Continental
Claude-Levi Strauss
Became old af
Worked at the new school in NY
Met Roman Jacobson who was a Russian emigre and a linguist, who previously worked in Prague. They read Saussure in Prague. Brought saussurian linguistics from Prague to Levi-Strauss, who was impressed by it. He wanted to implement it into a reflection on indigenous people. He saw a lot of potential for the understanding of other cultures.
As such he implemented it into ethnology and anthropology.
This created a trend that dominated European sciences from 50s to the 70s. After he published the structure of kinship, he showed the power of structuralism for the human sciences, and as such people wanted to emulate this. Structuralism helps etthnology and all other human sciences to arrive at a scientific background, comparable to the revolution of newtonian physics.
What Levi-Strauss believed he provided, was a new basis for the human sciences, which was finally thorougly exact. Like the natural sciences.
Which was furthermore trans-disciplinary framework that could work on any human-scientific discipline. One and the same framework for all human sciences.
This is known as the structuralist wave.
Lacan did the same as Levi-strauss, but in regards to psycho-analysis. People like Lacan experimented so strongly the structuralist paradigm that they overturned it, thus creating post-structuralism. He could come back to free france after the war. In 59 he got a chair at the college de France thanks to MP.
He went away from a very rigid structuralism throughout his life to a more liquid form in his later works. He was always open to new suggestions and creative impulse in his students.
”Structural anthropology explains societies and their manifestations as a whole, endowed with a self-regulated internal coherence that escapes the consciousness of the individuals.”
We need to look at any cultural construction as a closed system. What any agent in a system does is entirely determined by the rest of the units of the system. The system is constituted by their value, their position in regards to other units in the system. It is a differential relationship.
The piece we read, he wrote for UNESCO, on the notion of racism.
the ”savage mind” has the same structure as the ”civilised mind”, we are all ’variations’ of the same basic structure. There is a base structure that we can recognise in all human societies.
He critiques humanism in the essay.
The problem of humanism: in Ethnology, occidental ”humanism” appears as a methodological problem. You will have a lot of problems when posed with the ideas of amerindians etc. And Ethnology is the study of the diversity of human cultures, but humanism believes that we all share the same human nature, it is a universalism. It claims the universality of the human nature. We are all capable of achieving the same highest point of morality, and wishes to reduce inequalities between men, by stating that they all have the same universal inalienable rights. This necessity comes out of its universalism, ontologically we are all the same. This is what promoted the Paris Human Rights Declaration. Sounds nice. But not so.
We need to critically reflect on some problematic presuppositions of humanism. It creates methodological distortions.
In humanism, all similarities, resemblances, identities prevail over differences and singularities. Assimilates all humans to the same form of ”humanity”, reason and culture. In their piece of the world they do this and this, but they are still human, and as such can be spoken of as actually the same as us.
”humanity” becomes an abstract sameness and identity, humanism cannot think cultural diversity and difference. We are essentially, eidetically, the same. Culture is only an empirical difference that do not touch upon the non-empirical source of what humanity is. We are all the same human beings that reveal ourselves differently throughout history. But this appearance does not attain the structural identity that it is to be human. This sounds like Heidegger.
Humanism’s ”Humanity” exists outside and beyond cultural differences. Cultural difference is only an accidental trait.
As such, alterity and otherness become an illusion, a misleading appearance of a deeper similarity and identity. We must see through these things, as otherwise we will have bad ethical results. To accept alterity is to refuse that they are humans in the humanist framework.
LS discovers behind this a kind of ethnocentrism.
A true understanding of the other has to preserve the other’s specificity and singularity. The other’s otherness is not an accidental determination of its being. Ethnology is as such only interested in that which cannot be reduced to a universal humanity’s sameness. What matters for an ethnologist is actually the differences, and not what identifies us as human. The ethnologist understands that there is only humanity insofar as there differential cultures that constitue it. Humanity itself is thought of as difference.
LV compares Greek and Roman culture, and Western universalism.
Greek and Roman: Only recognise their own ’culture’ is a culture, and reject every different culture into the realm of ’nature’ and as such, everyone else is a barbarian. In Greek philosophy, someone who has no Logos, is an animal, and not even a rational one at that. Someone that cannot speak the right language, does not belong to the one existing culture, and as such no human culture at all.
”The ancient world thus lumped together everything not covered by Greek culture under the heading of barbarian: western ciivlisation later used the term savage in the same sense. Underlying both these epithets is the same sort of attitude. The word barbarian is probably connected etymologically with the inarticulate confusion of birdsong, in contradistinciton to the significant sounds of human speech, while savage- of the woods – also conjures up a brutish way of life.”
”Humanity is confined to the borders of the tribe, the linguistic group, or even, in some instances, to the village, so that many socalled primtivie people describe themselves as the men… thus implying that the other tribes, groups or villages have not part in the human virtues or even in human nature”
At another point LV said that the negation of the status of humanity to other cultures, is probably the idea most shared in all of humanity. To refuse the other the status of human. This is what most humans truly share. The universal trait of humanity is to negate the status of humanity to the other, to someone beyond one’s own culture.
What all the big religions and ideologies share, is that there is an identical universal determination of man that all human beings share. In the eyes of God, we are all the same.
What should we do with a framework of factual diversity? Universalism explains it evolutionarily. Human culture is one and identical in essence, but it unfolds diachronically. The essence of humanity unfolds. As such we end up with different cultures, of people who are at different stages of our essentially same development. Everyone else was just stuck at the very beginning of human reasoning. The notion of primitvity as such arises. At the end of history, all human cultures will be the same. This is quite an oppressive and colonialist answer to the question of culture.
History produces differences between fully developed culture and primitive culture. This helps us to preserve the identiy of humanity as a whole, some are just backwards, and some are progressive.
We are here talking about a kind of humanism that implemented itself throughout the enlightenment and the French revolution. In WW1 it kinda of receded, people realised culture might sometimes go backwards. The kind of ideology that LV is concerned with is the one from the enlightenment to the French empire.
In principle, history always goes in the same direction, towards the future. This is the promise of enligthenment. Humanism is structurally linked to the enlightenment. The future will always be better, and always hand over from project to project the scientific insights from the prior of humanity. As such, enlightenment became a historical project of preserving what has been gained, to hand it to the next generation, so that it can surpass the current society.
”it is really an attempt to wipe out the diversity of cultures while pretending to accord it full recognition. If the various conditions in which human societies are found, both in the past and in far distant lands, are treated as phases or stages in a single line of development, starting from the same point and leading to the same end, it seems clear that the diversity is merely apparent. Humanity is claimed to one and the same everywhere, but this unity and identity can be achoieved only gradually; the variety of culture we find in the wordl illustrates the several stages in a process which conceals the ultimate reality or delays our recognition of it.”
The ultimate reality is concealed in the diversity of cultures.
It tries to explain both the factual diversity, and hold onto the essential unity.
The interplay between fact and essence, the empirical and the apriori, is very important for these universalist frameworks. If you still want to then hold onto an identity that we cannot actually grasp, we have to work with the pure and the impure. The essence and the fact.
Both universalism and particularism have the same problem. They cannot think the ’other’.
Universalism is itself a particularism, because it sees itself as the realisation of the highest achievement in the historical development of culture. It puts itself at the endpoint of history.
They cannot understand what difference is in human culture, other than just mere accident.
Occidental thinking favours identity over difference, and all differences are differences between already fixed identities. Identities for Saussure are constituted by the differences, and through these relationships, are things alloted their difference positions.
LV thinks diversity is as fundamental for identity. A certain culture has only an identiy, insofar as it is in a differential relationship to other cultures. Cultural diversity is essentially inscribed in the definition of culture.
It is unthinkable to have a human culture that is not somehow distinguished according to its relationship to another culture. This as such is not always peaceful. But this difference is essential. ”Human societies are never alone”.
It makes no sense to inquire a certain culture in abstraction from other cultures. Anthropology is always differential. The ethnologist themselves comes to understand themselves through the relationship to another culture. The ethnologist is its own culture, in the light of the culture. The ethnologist has to leave behind their own culture to understand the culture they study. There is a moment at which they have to distance themselves from their own culture, in order to really see the face of that culture. There is a two-fold detachment, the fact that it is another culture, but also that they seperate from their own culture.
”many customs have come into being, not because of an intrinsic need for them or of a favourable chance, but solely because ofa group’s desire not to be left behind by a neighbouring group which was laying down specific rules in matters in which the first group had not yet thought of prescribing laws. We should not, therefore, be tempted to a piecemeal study of hte diversity of human cultures, for that diversity depends less on the isolatin of the various groups than on the relations between them”.
We can only see the values of things if we take a step back from the culture as such, and study the value of certain cultural things to distinguish by.
What is important is the institution of new social codes. We cannot distinguish what a social code is, without comparison to another.
As such, there is something universal in human beings, but it is not an essence.
LV was a vegetarian, he thought people will hate eating cows in a while. You can implement the structuralist analysis to animals too.
All cultures share the same structure, and what differs is each culture’s answer to that structure.
Natural are all cultures shared by the species. Culture are the characters which can differ from one social and cultural group to another.
The distinction between nature and culture is important for LV, but is important for later anthropologists.
Culture is itself a ’natural’ fact of humanity, it is universally shared by all human beings; ie. To distinguish oneself from other groups. It is a point of identity and difference. So it is universally shared by all individuals to not share certain traits with each other. This is where the production of differences begin.
Human nature is a universal combinatorial matrix that produces cultural diversity.
Particular culture = surface productions of the deeper universal structure or matrix
History = process of factual generation & destruction of particular cultures.
History is the motor.
So it is quite similar to the law of gravitation, which stands behind multiply different, more singular empirical laws. It stands in the background of a multitude of other laws which are more specific. These more specific laws are the explanations of still more specfic phenomena.
”Less confusion would hvae occurred in connection with the concept of human nature, that I continue to use, if it had been realised that I do not take it in the sense of a heap of completed and immutable structures, but rather with the meaning of matrices giving rise to structures all belonging to the same set, without necessarily remaining identical throughout any individual existence from birth to adulthood, or, in the case of human groups, at all times and in all places”.
Here we witness the scientific dream of structuralism in its essence, with its quasi-newtonian basis for cultural studies. Strucutural anthropology comes up with the most fundamental laws, and on-top of that, all other sciences come up with their more particular laws, their variations of the space pattern. Structure as such is an apriori of culture.
Post-structuralism showed that the structures themselves are not static, but are movable, and eixst in a disseminated fashion, which are chaotic and not nearly as clear as they seem. And as such, structures don’t really exist lol.
Structuralism is a philosophy against the subject, it is against the idea that the self is an origin of one’s acts etc. It goes against a lot of what is important to phenomenology. Many of them are against phenomenology. Phenomenology came in the 30s-50s, whilst the 50s-70s was dominated by structuralism.
The ultimate universal matrix was not discovered by LS, one such is however totemism. It is the worship of animals or plants, and the identification with those; either species or individuals. Before LS, the people tried to understand the metaphorical content of a totem. You tried generally to understand what is the signifcation of the totem.
LS is against this. He thinks we need to analyse the cultural structure that stands behind the indiviudal totems. The totemic laws are the invention of culture in the realm of nature in order to organise the social structure. They are projections of social differences upon animal/plant species and individuals. In order to organise the culture itself. It is a means to clarify what is going on in the culture, to project on the neutral stratum of nature, to rationalise the processes of the culture itself. As such the social differences are central.
Social positions become meaningful in their relationship to difference in nature. King-Servant/ Lion-Antilope/Eagle-Mouse → not considered according to their metaphorical content. What is identical is the relationship, and thus the differnece between the terms. There is never a lion in a society without there being a different animal that exists in a differential relationship to that lion, like an Antilope.
For LS, totemism is entirely like this:
Nature Culture
Species Group
Species Individual
Particular Individual
Particular Group
Each of these combinations corresponds to an observed people, and they don’t have to know each other.
The first for austrialian tribes, the second for north american natives, the third for the mota people in Banks island melanesia, and the fourth for people in melanesia and africa.
He means that these four possibilities will be developed by humanity somewhere, because they are the possibilities that are available to us.
Former ethnologists, like Elkin denied the unity of totemism; there is not one totemism but many, each one being a single irreducible whole, because he inquired into the imaginary of totemism.
As such, totemism is an anthropological unitary structure, and which is only realised in certain cultures.
Prohibition of incest is a cultural fact, but which is universal to all human societies. Pushes people into exogamy. LS develops ’alliance theory’.
The emergance of a society will be explained through the prohibition of incest. A tribe is what it is not merely as biological unity, but as something that combines biological unities with alliances.
Relations of consaguinity are systematically interwoven with the constitution of social alliances.
Marriages have to take place between families from another lineage. The woman is the significant unit in this exchange.
The basic family structure: mother, father, children & father or brother of the mother who ’offers’ the women. There is a pure linkage between nature (affiliation) and culture (alliance).
Every ’biological’ family is based on communication with other families, ie. A circulation of signs.
The basic invariant of a culture: not an identiy, but a functional relationship which is a symbolically overdetermined relationship. The bride from family is part of the family structure of A, but changes meaning when entered into family B. There is a material sign crossing the limits between two different significations.
LS tries to identify the movements of a society with the movments of a society with Saussure. Lacan puts the Phallos into LS’s theor.
Kinship can have two forms of exchange: restricted or direct exchange = a symetric exchange between two groups (moieties).
Generalised exchange = at least three families; allows the integration of indefinitie numbers of moieties.
”The prohibition of the sexual use of the daughter or sister forcer her to be given in marriage to another man, and at the same it creates a right on the daughter or sister of this other man. Thus, all the negative stipulations of the prohibition has a positive counterpart. The defence amounts to an obligation: and the renounciation opens the way to a claim”
This simple structure is the positive version of what the prohibition of incest expresses negatively.