Breton went back to France before I did, since in 1945 I was sent back to New York as the cultural counsellor to the French embassy. So we didn't see one another for three years. We had a ritual going to the flea market every Saturday with his small band of followers. It was considered a great honor to be allowed to accompany Breton on this occasion.
D.E. Were you ever banished from the realm?
C.L-S. Of course we had a row, for which I was unwittingly responsible. Breton had been asked to do a book that was to be called L'Art magique. Inspiration failed him, and as one often does at such a pass, he made up a questionnaire, which he sent to me and some other people. I admired Breton. When we looked at art he had an infallible eye for objects, he was always right on the nose, never hesitating in his assessment. But the term "magic" had a precise meaning for me, it was part of the anthropological vocabulary. I didn't like to see it put to dubious uses. Instead of stating my objections, I preferred simply not to answer. Breton sent me another questionnaire. I was in the Cévennes on vacation with my son from my second marriage, who was seven at the time. The questionnaire came with reproductions of artworks you were supposed to rank as "more or less magical." Even if I objected to the project, I thought it would be interesting to have a child's reaction, and I thought it would interest Breton in the same way. Particularly since my son ranked the pictures without any hesitation. I sent it to Breton, who responded with an acerbic letter. The book came out, with my son's answers included. But the copy he sent to me bore a curt dedication to my son.
D.E. And you didn't see one another again?
C.L-S. We more or less reconciled our differences but it wasn't the same.
D.E. And with Max Ernst?
C.L-S. Our friendship continued after New York. There was never a problem. When the Collége de France invited me to give the lectures for the Loubat Foundation - I was not yet a member, it was about the time I was turned down - Max Ernst came to hear me. I happened to describe a Hopi divinity while expressing my regret that I was unable to obtain a slide to illustrate my point. The following week, Max Ernst brought me a drawing big enough to show for a lecture. I still have it. Max Ernst's attitude toward anthropology was the opposite of Breton's. Breton distrusted it, he didn't like having scholarly matters get between him and the object. Max Ernst collected objects but also wanted to know everything about them.
D.E. Did this contact with the surrealists influence you? I mean your work? Rodney Needham, in an article in The Times Literary Supplement in 1984, compares your work to that of the surrealists.
C.L-S. In a way, the comparison is valid. It is true that the surrealists and I all belong to an intellectual tradition that goes back to the second half of the nineteenth century. Breton had a passion for Gustave Moreau, for the whole symbolist and neosymbolist period. The surrealists were attuned to the irrational and sought to exploit it from an aesthetic standpoint. This is part of the same material I work with, but I am guided by the intention of analyzing and understanding it while remaining sensitive to its beauty.
I will add that among this group there was a climate of intellectual ferment that did a great deal for me. Contact with the surrealists enriched and honed my aesthetic tastes. Many objects I would have rejected as unworthy appeared in a different light thanks to Breton and his friends.
D.E. You say in The View from Afar that the books in your Mythology series are put together like Max Ernst's collages!
C.L-S. The surrealists taught me not to fear the abrupt and unexpected comparisons that Max Ernst like to use in his collages. This influence can be seen in The Savage Mind. Max Ernst built personal myths out of images borrowed from another culture. I mean from old nineteenth-century books, and he made these images say more than they did when viewed by an innocent eye. In the Mythology books I also cut up a mythical subject and recombined the fragments to bring out more meaning.

pp. 31-35

His tone is very modest as he talks about people who are giants of the 20th century. Normaly, I would put links to key names, but there are so many well known people in here and it is late. Google it yourself. :)

Claude Lévi-Strauss One Hundredth Birthday - Post 3: What Others are Saying

Today I'm going to give you glimpses of what others - people who know this topic much better than I - are saying about Claude Lévi Strauss' 100th birthday. [All the Lévi-Strauss Birthday posts are here.] In each case you are only getting a small portion of what they have written. You can read the rest by following the links. These are in the order that I found them.

From Robert K. Blechman at Blogcritics - Sci/Tech

Beyond his well-known scholarly accomplishments, I think I can say without fear of contradiction that Professor Lévi-Strauss' personal longevity is a testament to the positive benefits of the pursuit of structural anthropology on long life and good health. Just carrying around his four-volume, 2200 page oeuvre, "Mythologiques" will improve your muscle tone and cardiovascular capacity...

Some critics get hung up on discrepancies within the structural methodology which Lévi-Strauss used to explain mythology, totemic systems and kinship systems. Other criticism focuses on how a particular interpretation doesn't fit the recorded ethnography for a culture. While the methodology itself, or its particular application may be subject to review and revision, what is important is that Lévi-Strauss demonstrated that there is a universality to the human mind, and given sufficient symbolic material, all peoples -- whether within an oral culture, a literate culture or our post-literate culture — still retain a commonality which can be explored through our symbol systems and perhaps understood in terms of the underlying structures transmitted via the stories told.

Our own "modern" culture also has a mythic "score," but being part of it, it is difficult for us to see. The distinctions between "raw" vs. "cooked," "nature" vs. "culture" and "modern" vs. "primitive" that Lévi-Strauss finds in his studies of North and South America native populations drive the narratives, beliefs and social customs of 21st century populations as well. [continue here.]

From Patrick Wilcken at the Times [London] Literary Supplement: [Note - this looks like the really authoritative piece to read]

The century of Claude Lévi-Strauss: How the great anthropologist, now approaching his 100th birthday, has earned a place in the prestigious Pléiade library

Patrick Wilcken

In 1938, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss drove a mule train up a derelict telegraph line, which wound its way across the scrublands of Mato Grosso state in Brazil. He headed an ethnographic team conducting fieldwork among the semi-nomadic Nambikwara who roamed the plains through the dry season. Photographs from the journey look dated even for their era. Men in pith helmets mingling with virtually naked tribesmen, mules heaving crates of equipment through the wilderness, laden-down canoes and jungle campsites – it all has the feel of some grand nineteenth-century scientific expedition. Yet, after the Second World War, Lévi-Strauss would add a modern twist to anthropology with the development of a completely new way of thinking about ethnographic data...

As he approaches his 100th birthday on November 28, Lévi-Strauss has become one of the few living authors to find a place in Gallimard’s Pléiade library. From the almost weightless Bible paper and soft leather cover to the pale pink flyleaves and the gold-embossed “Claude Lévi-Strauss Oeuvres” on the spine, Gallimard has retained the library’s old-world gravitas. In a testament to just how differently the publishing industry works across the Channel, this 2,000-page, seventy-euro edition sold 13,000 copies in its first three months...

The first thing one notices about this book is a huge absence. Organized chronologically, the collection skips from 1962, when Lévi-Strauss had only recently entered the Collège de France, to the mid-1970s, after his retirement; from the birth of structuralism in the popular imagination to the beginning of its decline. The core of Lévi-Strauss’s career when he was professor at the Collège, a media celebrity and one of the most influential theorists of his age, has been excised. Lévi-Strauss has opted for what he described as his “petites mythologiques” over the centrepiece of his career, the monolithic Mythologiques quartet. A further absence is his PhD thesis, Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949), the reinterpretation of the field of kinship studies which established him as a leading thinker in post-war France. As Lévi-Strauss himself made the selection, it seems a timid assessment of his own output. [continue here]

Here are some 1988 (so he's 79 or 80) video interviews in French with several anthropologists (Lévi-Strauss is the first). These aren't related to his birthday, but they give us a chance to see and hear the man. Even for those of us who don't understand French - you surely can pick out some words, including the French pronunciation of his name - they are worth watching.

Entretiens avec Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS, Jean-Pierre VERNANT, Jacques Le GOFF, Pierre BOURDIEU, Andre, COMTE-SPONVILLE, Michel TOURNIER et Luc de HEUSCH. 1988

(part 2 is here)



And one in English, no, it turns out to be in French too. This is 1972 I believe, so he would be 63 here (his birthday is the end of November).


This link at YouTube will give you more videos from these two sets of interviews.



For a detailed discussion of Lévi-Strauss' political development, we have
An essay to mark the 100th birthday of Claude Lévi-Strauss: Anti-Historicism and the Algerian War

Andy Blunden. May 2008

Introduction

The publication of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s “The Savage Mind” in early 1962, as France stood on the precipice of civil war, launched a trend of “anti-historicism” in social philosophy. This “anti-historicism” had its roots in Durkheim’s sociology and structural linguistics, and while remaining a positive contribution to scientific technique, the ethical and political implications of this turn were far reaching and mixed. The point of this article is to show how social movements impact on the development of science. In spite of Lévi-Strauss’s adoption of the cloak of scientific objectivity, his “anti-historicism” was a direct response to the Algerian struggle for independence and presaged the decentred post-colonial world then emerging from such struggles across the world. The impact of this “anti-historicism” on science and politics shifted over the following decades but such transformations were also responses to social movements, whether or not they were valid scientific paradigms shifts. I will explain what I mean by “anti-historicism” later, once some of the nuances of Lévi-Strauss’s position and its relation to the Algerian independence war have been explored.

Lévi-Strauss’s Intellectual Development up to 1962

At school in the 1920s, Lévi-Strauss was involved in moderate socialist politics and at university was general secretary of the Federation of Socialist Students for a time, but his experience of the Second World War and in Brazil led him to a political position of refusing to accept the superiority of his own Western European culture, inclusive of both the dominant capitalist culture and the socialist alternative. He did not ‘drop out’ though, but adopted as his central value Western society’s key achievement, science, and worked assiduously to secure a place in that society as an esteemed scientist. His greatest fear was the prospect of the world being subsumed by a monoculture, and above all he valued cultural diversity, which, somewhat ironically, he credited as both the content and the source of progress.

His commitment to cultural diversity and admiration for ‘primitive’ (Lévi-Strauss’s word) cultures pre-existed all of his scientific discoveries as an anthropologist, and indeed motivated his interest in anthropology. But he almost never lent his name and prestige to a cause or spoke out publicly against the destruction of the ‘primitive’ cultures he so admired, almost never. Lévi-Strauss consistently adopted the cloak of scientific objectivity and rightly judged that his political aims could best be furthered by distancing himself behind the mask of science. Lévi-Strauss’s trope of discovering his political beliefs to be scientifically proven facts is really a very dogmatic mode of political argument.

By his own account, in his youth Lévi-Strauss had three ‘intellectual mistresses’: geology, Freud and Marx. But he was never a Marxist in any recognizable sense; Marx for him was an icon of ethical skepticism and scientific critique, but he never accepted Marx’s commitment to socialism, class struggle nor his historical method. Likewise, geology and psychoanalysis stood for the need to probe below surface impressions to the underlying structures. His public admiration for Marx and Freud did however serve to give him a probably undeserved reputation for being on the Left. [continue here]

And excerpts from the Jewish Daily Newspaper The Forward's article in honor of Lévi-Strauss' 100th birthday:

Claude of the Jungle
The other Lévi-Strauss turns 100

By Benjamin Ivry
Thu. Nov 06, 2008

On November 28, the centenary of the legendary French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss will be fêted in Paris. As a centenary celebration of a legend, however, it is rather unusual, as the birthday boy is very much alive and well.

Born in 1908 to a French-Jewish family — his grandfather served as a rabbi in Versailles — Lévi-Strauss made his name with such key texts as “Tristes Tropiques” (“A World on the Wane”) in 1955 and “La Pensée sauvage” (“The Savage Mind”) in 1962. . .
[The photo came with The Forward article and is a Getty Image.]

His sheer mastery of a vast number of subjects — a friend, writer Claudine Hermann, once said that Lévi-Strauss “gave me the impression of universal knowledge” — has left some readers with the image of a remote, aloof observer. Yet over the years, the supposedly cool and reticent Lévi-Strauss has granted increasingly telling glimpses into his personality and motivations.

Among these, unquestionably, are his Jewish roots, as he recently explained to the newsweekly Le Nouvel Observateur. “In grade school, I was called ‘dirty Jew,’” he said. He went on to recall fistfights provoked by antisemitic school bullies: “Suddenly finding oneself contested by a community to which one believed oneself to belong entirely may lead a young mind to take some distance in terms of social reality, insofar as he is forced to look at it simultaneously from within, where he believes himself to be, and from without, where he is placed.” This sense of dislocation as a French Jew, he implies, was a natural mindset for studying other cultures, and especially for reserving judgment on their qualities and right to exist. He survived World War II in exile, and part of that time was spent in New York, teaching at The New School. Faculty members there advised him to call himself “Claude L. Strauss,” lest Yankee students laugh too much at the coincidence between his name and that of the Bavarian-Jewish immigrant tailor who introduced denim blue jeans.

In 1952, a scant few years after he learned the full tragedy of the Nazi occupation of his homeland, Lévi-Strauss wrote a text that continues to resonate, “Race and History.” [A small part of which I excerpted in the first post of this series.] Sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the book made the case that fighting the notion that some races are inferior to others also means combating the concept that some societies are culturally superior to others. Its adamant originality may have been influenced by a close wartime friendship with surrealist poet André Breton, whose “imaginative vivacity” he lauded in a moving tribute to another writer, Georges Dumézil, at the French Academy.

The rest of the Forward piece is here.

I feel a little embarrassed because there are so many people so much more knowledgeable than I on this topic. So I have a responsibility to point out some of them and what they are saying about Claude Lévi Strauss. More tomorrow. And, oh yes, even before reading this last piece above, it became very clear that most people looking up Levi-Strauss are looking up the jeans. Is there some distant relationship between the two? Maybe that will come up as I continue this.

Claude Lévi-Strauss One Hundredth Birthday - Post 2

[All the Lévi-Strauss Birthday posts are here.]


I'm going to continue offering work by or about Lévi-Strauss for the next week in the hopes that I'll learn something useful and in that some of you will have the patience to read something a little heavier than normal blog fare if it's in short doses. And some people have complained that reading blogs prevents them from reading books, so we come full circle.
[Photo credit below*]

I'm drawn in this section, to the point, mentioned yesterday too, that Lévi-Strauss believed that the mind of 'primitive' peoples was no different from the mind of 'civilized' peoples. My experiences overseas certainly confirm this. There are bright inquisitive minds in every culture just as there are dull ones. Although I live in a 'civilized' community, neither I nor most of my fellow citizens have done much to create the world in which we live. We are dependent on technology most of us cannot even fix let alone create. And few of us can even make 'simple' things like baskets or weave fibers into cloth. In Alaska this is particularly of interest, since many of the rural inhabitants, who are looked down on by the many urban inhabitants, can probably do a lot more to create and repair the environments in which they live.

In any case, here is an excerpt from one scholar's (Hans H Penner) introduction to Lévi-Strauss. He's very sparing of the commas, so if you get confused, try reading it out loud until you figure out where he meant to pause. At one point I stuck in [,]s because I really needed them.

The list of scholars who have changed the course of an academic discipline in their own lifetime is very short. Einstein and Chomsky are clearly on the list and so is Claude Lévi-Strauss, who made the words "structuralism" and "structural analysis" common terms in most newspapers and weekly magazines around the world. The terms were certainly used before Lévi-Strauss made them so popular. No one would deny that the term "structure' was used in physics, logic, and anthropology long before Lévi-Strauss began to lecture on "structural anthropology." This being so it is often claimed that there is really nothing new in what Lévi-Strauss has to say, his popularity was nothing more than one of the many vogues that arise and pass away in Paris. If this is true then it is hard to explain the explosive controversy that took place after Lévi-Strauss began to publish essays on something called "structural analysis." Structuralism simply cannot be separated from the thought of Lévi-Strauss. After Lévi-Strauss the study of kinship, totemism, myth and ritual would never be the same again. As one disgruntled scholar put it, "Yet it has been said that when one turns from Lévi-Strauss to any other attempt to analyze these myths, the results look old-fashioned and unconvincing; and I too find this to be so." I agree.

The Fundamental theme running through all of his writings is that it is a serious error to follow the thought of Lévy-Bruhl (as many do) and think that there is a fundamental difference between so-called "primitive" and "modern" societies. That "primitive mentality" is like the mentality of our children, or, that they are "mystical" and we are "logical" in our way of thinking, that there are two modes of thinking that are different in kind. The basic binary opposition, nature/culture (raw/cooked) can be found in all of his publications. It would be an error to think of this basic opposition as a dualism or as containing ontological significance. Nevertheless, the opposition nature/culture clearly marks what Lévi-Strauss thinks human nature is all about. We are rational creatures who [,] says Lévi-Strauss [,] must first of all know the world before it becomes useful to us. Lévi-Strauss is not a pragmatist. What fascinates Lévi-Strauss are such questions as, "since it is clearly not necessary for our existence, why do human beings cook food?" Why are there prohibitions on eating certain kinds of food? Perhaps the most significant question Lévi-Strauss asks is, "what is the significance of 'the other'?" "We/they?" Throughout all of the diverse material he studies Lévi-Strauss finds a logic, a structure. And for Lévi-Strauss where there is a logical structure there is also rationality.

From:

Plenner, Hans H (ed)(1998) Teaching Lévi-Strauss, Atlanta: Scholars Press, pp. 1-2

*The photo of Claude Levi-Strauss is from culturamauff.blogspot.com but I suspect is not original to that blog.

Claude Lévi-Strauss One Hundredth Birthday - Post 1

[All the Lévi-Strauss Birthday posts are here.]

I first read a book by Levi-Strauss as a doctoral student. It wasn't something assigned; I'm not sure how or why I picked it up. It was about going to Brazil. I was enchanted. I haven't gotten around to reading more about him, but he's always had a favored spot in my mind. So I was more than a little excited when I did the Famous People Born in 1908 post last January discovered that he was still alive. I wanted to do some posts in honor of his birthday - which will be a week from Friday on November 28. But I don't know all that much. So, finally, today, I stopped at the library and checked out seven books on or by Levi-Strauss. I'm hoping to do some cramming in the next ten days and to share some quotes here each day. Note, since I'm working from books and not the web, I'll put in citations for people who want to find the original. (I'll try to see if I can also find some of this online.)

What I'm discovering though, is that Levi-Strauss does not do sound-bites. What he's writing about is very complex, and he doesn't simplify it. So I felt a little better when I read, from Edmund Leach

The outstanding characteristic of his writing, whether in French or in English, is that it is difficult to understand; his sociological theories combine baffling complexity with overwhelming erudition. (Leach, 1977, p. 3)

Actually, I think that exaggerates it somewhat, but I try to put up quotes here that are reasonably easy to understand. Levi-Strauss, it seems to me, is complex, and has lots of caveats, simply because it is extremely easy to take things he says out of context. So he's constantly making sure that the reader isn't doing that. For example:

The way of thinking among people we call, usually and wrongly, 'primitive' - let's describe them rather as 'without writing,' because I think this is really the discriminatory factor between them and us - has been interpreted in two different fashions, both of which in my opinion were equally wrong. (Levi-Strauss, 1979, p. 15)

I have to admit to being guilty to doing much the same thing in this blog - lots of asides to expalin how what I'm writing might be taken wrong and how I really intend it. And also lots of qualifications, such as 'in my opinion'. Some would say, 'well of course it is just your opinion,' but if I don't write it, others will jump to conclusions that I'm stating a 'truth.' So, I take comfort in Levi-Strauss' writing.

So for the next week I'll try to write a little bit about what I'm discovering in the books. Today I really want to start with Levi-Strauss' own words. One book, Myth and Meaning, is from a series of radio talks Levi-Strauss gave in December 1977 on CBS. (As I'm writing this I'm going to Google this and see if the audio is available. Answer: Not found easily.) The table of contents is a series of questions that are addressed in each chapter. From Chapter 2:

There are those who say that the thinking of so-called primitive people is inferior to scientific thinking. They say that it is inferior, not because of a matter of style, but because, scientifically speaking, it is wrong. How would you compare 'primitive' thought with 'scientific' thought?

Claude Levi-Strauss responds (somewhat abridged):

He starts this section with the quote immediately above. He then goes on to describe the two fashions. Malinowski felt that:

The thought of all the populations without writing which are the subject matter of anthropology was entirely, or is, determined by the basic needs of life. If you know that a people, whoever they are, is determined by the bare necessities of living - finding subsistence, satisfying the sexual drives, and so on - then you can explain their social institutions, their beliefs, their mythology, and the like. This very widespread conception in anthropology generally goes under the name of functionalism.

The other fashion is not so much that theirs is an inferior kind of thought, but a fundamentally different kind of thought. This approach is exemplified by the work of Lévy-Bruhl, who considered that the basic difference between 'primitive' thought - I always put the word 'primitive' within quotes - and modern thought is that the first is entirely determined by emotion and mystic representations. Whereas Malinowski's is a utilitarian conception, the other is an emotional or affective concpetion; and what I have tried to emphasize is that actually the thought of people without writing, is or can be in many instances, on the one hand, disinterested - and this is a difference in relation to Malinowski - and, on the other hand, intellectual - a difference in relation to Lévy-Bruhl.

He's going to explain what he means by disinterested and intellectual soon.

What I tried to show in Totemism and in The Savage Mind, for instance, is that these people whom we usually consider as completely subservient to the need of not starving, of continuing able just to subsist in very harsh material conditions, are perfectly capable of disinterested thinking; that is, they are moved by a need or a desire to understand the world around them, its nature and their society. On the other hand, to achieve that end, they proceed by intellectual means, exactly as a philosopher, or even to some extent a scientist, can and would do.

Hey, I found this online - I don't have to keep typing this. SMILING.

This is my basic hypothesis. I would like to dispel a misunderstanding right away. To say that a way of thinking is disinterested and that it is an intellectual way of thinking does not mean at all that it is equal to scientific thinking. Of course, it remains different in one a way, and inferior in another way. It remains different because its aim is to reach by the shortest possible means a general understanding of the universe —and not only a general but a total understanding. That is, it is a way of thinking which must imply that if you don’t understand everything, you don’t explain anything. This is entirely in contradiction to what scientific thinking does, which is to proceed step by step, trying to give explanations for very limited phenomena, and then going on to other kinds of phenomena, and so on. As Descartes had already said, scientific thinking aimed to divide the difficulty into as many parts as were necessary in order to solve it So this totalitarian [I think holistic would be a better word since totalitarian has another connotation] ambition of the savage mind is quite different from the procedures of scientific thinking. Of course, the great difference is that this ambition does not succeed. We are able, through scientific thinking, to achieve mastery over nature—I don’t need to elaborate that point, it is obvious enough—while, of course, myth is unsuccessful in giving man more material power over the environment. However, it gives man, very importantly, the illusion that he can understand the universe and that he does understand the universe. It is, of course, only an illusion.

So, what I understand this to mean is that people without writing think the same way as people with writing. But rather than attempting to understanding the world by breaking it up into smaller and smaller parts which they can study, the people without writing develop holistic myths that explain and help them understand the universe. It's the same type of thinking, but focused on a macro explanation rather than micro explanations. I'm not sure I buy this completely that it is the same type of thinking, but I agree that it is certainly as sophisticated.

He goes on to talk about using different parts of the brain. This is easier to understand.

We should note, however, that as scientific thinkers we use a very limited amount of our mental power. We use what is needed by our profession, our trade, or the particular situation in which we are involved at the moment...

Today we use less and we use more of our mental capacity than we did in the past; And it is not exactly the same kind of mental capacity as it was either. For example, we use considerablyless of our sensory perceptions. It seems that there was a particular tribe which was able to see the planet Venus in full daylight, something which to me would be utterly impossible and incredible. I put the question to professional astronomers; they told me, of course, that we don't but, nevertheless, when we know the amount of light emitted by the planet Venus in full daylight, it was not absolutely inconceivable that some people could. Later on I looked into old treatises on navigation belonging to our own civilization and it seems that sailors of old were perfectly able to see the planet in full daylight. Probably we could still do so if we had a trained eye.

It is exactly the same with our knowledge about plants or animals. People who are without writing have a fantastically precise knoweldge of their environment and all their resources. All these things we have lost, but we did not lose them for nothing; we are now able to drive an automobile without being crushed at each moment, for example, or in the evening to turn our our television or radio. This implies a training of mental capacities which 'primitive' peoples don't have because they don't need them. I feel that, with the potential they have, they could have changed the quality of their mind, but it would not be needed for the kind of life and relationship to nature that they have. You cannot develop all the mental capacities belonging to mankind all at once. You can only use a small sector, and this sector is not the same according to the culture. That is all.

Actually, he keeps going. You can read more at this link to Myth and Meaning.

Levi-Strauss, Claude (1979) Myth and Meaning, New York: Schocken Books (also the link above)
Leach, Edmund (1970) Claude Levi-Strauss, New York: The Viking Press

Famous People Born in 1908

[Update January 6, 2009: I've posted a list of Famous People born in 1909. The new list has pictures and short descriptions of each person.]
[Update Nov. 13, 2011:  Famous People Born in 1910  and Famous People Born in 1911. Also, Famous People Born in 1913.]

As we move into 2008 it seems useful to look back to get some perspective. Doing that I found on brainyhistory.com a day-by-day list of events for 1908. You can click the link to see it. The page included people born in 1908. [If you're looking for events or people born on specific days in 1908, that's how the brainyhistory list them.] I thought the people list more interesting. This list of people seems to be US centric, though I spotted some European born people and at least three African Americans.

Of all the people on the list only two appear to be possibly still alive. Deadoralive.com says that Claude Levi-Strauss is still alive. But it didn't have George Kimble, a famous geographer, listed, so I couldn't tell. I have not double checked all the dates that I got from brainyhistory.com. However, for all the people who did not have death dates, I googled and got added the death dates with and *, mainly from Wikipedia.

Abraham H. Maslow 1908 - 1970 Alistair Cooke 1908 - 2004 Amy Vanderbilt 1908 - 1974 Arthur J. Goldberg 1908 - 1990 Bette Davis 1908 - 1989 Cesare Pavese 1908 - 1950 Claude Levi-Strauss 1908 - Edward R. Murrow 1908 - 1965 Edward Teller 1908 - 2003 Estee Lauder 1908 - 2004 Frank Leahy 1908 - 1973 George Kimble 1908 - ?? Harry A. Blackmun 1908 - 1999* Jacob Bronowski 1908 - 1974 Jimmy Stewart 1908 - 1997 John Kenneth Galbraith 1908 - 2006* Joshua Logan 1908 - 1988* Lawrence Welk 1908 - 1992 Lyndon B. Johnson 1908 - 1973 Leo Rosten 1908 - 1997 Louis L'Amour 1908 - 1988 Milton Berle 1908 - 2002 Quentin Crisp 1908 - 1999 Rex Harrison 1908 - 1990

Richard Wright 1908 - 1960 Robert Morley 1908 - 1992 Rosalind Russell 1908 - 1976 Simone de Beauvoir 1908 - 1986 Theodore Roethke 1908 - 1963 Thurgood Marshall 1908 - 1993 William Randolph Hearst, Jr. 1908 - 1993* William Saroyan 1908 - 1981 Yousuf Karsh 1908 - 2002 Mary Hemingway 1908 - 1984* Eddie Albert 1908 - 2005* Lefty Gomez 1908 - 1989* Paul Brown 1908 - 1991 Ethel Merman 1908 - 1984 Carl Albert 1908 - 2000* Rene Daumal 1908 - 1944 Greer Garson 1908 - 1996 Henri Cartier-Bresson 1908 -2004 Pauline Frederick 1908 - 1990 Carole Lombard 1908 - 1942 John Holt 1908 - 1967 Osbert Lancaster 1908 - 1980

Who are they all? I don't know them all, but there are at least three US Supreme Court justices, lots of actors, a great photographer, newsman, comedian, a US president, an economist and ambassador to India, the psychologist who authored the Hierarchy of Needs, a baseball player, a congressman, a key architect of the atom bomb, several writers...

I thought it would be interesting to see how many people born in 1908 are still alive. That is a fairly complicated question to ask it appears. The best I can find is the number of centarians, but that is everyone over 100. Actually as of today, most people born in 2008 would still be 99. Here's the Google-answer for the question: Number of 100 year old U.S. citizens per 100,000 population for various dates.

In 2000, there were 50,454 centenarians in the United States, or 1 per
5,578 people, or roughly 18 per 100,000
In 1990, there were 37,306 centenarians in the United States. or 1 per
6,667 people, or roughly 15 per 100,000

Apparently the numbers before these are less accurate. But the researcher did provide this as well:

In 1900, there were 46 centenarians per million people in the US, or
4.6 per 100,000
In 1930, there were approximately 35 centenarians per million people
or 3.5 per 100,000

So, there are a lot more today (18/100,000 rather than 4.6/100,000 in 1900). I'm guessing the drop between 1900 and 1930 might reflect the 1918-20 flu epidemic.

Who born in 2008 will be on this list in 2108? Among all those babies born will be a host of people who will go on to be world famous. So treat them with respect. You never know what the will achieve.

[November 2008 Update: I'm posting writings by and/or about Claude Levi-Strauss in honor of his 100th birthday at the end of November.]