Claude Levi-Strauss
Is probably rather a social and cultural anthropologist. But social anthropology is a kind of social science so it seems similar to a kind of sociology. He is mainly included because of his influence on philosophy.
In French philosophy after WWII, structuralism and post-structuralism was omni present, which was partially due to Levistrauss.
He is a philosopher of education.
Born in Belgium, taught in sao Paolo.
It was customary for the French state to send teachers all over the world to French institutions, they had schools abroad, and young academics often did so. Levistrauss was sent o Brazil.
He used this occassion to do field work, which is famous but limited. Tristes Tropiques became a kind of best-seller.
Levistrauss speaks of his experiences in the amazon forest where he studied population groups which were radically different from our western ways of viewing things.
During WWII he flees to New York, where he encounters a number of scientists who inspire him to develop structuralism. The emergence of systems theory and cybernetics were present there, as well as access to Saussure. Wrote Les structures elementaires de la parente. The anthropology of kinship.
Kinship-relations in non-western cultures are incredibly complicated. When anthropologists meet another culture they immediately observe that there are usually entirely different ways through which they have kinship.
Much work by levistrauss is about myth. The stories we tell ourselves.
How do you study stories? What method?
Structuralism gives a method through which to study stories.
Many anthropologists go and live with a culture they are interested in for a nhumber of years. Just a few months or so is not enough. Levistrauss only visited the cultures he studied for about 6 months as well as met mutliple different cultures only through informers.
Durkheim: armchair sociology, using available written sources.
Malinowski (functionalist) spent years in melanesia doin gfieldwork, focused on a very particular group of people.
Levistrauss was interested in the theoretical questions, a theoretical elaboration of his method, which he made out of actually going out there.
Kinship
Myth
Primitive classifcation
Structuralism:
It is important that structure always means something like underlining structures, deep structures. He usually uses geological metaphors. When you study something, you have to look for the underlying structures which cannot themselves be visible, but which can be reconstructed through theory.
”True reality is never the most obvious one”.
We should only study the underlying structures in cultures, which forces us to see the cultures as they are.
However, structuralism is critiqued in terms of not being historical. The concepts that it uses to describe culture make the place for history impossible.
Levistrauss background:
There were a lot of sociologists at this time who were influenced by Durkheim, and so Levistrauss was among these.
Levistrauss distinguishes himself from Durkheim, but there are still similarities. Levistrauss rejects the collective consciousness, and rather thinks that there are social facts that impose themselves on individuals.
”The social fact, which is no longer a massive reality but an efficacious system of symbols or a network of symbolic values, is going to be inserted in the depthts of the individual.”
The are underlying structures, and the root of these structures are according to symbolic structures present in the human brain.
It shows something of the scientific ambition of levistrauss. He wanted to cross the divide between nations and culture, to show that the human brain works according to certain symbolic structures.
(It seems however that he was not able to show that this was the case, but he nicely showed the structures cultures are made up off of).
Cultural structures are rooted in the unconscious.
However, Levistrauss’ unconscious is not the same as Freud, the unconscious is structure itself.
The similarity between levistrauss and Durkheim is the approach wherein we should study cultures empirically and with a certain academic objective distance in order to uncover structures. In such a way even that a scholar can show how a culture works in a way that the participants of the culture cannot. So a scholar can potentially have a greater insight into the myths than the myth-tellers themselves. This is very similar to Durkheim.
Cultural anthropology at the time of Levistrauss.
Malinowski, a british anthropologist who pioneered the subject. He was in the Trobriand islands together with the cultures there. He discovered a strange practice among them. The islands in the area have interactions with each other, which regard passing on braces and necklaces between each other. These objects ciruclate, one of them clockwise in the island circle, and the other counter clockwise. Malinowski shows that these are not objects of trade, they don’t particularly need these objects. Instead, there were all kinds of rituals with these objects, and they go through incredible amounts of effort, boating between the islands, in order to pass them on. These objects also have particular meaning, one is male and must be worn by women, the other is female and has to be worn by men.
The obvious question is ”what is at stake here?”
Well, by encountering each other over and over, and giving each other these objects, a kind of friendship relation is maintained within the groups. It is a very complicated issue which anthropologists can barely understand.
Malinowsky’s work would be very important of Marcel Mauss, the nephew of Durkheim.
He wrote an important work on Gift-giving and contracts. Essai sur le don.
He maintained that giftgiving is an incredibly important part of how cultures function. In all cultures, it has a tremendous meaning. Oin most Western cultures we have kind of lost the spirit of giftgiving, but there is still something that remains in a desire to give gifts.
The refusal of a gift, is the refusal of a relation with someone. It’s not the object itself that matters, but through the giving of gifts, peace and friendship was made. There are subtle rules to giftgiving. It feels a bit uncomfortable, because you immediately feel that you need to give something back in order to not be in a relation of dependence. Through this ritual of giftgiving, a relationship is accepted, maintained and so on. Sometimes, you cannot give back immediately, because that can also be a sign of refusing the relation. So there can be incredibly subtle rules involved with this.
Mauss shows that the practice of giftgiving are all over the world, it is something fundamental to most cultures. ”giftgiving is the foundation of culture and society”.
It is the moment when culture start and nature ends. Animals can share, but they cannot give gifts.
Fundamentally, what are social relations? They only emerge from giftgiving, it is the entire basis of it.
You can of course expand the notion of giftgiving, and you will see that many general structures of social relations are bound to be about giftgiving.
Charity instead, is problematic, because poor people can never give back. So there is no reciprocity and poor people feel this.
Mauss shows that the soul of a people or a group is usually present in an object that is given. It is not just an object, but something that must be treated with respect according to the correct rules.
The ”Hau”.
Giftgiving is the most important social fact, because it is a total social fact.
It is a social fact wherein the totality of society is involved. Giftgiving is something that involves the entire society as an undertaking.
Furthermore, all dimensions of social life are at play in the act of giftgiving.
Potlach (Kwakiutl, West coast of North America.)
In certain moments of the year, all the clans of the Kwakiutl, gather for a celebration of giftgiving. The chief of the group gives such a huge amount of gifts, that the opposing chiefs cannot possibly give back, and so are dominated without war. It is instead a kind of symbolic violence. And then, they destroy these goods that are given between each other. So there is both submission and destruction.
It is a kind of war without physical violence.
”This act of service on the part of the chief takes on an extremely marked agonistic character. It is essentially usurious and sumptuary. It is a struggle between nobles to establish a hierarchy amongst themselves.”
LeviStrauss Again.
Who can you marry?
In Western cultures it is quite simple: you can marry anyone except those of your close kin. In most cultures however, marriage rules are very precise, and which drastically limit the number of potential partners. What they observe is that almost universally there is a prohibition of incest. Why would all these societies and cultures prohibit relations with close kin? Modern science of course knows that this has bad biological effects.
Levistrauss considers this hypothesis and says it is incredibly unlikely. This is not something immediate, it would require quite a lot of scientific knowledge for all these cultures to make this kind of scientific knowledge.
There are many scentific instances of 100% twins that have fallen in love, so it seems odd to think that it is a natural repulsion.
Levistrauss’ claim is that it has a social meaning. It is about social relations, and the root of the prohibition of incest comes from the expansion of social relations.
In many cultures there are particular marriage rules, such as being able to marry a cross cousin, but not a parallel cousin. Biologically speaking, the difference is the same. This is something that needs to be explained. This is a strange rule to see in multiple places.
Two ”tribes” will always engage with each other. And the most common interaction is the giving of women between the tribes. Levistrauss discovers that the whole theory of giftgiving helps us explain the systems of kinship in nonwestern cultures. There are usually elaborate giftgiving cultures in most cultures. (Levistrauss was critiqued by feminists for this, because this is the shape that patriarchy exists in, though Beavoir found Levistrauss’ text very interesting).
Levistrauss argued that we have to be careful not to impose our own theories and ideas of the people we study. There are no traits, these are highly ritualised objects of giftgiving. Through giftgiving, relations are established between people who would otherwise be each other’s enemies.
The reason we do not marry those close to us, we show other parties that we are willing to always give our best, the ones we love the most. It is by prohibiting incest, that you are obliged to give away your sister, your best gift, to the other party.
So why it is not alright to marry cross cousins, is because cross cousins are the ones that are left over in a marriage relationship and so must be married to each other. It is almost a purely mathematical relation.
Levistrauss discovered most of this through his own fieldwork.
For example the Bororo, whom had a circular village split into two halves. There is a dualistic relationship (moieties) between the two groups where there is an exchange of women between the two.
The spacial organisation of the tribe expresses the social organsisation.
He was thereby capable of uncovering the underlying structure of the kinship system among the Bororo. He makes a model, that makes it possible to understand a wide variety of marriage rules among different cultures.
In the elementary of the basic structure, we have to include the uncle, because it is the uncle that gives away his sister to the other side.
Levistrauss uses mathmeatical symbols to express the matrilineal and patrilineal relations.
The structuralist would then apply certain mathematical operations, in order to discover variants of the model that are of the same form. Levistrauss was then capable of using other cultures, radically different, where indeed the alternative pattern of relation actually exists. So in the enormous amount of data that we have on marriage rules, we attain a kind of model that explains in a strong and concise way about how the relations must function.
The law according to levistrauss:
”The relation between maternal uncle and nephew is to the relation between brother and sister as the relation between father and son is to that between husband and wife”.
Levistrauss finds inspiration from the study of linguistics in De Sassure.
Linguistics traditionally studied language, and at that historically: you study the change of meaning through time and so on. In other words what you do then, is to study language with something outside of language. (Gramsci was for example related to this tradition.)
Saussure changes this by bringing it instead into a relational study of systems. The meaning of a word is not intrinsic to the word, but is made up of relations. Each word aquires its meaning on a relation of difference and contrast. Meanings become attached to sounds through difference.
This makes linguistics a science of its own. Very important to Saussure is phonology, and just like before Levistrauss on kinship, the continuum of sound was entirely chaotic. Saussure claims it is however difference that matters. What is the minimal difference in sound that constitutes a meaning.
A typical formula in structuralism is the structure A:B :: C:D
A is to B as C is to B.
For example: Zwarte Piet. If you map the type of relations between the signifiers in the story of Sint Nikolaas and Zwarte Piet, there is an underlying pattern of relations which structures the story and so on has influence on how we perceive the word, and we can show that it is indeed a racist tradition.
”Culture is like a language”.
The dynamics of social systems can only be explained immanently. It has to be explained between the inherent parts of the object. First we have to study the symbolic ordering at work in the system.
For Levistrauss, linguistics and not biology is the model science. (Sociologists have often borrowed concepts from other fields and, weirdly for LeviStrauss, it was something new).
Systems of meaning are everywhere and their orders too, and we can map them between signifiers and look for variants by permute and recombine different symbolic systems. This becomes a rich vocabulary for anthropologists to use and describe different patterns.
An important concept is homology. This is a kind of pattern at work in regards to association of conceptual oppositions. Through such notions we get an entire apparatus through which we can describe cultures. And this in turn becomes hugely complicated.
Thus, furthermore we can find possibility of cultural being that we rather desire as opposed to another.
”The customs of a community, taken as a whole, always have a particular style and are reducible to systems. I am of the opinion that the number of such systems is not unlimited and that – in their games, dreams or wild imaginings – human societies, like individuals, never create absolutely, but merely choose certain combinations from an ideal repertoire that it should be possible to define. By making an inventory of all recorded customs […] one could arrive at a sort of table, like that of the chemical elements.” Tristes Tropiques.
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Define the phenomenon under study as a relation between two or more terms, real or supposed.
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Construct a table of possible permutations between these terms;
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Take this table as the general object of analysis which, at this level only, can yield necessary connections, the empirical phenomenon considered at the beginning beong only one possible combination among others.”
Anthropoligists should look for invariants. The fundamental relation between husband, wife, and child and uncle, are invariants which can be the repertoire for how a culture functions in terms of kinship.
Marxist structuralists would say that we can analyse capitalism in this sense too. We can then discover all the potential modes of production, potentially.
Through this approach, Levistrauss is capable of finding out something universal, however, Levistrauss is not seeking universal traits, but rather universal functions of structure.
However when you show that there are underlying structures, this leads to the death of the subject. Culture has nothing to do with individuals, but rather the structures on which they exist. The fundamental structures and models of culture are unconscious and so incredibly difficult to change. Human beings are just a product of the structures.
Big controversy in levistrauss is the basic question: ”What actually is a structure?” is it ontologically real or just a methodological heuristic? Levistrauss later went out and said that it was merely a heuristic.