Books - Claude Levi-strauss

All this is quite well laid out and easy to read. However, the last chapter deals with music and mythology, and here Levi-Strauss badly missteps. He postulates that the decline in mythology that accompanied the rise of modern science coincided with the creation of great music by the likes of Bach, Haydn and Mozart that drew upon the same sources of inspiration as mythology. He spends several pages in a structural critique of Wagner's Ring which, albeit fascinating, is highly questionable. Furthermore, at the end of the book he suggests, quite wildly, that serial music is now poised to overtake the modern novel, which arose at the same time as modern science, in importance.

This weak section at the end notwithstanding, however, this is a good book for anyone interested in Levi-Strauss's groundbreaking work.

The Savage Mind is one of a small number of exceptions to this rule. In a book that requires no prior knowledge of anthropology, Lévi-Strauss succeeds in leveling a major challenge to his discipline and simultaneously to every reader. In elegant, graceful prose, he meticulously dissects his objects, formulates his arguments, and stretches the range of theoretical speculation to cover an extraordinary range of material from all over the world-including the modern.

In the nearly fifty years since this book first appeared, however, much has changed. Structuralism, for which The Savage Mind served as something of a manifesto, has collapsed beneath the weight of its own logical formation and the critical assaults of various respondents-not all of them well-informed. But even that most scathing critic of structuralism, Jacques Derrida, has noted repeatedly that we can never really go back: structuralism is part of our thinking now, and the only way out is through. To put it simply, if you never read this book, you will never gain the right to criticize structuralism as a method for studying culture.

Another thing that has changed is basic education. Lévi-Strauss takes it for granted that we all know quite a bit about European literature, music, and art; that we know who the painter Clouet was, and the difference between Mannerism and Impressionism. He doesn't assume expertise, but a kind of general cultural education no longer usual. This can make some of his analyses opaque, where they are intended to be illustrative. Just as you can skim these arguments, which are often problematic anyway, you don't actually need to know much about totemic practices to understand; he summarizes what's important, and so long as you don't intend to challenge through data, you need no background.

Lévi-Strauss's arguments proceed methodically and exceedingly rapidly. Their weight lies in their logic, not their particulars; that is, it really doesn't matter whether his interpretation of any one myth or ritual is correct, but rather whether the means of going about it makes rigorous sense. He is not expert on everything, and he often inserts such phrases as, "Without presuming to decide this issue...." This is not mere qualification: he distinguishes between illustration of method and rigorous analysis of particular material. If you want him to analyze material, go read The Raw and the Cooked; if you want to know how he does it, read The Savage Mind.

To put this differently, to pick on trivia here is to miss the point. Perhaps you do name your pets differently than he does. Perhaps the Murngin creation-myth has a step he forgets to mention. Perhaps the interpretation of Clouet doesn't really quite make sense if you know much about Clouet. So what? These are illustrations, not proofs. The same happens with the famous essay "The Structural Study of Myth": Lévi-Strauss proposes a reading of Oedipus which, though wildly suggestive and interesting, really doesn't make a lot of sense for Oedipus, and leads to a stunningly silly conclusion. No matter: the point is to demonstrate how the method works. Again, if you want to see him analyze something, you don't read his pure theory books; you read The Raw and the Cooked, or Totemism, or (especially) The Elementary Structures of Kinship. So long as you can work out how the method functions, Lévi-Strauss thinks you should go test it yourself, on material you know. Then, if it doesn't work, you can come back and criticize.

As we read The Savage Mind, we are constantly forced to slow down. Lévi-Strauss has a tendency to condense an enormous argument into a paragraph, then move on; unlike his best American and English counterparts, who make their analyses as explicit as possible, Lévi-Strauss takes the classically French approach of hitting the highlights in the topic and concluding sentences of a paragraph, then putting all the illustrative detail of logic and material into the middle. This is a matter of style, a choice and not a vice. So if you really want to understand the book, you actually have to work through his examples very slowly and carefully. Otherwise one has a tendency to lose the thread and simply become bewildered.

Unfortunately, this translation is, as Clifford Geertz and everyone else has noticed, execrable. Some sentences are not even acceptable English grammar, to say nothing of their failures to render Lévi-Strauss's beautiful, dense French. Mercifully, the various translators involved all recognized their failures and refused to sign their names. Some day, a really good translation will come along, I suppose, but in the meantime at least this one is hyper-literalist-far better than simply wandering off course. If you read French perfectly, read La pensée sauvage; it's genius!

The Savage Mind is an endlessly fascinating, stimulating, brilliant book, a true masterpiece of the human sciences. It happens that Lévi-Strauss is quite often wrong, but the fact remains that this is a landmark of scholarship and a book everyone seriously interested in culture needs to read. Durkheim, Weber, Freud, and Marx are all wrong too. So are Eliade, Geertz, and Turner, for that matter. Does this mean we shouldn't read them? To think we can simply jump to the most recent people and skip what came before is to submit to ignorance and laziness. Lévi-Strauss is perhaps the last of the great French intellectuals, and his work will stand for a long time as a challenge and a landmark; you must take up his challenge, read him, and thoroughly master his thought. Only then can you move on.

Read now, and see a (slightly misguided) genius at work.

Customer Review: Much Ado:
Claude Levi - Strauss' The Savage Mind (1962) is a densely - composed book that winds a circuitous path through several important thematic areas of the anthropological minefield. As multiple passages attest, Levi - Strauss was capable of writing and thinking clearly. Quoted passages - many of admirable simplicity - reveal that Levi - Strauss also appreciated straightforward writing, thinking, and scholarship in others.

Nonetheless, much of the book's content is bogged down in miasmic discussions concerning simplistic points of fact or interpretation that are obvious in many cases ("the principle underlying a classification can never be postulated in advance," or the unsurprising fact that Indian tribes from opposite regions of North America regarded the crow in entirely different lights), thus further obscuring his already ambiguous theses. Levi - Strauss conjures up extended metaphors which he manipulates haphazardly (the most prominent being the comparison of the myth - making process to the 'bricoleur'), and makes outright, seemingly willful mistakes of logic, such as the passage in which he refers to an eagle hunter cleverly hidden within a self - devised trap as "both the hunter and the hunted" merely because the man has situated himself on the inside of the trapping mechanism: within the trap he may be, but hunted by the eagle, or by anything else, he is not. That the hunter remains in firm control over the successful capture of the eagle is a fact Levi - Strauss slyly chooses to look away from.

Elsewhere, Levi - Strauss makes laughably incorrect suppositions when attempting to correct the broad generalizations of others, stating, for instance, after tacitly acknowledging the existence of such dietary cravings, that "there is no evidence that pregnant women the world over have cravings." Moving from literal to figurative meaning and jumping from objective fact to subjective interpretation without restraint ("Nature is not in itself contradictory. It can become so only in terms of some specific human activity which takes part in it; and the characteristics of the environment take on a different meaning according to the particular historical and technical form assumed in it by this or that type of activity"), the author's sentences intertwine recklessly together until the reader can reasonably conclude that entire passages are dazzlingly free of definite, cohesive content of any kind. Though he has literally hundreds of objective facts at his fingertips, Levi - Strauss' confidence in his ability to build them into a sustained, persuasive presentation seems illusory at best.

Readers who have thus far found the book almost impossible to absorb will find their judgment richly rewarded when Levi - Strauss discusses the role of domesticated animals in Western civilization - a subject most readers have had some degree of everyday familiarity with - in Chapter Seven, "The Individual As A Species." Beginning with the absurd statement that "birds are given human christian [sic] names in accordance with the species to which they belong more easily than any other zoological classes, because they can be permitted to resemble men for the very reason that they are so different," and continuing "consequently everything objective conspires to make us think of the bird world as a metaphorical human society: is it not after all literally parallel to it on another level?", the author's discussion of what he believes constitutes the underlying processes in naming dogs, cows, and horses in the West is so transparently ludicrous that it exposes everything that has come before as the intellectual hokum that it is.

The main supporting audience for The Savage Mind has been masochistic American academics who bow reflexively to European theorists, particularly French theorists, as if on command, building author cults small and large in the process, and thus entering suicidally into intellectual perdition. For such academics, the more obtuse a work, the better; most esteemed is a book completely beyond comprehension. The Savage Mind, a work of anti - knowledge, warrants that level of criticism: it completely fails to succinctly outline its ideas, or prove, finally, that its incommunicable "theories" have any appreciable merit whatsoever.

Customer Review: The Manifesto of Structuralism:
hmmmm..... I can't see why this book has got such humble and unskilled review till now. This book is the easiest material to understand the tenet of structuralism. Personally I don't like the disposition of structuralism at all and I suspect whether in 50 years, anybody remember that kind of school existed at all except writers of history of philosophy.
Anyway, this book made structuralism floating on the vogue with its ease to understand and constructed the intellectual fashion of structuralsim which dominated the whether of discourse in human science in the 1960s and 1970s. Yep. now nobody read Levi-Strauss, even anthropolgists don't read his books. But if you want to understand structuralism, post-structuralsim and postmodernism, you'd better begin with this book for it's the easiest and fun to read.

The whole book-the whole four volumes, actually-is structured according to a complex musical metaphor, and the Overture to The Raw and the Cooked explicates this metaphor in detail. You'll need to know something about serialism (i.e. Schoenberg) to understand it, but once you do you'll really begin to see what Lévi-Strauss is up to. He thinks that myth is not like poetry, and is more like music than ordinary language. I think his comparison is misguided, based on a misunderstanding of serialism, but it's essential to understand why he correlates myth and music to understand the project.

In the main part of the book, he goes on to select a "key myth," a somewhat arbitrarily-chosen tale from the Bororo, a people he has studied fairly intensively (and did some fieldwork among). He then begins a massive project of connecting this myth to other myths from South America, breaking down and analyzing all the little bits and pieces as he goes. The logic can be hard to follow at times; his little diagrams don't help much, and in fact he seems to see this and ditches them in later volumes. But if you lose the thread, you can lose track of the whole book.

Ultimately, he's going to link up a thousand-odd myths from both Americas, demonstrating how each transforms and adds to other themes, until we get a vast complex of American mythical thought laid out in a mesmerizing sort of crystalline web of relations.

In short, Lévi-Strauss thinks that myths are a way of thinking, using concrete objects, about such problems as self and other, social relations, kinship, cooking, culture and nature, and so forth. He argues that each myth demonstrates a particular thinking-through of such problems by what amounts to cultures as intellectual entities. This may seem hard to believe, but if you've read The Savage Mind, this is the bricoleur at work.

The big problem, as various people have noted, is that his readings are necessarily somewhat subjective; he could be breaking the myths down incorrectly, splitting up whole units or lumping discrete pieces. What we really see is Lévi-Strauss giving it a shot, not a conclusion. Indeed, he calls this a "prolegomenon to a science of mythology," which hits the nail on the head.

I doubt very much whether anyone ought to continue the work, correcting the readings on the basis of further fieldwork or computerized analysis, as he seems to want. Once you've read through this series, you really have to wonder whether it's worth going further, or whether there aren't more interesting questions to ask about mythology. But his point really does stand: myth cannot be taken as a bunch of moral tales and ritual foundations; it must be recognized as thought enacted, or action thought-through.

The big question he doesn't address is history; as in The Savage Mind, he wants to exclude the historical from analysis. Thus the next big step would be someone like Sahlins, who tries to build an appreciation of the historical into structural analysis. Nevertheless, these books really do deserve serious study. If you want to see what mythology really is about "in the raw," as it were, you need to read this. As far as I'm concerned, those who haven't read The Raw and the Cooked have no business saying that structuralism is dead, or that it's unhelpful; they don't know what they're talking about.

Lévi-Strauss is a genius, and if he goes in directions that maybe now seem a bit dated, let's remember when he wrote all this stuff (i.e. the 60s). But only the intellectually lazy can afford to pass over this essential moment in the study of myth and religion; we have to work through, not skip over.

Not that Levi-Strauss makes the task of a would-be reader easy, as he gives the reader little or no help in telling the forest from the trees. His most off-putting habit is to write his chapters like a detective story, in which he assembles a large number of odd features in Australian or Naga or Manchu kinship terms and practices as clues, then considers and discards several possible interpretations, and then only at the end of the chapter "solves" the case, informing the reader of the crucial concepts, terms, and arguments that make sense of the clues. By that time, I'd usually had forgotten the details of the clues and had to go back and review the chapter again.

Persistent readers will, however, find the ideas involved profound and important. I would strongly recommend that readers skims the conclusion to chapters first and particularly the conclusion to the large parts first, before heading on to the details. Nothing you do is going to make Levi-Strauss easy but for those interested in issues of the incest taboo and culture, how marriage choice structures societies, or in East Asian, Indian, Southeast Asian, or Australian kinship and social structure, this is an important book.

Totemism is a Beacon Press publication.




Customer Review: a classic, boring book:
Don't read this book for pleasure. Only read it if you have to. It's useful if you have a good reason to read it.

Customer Review: An awakener from Anthropology:
A classic of 20th Century intellectual creativity, that has been recognized as such, but that has not yet received the full attention it deserves. It has momentarelly be dispensed of as "old fashioned", when social sciences based on neuro-sciences has clearly not yet integrated the vast webb of implications the formulations of this volume generate.
An absolute must, even - or because - many formulations are arguable. It is not a book that proposes conclusions, but awakens our intelligence.