Remembering Claude Lévi-Strauss | Savage Minds - The Diigo Meta page

• 05 Nov 09
  

  Jeremy Price

  anthropology humanism

• 04 Nov 09
  

  thepinkdolphin's diigo

  anthropology

  • First, Lévi-Strauss taught us that culture is a force in its own right. The idea that arbitrary and conventional systems of meaning are sui generis and have a determining force on our lives is one that is continually under assaults from various forms of reductionism.
  • Second, Lévi-Strauss taught us connoisseurship of culture. He treated cultures like works of art, and was in many sense the first person to analyze them—really analyze them—with the care that they deserved. Even today, when concrete analysis of culture has fallen by the wayside in the name of ‘theory’, Lévi-Strauss remains the great exemplar of how anthropologists work with cultural materials.
  • 2 more annotations...
  • • Finally, Lévi-Strauss got the relationship between the general and the particular right. He taught us to see the universal in small details. Boasian in his obsession with details, he also lifted us up to the highest and most abstract levels of thought, using little more than the detail on a piece of lace or the curve on the edge of a mask. Anthropology has always been haunted by its fierce commitment to the particular even as it strikes out towards general accounts of human society. Lévi-Strauss somehow knitted together ethnographic minutiae, comparative scope, and transcendent theorizing. This isn’t really an act that the rest of us can follow, but it was a vision that inspired others, and continues to set the tone as future generations of anthropologists try to imagine their own futures.
    • But still—there are points in the final chapters of Tristes Tropiques where I feel like my soul is being twisted by some titanic power to agree with a vision of the world that I find not just wrong but disturbing. His attempts to fit history and agency into his theoretical framework in his Introduction To The Work of Marcel Mauss always seemed painful and awkward to me.
• 

  mary theberge

  Levi-Strauss

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