CLAUDE LVI-STRAUSS

The leading figure in post-World War II French ethnology, Claude Lvi-Strauss (b. 1908) adapted approaches
from linguistics, Durkheimian sociology, and several schools of anthropology to analyze comparative kinship
and marriage, ritual practice, mythologies, and the interrelation of semantic, aesthetic, and economic values
of nonliterate societies. Anthropologie structurale (Structural Anthropology) was the title given to two widely
influential volumes of essays on cross-cultural method and theory. Lvi-Strauss was particularly inspired by
Ferdinand de Saussure's semiology, Roman Jakobson's poetics, and both mathematical and musical theories
of "internal properties" of any system of signification. His influential ideas about pense sauvage--
undomesticated, differential thought codes, which he contrasted to conformist regulations of centralized state
administrations--helped consolidate the movement designated Structuralism throughout the social and
literary sciences. Literary theorists and critics of various schools and interests have eclectically drawn from
his work on myth, communication, and methodology.

After fieldwork experiences in Amazonia (1935-39) and wartime expatriation from France at the New School
for Social Research in New York (1942-45), Lvi-Strauss joined the Muse de l'homme and later the cole
Pratique des Hautes Etudes. In 1959 he received the first chair of social anthropology at the Collge de
France, and in 1973 he was voted a member of the Acadmie franaise. Educated in philosophy, learned in
literature, masterful in encyclopedic ethnology, aggressive in polemic, and brimming with preferences and
prejudices in all the arts, Lvi-Strauss became for his colleagues and followers a bona fide savant. He was
seen as somewhat less significant by the intellectual vanguard after the political developments of 1968 and
was branded as logocentric by critics turning to Deconstruction in the 1970s and 1980s. Lvi-Strauss
nevertheless remained very prominent, as he continued producing ambitious analyses in a virtuoso prose
saturated with details of remote human evidence and flavored with pastiches of many styles of rumination on
human nature and culture. His corpus helped restore intellectual verve and reflexive rhetoric to
anthropological-cum-philosophical argument and critique.

Lvi-Strauss's formation, fieldwork, and travels are intricately recalled in Tristes tropiques (1955, trans.,
1973), a narrative of professional awakening, whose complex style echoes both Amerindian mythic devices
and moments from European literary history. De prs et de loin (1988, Conversations with Claude Lvi-
Strauss) looks back over accomplishments, ironies, and incongruities of his illustrious career; he revisits
important debates with Jean-Paul Sartre concerning the salience of historical consciousness and reiterates
misgivings about phenomenological, existentialist, and functionalist approaches insensitive to variational
structures of human experience informed by the ethnographic record.

Lvi-Strauss's views of marriage exchange as regulated social arrangements positively asserted to back up
negative incest taboos (brother-sister, parent-child, etc.) have been particularly influential. He approached not
just marriage systems but all cultural classifications as representations of desired communication
(periodicities, reciprocities, cycles, and circulations) posited against those contradictions and transgressions
elaborated in myths of incest, unanswered riddles, and unspoken questions. Various critics, however, have
found aspects of power, gender, political strategy, and individual endeavor inadequately addressed in his
work.

Perhaps the most general critical debate has concerned the nature of "universals" sometimes invoked in Lvi-
Strauss's programmatic essays and of "dialectics" often inscribed in his actual analyses. Some commentators
have declared him a roundabout, Enlightenment logician of totalized order; others have considered him a
dialectician who decoded meanings of social divisions in contexts ignored by theories of superstructure
restricted to dramatically antagonistic historical classes. Lvi-Strauss's clearest statement on such issues was
offered in 1972, after he completed his four-volume magnum opus, Mythologiques:

The difference [in my approach] from a Hegelian outlook lies in the fact that instead of coming from
nowhere as the philosopher's writ (or maybe inspired by a hasty flight over a few centuries of a local past
history), these specific constraints of the human mind are inductively found . . . by making a minute study
of . . . the particular ideology of many different cultures. Besides, they are not given once and for all, as a
kind of key which from now on and in the psychoanalyst's fashion, may open all the locks. We rather follow
in the path of the linguists well aware that all grammars exhibit common properties or that, in the long run,
universals of language may be reached. But linguists are also aware that the logical system made up of these
systems will be much poorer than each particular grammar and never replace them. They also know that
since the study of language in general and of the particular languages which have existed or still exist is an
endless task, their common properties will never become encapsulated in a final set of rules. If and when
universals are reached, their framework will remain open so that new determinations can be adduced while
earlier ones may be enlarged or corrected. (Structuralism and Ecology 7)

Many critics pointed out Lvi-Strauss's relative neglect of historical process and his overreliance on
Saussurean notions of langue/parole and synchrony/diachrony in theories of structure as relational
differences. But one should not forget his active rejection of historical consciousness, linear sequencing, and
developmental schemes. Many formats, elaborate digressions, and winking asides in Lvi-Strauss's most
memorial arguments, particularly in The Savage Mind and "The Structural Study of Myth," challenged
epistemologies of historicism, questioned cause-effect explanation, and carnivalized chronology as a mode of
authoritative order. Moreover, three of his methodological trademarks were to metaphorize metonymies (and
vice versa); to pulverize plot (i.e., assert narrative "harmony" over "melody"); and to use allusive alliteration
(Tristes tropiques, Le Cru et le cuit) as a way of suggesting his model of variation: repetitions plus difference.

Much of the aptly designated "structuralist controversy" restricted itself to abstract issues of theory and
method. These quarrels conveyed little of the actual experience of reading Lvi-Strauss's dauntingly
orchestrated texts. A typical section of Mythologiques II, Du meil aux cendres (From Honey to Ashes),
provides a telling example. The section first outlines South American myths of the origin of cultivated plants
that are sometimes endowed with speech. It then reviews long-term evidence of the utterly unstatic quality of
tribal codes: such Indian languages as Nambikwara and Machiguenga, for example, demonstrate creative
plasticity by self-consciously distorting terms, playing with muttering, altering consonants, inventing slang,
and indulging in interlingual "osmosis" when unmaking and remaking words. Next come ethnographic
details of meaningful sounds (flutes, rattles, whistles, speech, cries, taps) and myths of communication modes
between gods and humans, humans and plants, women and men, and allies and enemies. From these Lvi-
Strauss distills a general theme, a formula, and a crystalline diagram (320-33, esp. 328).

The theme here, that "music supplements language, which is always in danger of becoming incomprehensible
if it is spoken over too great a distance" (326), leads to the tricky, vital formula: "a melodic phrase is a
metaphor of speech" (328). (Unfortunately, the English translation here renders discours as "speech," also
used to translate parole, contrasted to song [chant] and signal [signal] on the diagram; discours and parole
cannot be merged in Lvi-Strauss's model.) The force of his formula is that "metaphor" (versus metonymy)
stands to discourse as "melodic phrasing" (versus harmony) stands to music. This provocative, general
analogy vibrates with implications for different arts of message-making, including both the specific myths
under investigation and the Mythologiques investigating them. Finally, the diagram: called "the structure of
the acoustic code," it is redescribed as a prism whose "four diagonals form two isosceles tetrahedra which
interpenetrate" (332). In this vintage LviStraussian twist, parallel and oblique relations are shown among
indigenous categories of song, speech, and signal. These include styles of insulting, courtly, confused, and
whistled "language"; signalings by name, epithet, tapping, and again whistling; and variant instrumentations
of flute, drum, gourd, and shell rattle. The lush cross-connections key to a local, Amazonian organology that
meticulously opposes drums to diverse, jangling noises from rattles made of nutshells or animals' hooves,
used in dances to imitate ambiguous buzzing sounds of dragonflies, wasps, and hornets.

Readers of Lvi-Strauss tolerant of copious ethnographic details found that his demonstrations eventually
wound back to Marcel Proust's petite phrase mlodique--a leitmotif of leitmotifs involved at the finale of
Mythologiques, as Wagner and Debussy were saluted in the overture. Such are the simultaneities of Lvi-
Strauss's texts, whose endlessly challenging pages both disclose and reinscribe reticulations of riddled
communication. According to the theatrically oracular endings of his major books, diverse cultural sciences
concrtes (including his own "myth of mythology") have been left in and as the wake of a humankind
doomed, no doubt, to Dmmerung.
James A. Boon

Notes and Bibliography

Claude Lvi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale (1958, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and
Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, 1963), Anthropologie structurale deux (1973, Structural Anthropology, Vol. II,
trans. M. Layton, 1976), Histoire de lynx (1991), Mythologiques I-IV (trans. John Weightman and Doreen
Weightman: Le Cru et le cuit, 1964, The Raw and the Cooked, 1969; Du meil aux cendres, 1966, From
Honey to Ashes, 1973; L'Origine des manires de table, 1968, The Origin of Table Manners, 1978; L'Homme
nu, 1971, The Naked Man, 1981), Paroles donns (1984, Anthropology and Myth: Lectures, 1951-1982,
trans. Roy Willis, 1987), La Pense sauvage (1962, The Savage Mind, 1966), La Potire jalouse (1985, The
Jealous Potter, trans. Bndicte Chorier, 1988), Le Regard loigne (1983, The View from Afar, trans. Joachim
Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss, 1985), Structuralism and Ecology (1972), Les Structures lmentaires de la
parent (1949, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, ed. Rodney Needham, trans. J. H. Bell, J. R. von
Sturmer, and Rodney Needham, 1969), Le Totemisme aujourdhui (1962, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham,
1963), Tristes tropiques (1955, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman, 1973), La Voie des masques
(1972, The Way of the Masks, trans. Sylvia Modelski, 1982); Claude Lvi-Strauss and Didier Eribon, De prs
et de loin (1988, Conversations with Claude Lvi-Strauss, trans. Paula Wissing, 1991).

Raymond Bellour and Catherine Clment, eds., Claude Lvi-Strauss (1979); James A. Boon, From
Symbolism to Structuralism: Lvi-Strauss in a Literary Tradition (1972), Other Tribes, Other Scribes:
Symbolic Anthropology in the Comparative Study of Cultures, Histories, Religions, and Texts (1982), "The
Reticulated Corpus of Claude Lvi-Strauss," The Philosophy of Discourse: The Rhetorical Turn in Twentieth-
Century Thought, vol. 2 (ed. Chip Sills and George H. Jensen, 1992); Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and
Semiotics (1977); Michel Izard and Pierre Smith, eds., Le Fonction symbolique (1979, Between Belief and
Transgression: Structuralist Essays in Religion, History, and Myth (trans. John Leavitt, 1982); Edmund
Leach, Claude Lvi-Strauss (1970, rev. ed., 1974); Edmund Leach, ed., The Structural Study of Myth and
Totemism (1967); Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds., The Structuralist Controversy: The
Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (1970); Ino Rossi, The Logic of Culture: Advances in
Structural Theory and Methods (1982); Ino Rossi, ed., Structural Sociology (1982).