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.

Kayak for Lunch?

Sometimes you see a picture that really grabs your attention. Like this one that I ran into at Fishingfury:

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. :)

Complete Sentence Controversy

From 60 Minutes, Andy Borowitz

Obama's Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy

In the first two weeks since the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say.

Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama's appearance on CBS's 60 Minutes on Sunday witnessed the president-elect's unorthodox verbal tick, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth.

But Mr. Obama's decision to use complete sentences in his public pronouncements carries with it certain risks, since after the last eight years many Americans may find his odd speaking style jarring.

Continued here at the Huffington Post.

This would be funny if it weren't so true.

Ropi Survives Pálotas

For months now, Ropi, an 18 year old high school student in Budapest, has been blogging about the agony of preparing to dance the Pálotas, a traditional Hungarian dance, at a school performance. The tales of stepping on his partner's feet have been tucked in between accounts of ancient Roman history, scores on math tests, his thoughts about his somewhat cool personality and what others say about it, and what he will do when he gets out of school. It's a blog I follow regularly because it is so charmingly mixes maturity well beyond his 18 years with honest, age appropriate concerns about life, girls, parents, and the future. The look of his blog changes too, reflecting his own experimenting with who he is and could be.

So I was delighted when he posted this video of the dance. There is something very universal, in 2008, of a school dance in a decorated gymnasium, with parents taking shaky videos of their kids' performances. (Yes, there are places where kids don't even go to school, let alone have video cameras, but there are also many places where they do.) Ropi is the tallest kid in his class and he's wearing blue. I think he's right there in the beginning with his back to us.

Fluorescent Bulbs - Dimmers and Mercury

Back in April 2007 I did a brief post on moving to fluorescent light bulbs. We've been changing to the fluorescent bulbs as the old ones burn out. But the one over our kitchen table burned out pretty fast. I thought they were supposed to last longer. Well, I put in a new new. Several days later as I was sitting at the table, there was a poof sound and the light went out.



I mentioned this to someone who does maintenance stuff and it came out that most fluorescent light bulbs DO NOT work with dimmer switches. So I started looking for fluorescents that are ok for dimmer switches. Costco didn't have them. Fred Meyer didn't have them. I called Lowe's. They had them. But I couldn't find them. A very nice sales woman was sure she had seen them, but she didn't seem to have any more knowledge about where they were than I did. She asked another salesperson who said they were "right here" but a women had bought them all and was headed to Wasilla to buy all the ones they had.

I thought that a bit weird, but who was I to question him. The nice saleswoman took me to the info counter where the lady shrugged her shoulders. "I'll look it up in the computer for you if you have a few minutes" the nice salesperson said. I wandered to
the garden shop and when I came back with some cyclamen (pink) and kalenchoe (yellow,) she was waiting for me just around the corner from where we were looking. The whole end of the shelf was dimmable fluorescents.

But there was one more issue. These things have mercury and you aren't supposed to just throw them out. So what do you do? As I was researching this, I also was reminded that batteries have mercury too. From a Lawrence, Kansas recycling site:

Developing awareness of household batteries and their current use is essential to understanding the importance of this collection program. The following list provides facts about battery use and its impact on our solid waste stream:

• 2.5 billion dry cell batteries are sold in the US each year
• An estimated 530,000 pounds of batteries require disposal daily
• Americans own over 900 million battery operated devices
• The average household batteries accounted for 89% of the mercury in the municipal solid waste stream
• Alkaline and carbon-zinc batteries are the most common types of batteries consumed, comprising 90-93% of all batteries in the residential waste stream
• In a recent EPA study, nickel-cadmium (Ni-Cd) rechargeable batteries were found to contribute over 50% of the cadmium in the waste stream

An Anchorage Daily News online post - is this on the recycling and renewables blog? can't tell for sure - from March 2008 written by Kevin Harun says:

Improper disposal of fluorescent lamps includes discarding them in the trash and intentional crushing. Improper disposal of fluorescent lights may eventually make its way into soils and water bodies. When the lamp is crushed, the mercury expels into the air and may contaminate the surrounding area.

If a lamp is crushed, intentionally or unintentionally, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) strongly recommends that people present leave the area for at least 15 minutes.

Proper disposal of fluorescent lamps is as follows: Once the lamp is removed, place the lamp in original packaging or a long cardboard box. Do no tape the lamps together. Store them in a dry place.

Once you are ready to dispose of them, bring them to Total Reclaim, Inc in the Huffman Business Park. Total Reclaim, Inc. will charge 18 cents per linear foot for them to be properly disposed of. Total Reclaim may be reached by calling 561-0544.
Types of lamps to look out for:
• Fluorescent – Straight, circular, or U-tubes
• High Intensity Discharge (HID) lamps
• “Green Tip” or “low mercury” lamps
• Neon lamps, and
• Any other lamps that may contain mercury, lead, and high pressure sodium.

What's wrong with this solution? It gives people these personal costs:
a. storing their used bulbs
b. taking them to the Huffman Business Park
c. paying someone to take your bulbs
for basically communal gain
a. reducing mercury (and other) contamination

The Municipality is relying on people's concern for the public good to do the right thing. Certainly, there are people who will do this. But all the costs are personal and the rewards are communal- keeping mercury out of the landfill. OK, I guess knowing you did something good for the community for some people is a personal reward.

But it's so much easier to just dump the bulb into your garbage bag and have Solid Waste people pick it up.

This is a case of the bulb companies being inefficient - using economic terms - because their product has externalities (polluting the environment) that we have to pay for which they don't have to consider in their costs. (An externality is a cost that is passed on to the community and does not show up in the cost or price of the item, so the manufacturer makes a profit by having everyone else subsidize the costs of cleaning-up his garbage. This is one of the problems with the market that even classical economists identify.)

So ideally, the manufacturers find a way to make an efficient light bulb without using mercury or other toxic materials. But until that day, they should be charged a recycling fee high enough to recover the mercury in the bulbs. It could be used by the Municipality to pay people to bring in their old light bulbs and perhaps a little bonus to make it worth their while to drive to the recycle place. In communities with poor folk, the collection of such recyclables with return deposits (like aluminum cans) is often done by the poor who can raise money this way and clean the environment.

So, I now have a dimmable fluorescent light bulb ($11 - yikes!) and when I'm done with it, I get to pay someone to take it off my hands.

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.

Anchorage International Film Festival Selections - Documentaries

Here's the list of the Documentary Features and Shorts for the AIFF. The Festival site doesn't have links up yet, so I've done what I could to fill in a bit of information on the films.

The program guide is available in PDF form. The website also says the program guide will be in the Press on November 26.

It would be nice if they had information on getting tickets on their site and prices. There are ads in the Press and ADN that say tickets are available at Bear Tooth, but that's what the website is for. If the info is there, I can't find it.

There are three focusing on Alaska - one on moving the village of Shishmareff, one on Pebble Mine, and one on a junk trip from Washington to Valdez. Another fish movie is about an Oregon tribe's battle to remove dams and bring back the salmon.

DOCUMENTARY FEATURES

A Nashville State of Mind • John-Martin Vogel • 88 min. USA
The alternative music scene in Nashville.


A Powerful Noise • Tom Cappello & Scott • 91 min. USA
"A documentary film about women changing the world. "

Ballou • Michael Patrei • 83 min. USA This film is about a marching band.

Crawford • David Modigliani • 74 min. USA



Junk Dreams • By Skye Borgman • 73 min. USA


Rachel: A Perfect Life • Fiona Cochrane • 91 hr/min Australia This is one where the topic might cause some people to pass (single mother, brain surgery, epilepsy) but one reviewer (?) writes:

"This film's appeal lies in the personality of its subject, Rachel Ouchirenko, and her truly brave and forthright approach to solving her biggest problem."

Secrets to Love • Tracie Donahue • 63 min. USA

"Director Tracie Donahue searches for the answers to finding (and maintaining) a healthy, happy love, by asking real couples and relationship experts the most important questions."

The Last Days of Shishmaref • Jan Louter • 88 min. Netherlands
This is a Dutch film about an Alaskan village. It looks like an important movie for urban Alaskans to see


The Wrecking Crew • Denny Tedesco • 98 min. USA
About a group of studio musicians in the late 60's who backed up the hottest groups of the late 60s in LA. The music will be good at least, based on the songlist.

Upstream Battle • Ben Kempas • 97 min. Germany

Native Americans on the Klamath River fight for their fish – against an energy corporation. Their struggle may trigger the largest dam removal project in history.

DOCUMENTARY SHORTS

Leave Her to Die • Antonia Thomson • 49 min. Canada

"A 2 year old baby girl lay alone on a bamboo mat in a government orphanage in Northern Thailand"

Red Gold • Travis Rummel • 54 min. USA

Produced by Felt Soul Media and Trout Unlimited Alaska, Red Gold is a one-hour documentary film on the proposed Pebble Mine told through the voices of commercial, subsistence and sport fishermen of Bristol Bay, Alaska.

Reefer Madness • Steve Hanson • 23 min. Canada
Can't find much on this one - Canadian freight train graffiti artist Fatso's trip across Canada.

Splitting Hairs • F Stone Roberts • 28 min. USA
The synopsis begins:

Facial hair championships began 30 years ago in the Black Forest of Germany. “Beard Clubs” organized social gatherings that gradually became competitive. Over time, the championships drew competitors from across Europe, but it was not until the early 1990’s that American pioneers Bruce Roe and Phil Olsen discovered the event.

OK World - Do we get a little slack now? We did NOT reelect Ted Stevens

Today's numbers give Mark Begich enough votes to win the Alaska Senate seat. We do some things right.

From the Anchorage Daily News:

MICHAEL R. BLOOD 11/18/08 9:22 PM EST AP
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Sen. Ted Stevens, the longest serving Republican in Senate history, narrowly lost his re-election bid Tuesday, marking the downfall of a Washington political power and Alaska icon who couldn't survive a conviction on federal corruption charges. His defeat to Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich moves Senate Democrats closer to a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority.
Stevens' ouster on his 85th birthday marks an abrupt realignment in Alaska politics and will alter the power structure in the Senate, where he has served since the days of the Johnson administration while holding seats on some of the most influential committees in Congress.
The crotchety octogenarian built like a birch sapling likes to encourage comparisons with the Incredible Hulk, but he occupies an outsized place in Alaska history. His involvement in politics dates to the days before Alaska statehood, and he is esteemed for his ability to secure billions of dollars in federal aid for transportation and military projects. The Anchorage airport bears his name; in Alaska, it's simply "Uncle Ted."

Tuesday's tally of just over 24,000 absentee and other ballots gave Begich 146,286, or 47.56 percent, to 143,912, or 46.76 percent, for Stevens.




[Later Update: Here's the New York Times report on the Alaska election results and the impacts on the US Senate.]

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.