LéVi-Strauss, Claude

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The Social Science Encyclopedia, Second Edition

Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in Brussels, of French parents. After attending the Lycée Janson de Sailly in Paris he studied at the Faculty of Law in Paris, where he obtained his license, and at the Sorbonne, where he received his teacher’s qualification in philosophy (agrégation) in 1931. After teaching for two years at the lycées of Mont-de-Marsan and Laon, he was appointed to the French university mission in Brazil, serving as professor at the University of São Paulo from 1935 to 1938. Between 1935 and 1939 he organized and directed several ethnographic expeditions in the Mato Grosso and the Amazon. Returning to France on the eve of the war, he was mobilized. After the armistice, in June 1940, he succeeded in reaching the USA, where he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York. Volunteering for the Free French forces, he was attached to the French scientific mission in the USA and founded with H.Focillon, J.Maritain, J.Perrin and others the Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes in New York, of which he became secretary-general. In 1945 he was appointed cultural counsellor of the French Embassy to the USA but resigned in 1948 in order to devote himself to his scientific work.

Lévi-Strauss’s doctoral thesis, submitted at the Sorbonne, was made up of his first two studies, La Vie familiale et sociale des Indiens Nambikwara (1948) and Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949) (The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 1969). In 1949 he became deputy director of the Musée de l’Homme, and later director of studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, chair of the comparative religion of non-literate peoples, in succession to Maurice Leenhardt. In 1959 he was appointed to the College de France, establishing a chair in social anthropology. He taught there until his retirement in 1982.

The name of Claude Lévi-Strauss has become linked indissolubly with what later came to be called ‘structural anthropology’. Reading his first articles, such as ‘Structural analysis in linguistics and anthropology’ (1963 [1945]), one is struck by the clarity with which from the first he formulated the basic principles of structuralism. As the tide of the essay suggests, he found his inspiration in the linguistics of Saussure and above all in the phonological method developed by Trubetzkoy and by Jakobson (with whom he was associated in New York during the Second World War). He drew from them rules of procedure: concentrate not on conscious phenomena but on their unconscious infrastructure; do not attribute an independent value to the elements of a system but rather a positional meaning, that is to say, the value of the elements is dependent upon the relations which combine and oppose them, and these relations must be the foundation of the analysis; recognize at the same time that these relations also have a merely positional significance within a system of correlations whose structure must be extracted.

Lévi-Strauss applied this method first to the study of kinship systems, demonstrating their formal analogy with phonetic systems. His article of 1945 paid especial attention to the problem of the avunculate, sketching some of the central themes of his Elementary Structures, which he was then elaborating. These included the central role of marriage exchange, which implies a prohibition on incest (of which exchange is, in a sense, the other, positive, side of the coin). Marriage exchange is the condition of kinship: ‘Kinship is allowed to establish and perpetuate itself only through specific forms of marriage.’ He also stressed the social character of kinship, which has to do not with ‘what it retains from nature’, but rather with ‘the essential way in which it diverges from nature’ (1963). Finally, Lévi-Strauss proposed the definition of kinship systems, and of social systems more generally, as systems of symbols.

Another influence which is also apparent, and which Lévi-Strauss has always acknowledged, is the work of Marcel Mauss. His sympathy for the thought of Mauss is apparent when he compares the method of analysis in Mauss’s Essai sur le don with the approach of structural linguistics, or when, in the same essay, he charges anthropology with the task of studying ‘the unconscious mental structures which one may discern by investigating the institutions, or better still the language’, and which render intelligible the variety and apparent disorder of appearances (Lévi-Strauss 1983 [1950]).

This was the goal which had been set by the author of The Elementary Structures of Kinship:

Furthermore, these kinship structures rest upon universal mental structures: the force of the rule as a rule, the notion of reciprocity, and the symbolic character of the gift.

Lévi-Strauss returned to deal with one unanswered question fifteen years later, in The Raw and the Cooked (1970 [1964]). Are these kinship structures really primary, or do they rather represent ‘the reflections in men’s minds of certain social demands that had been objectified in institutions’? Are they the effect of what one might term an external logic? His Mythologiques, of which this was the first volume, put this functionalist hypothesis out of court, demonstrating that in mythology, which, in contrast to kinship, ‘has no obvious practical function…is not directly linked with a different kind of reality’, processes of the same order were to be found. Whether systems were actually ‘lived’, in the course of social life, or like the myths, simply conceived in an apparently spontaneous and arbitrary manner, they led back to the same sources, which one might legitimately describe as ‘mental’. This answer had in fact been given earlier, in Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (Totemism, 1962) and La Pensée sauvage (The Savage Mind, 1966), the latter book asserting, in opposition to Levy-Bruhl’s notion of a ‘prelogical mentality’, that ‘savage’ forms of thinking are to be found in us all, providing a shared basis which is domesticated by our various cultures.

The issue was whether the structuralist method applied only to kinship structures, and moreover only to those Lévi-Strauss termed ‘elementary’, which are not universal, even among those societies which traditionally are called traditional. The re-examination of totemism demonstrated how successfully this method could be applied to the symbolic systems with the aid of which people structure their representations of the world. The analysis of myths demonstrated, further, that the method not only worked for closed systems, like kinship systems, but also applied to open systems, or at least to systems whose closure could not be immediately established and whose interpretation could be developed only in the manner of a ‘nebula’ in the absence of ‘the general appearance of a stable and well-defined structure’ (The Raw and the Cooked).

In his last lectures at the College de France, between 1976 and 1982, Lévi-Strauss took up problems of kinship once more, but moved on from the systems based on unilineal descent and preferential alliance, concerning which he had developed his theory of elementary structures in 1949. He now investigated societies whose fundamental grouping brought together ‘either cognates and agnates, or else cognates and maternal kin’, and which he termed the ‘house’, borrowing a term which was used in medieval Europe. These studies are described in his book, Paroles données (1984). Here he demonstrates that structuralism is by no means disqualified from the study of ‘a type of institution which transcends the traditional categories of ethnological theory, combining descent and residence, exogamy and endogamy, filiation and alliance, patriliny and matriliny’ and can analyse the complex matrimonial strategies which simultaneously or in succession employ principles ‘which elsewhere are mutually exclusive’. What is the best alliance? Should one seek a spouse in the vicinity, or far away? These are the questions which dominate the myths. But they are not posed by savages alone. At a conference held in 1983 (whose proceedings were published in Annales, November-December 1983) Lévi-Strauss cited materials from Blanche de Castille, Saint-Simon and the peasant populations of Japan, Africa, Polynesia and Madagascar to show that ‘between societies which are called “complex” and those which are wrongly termed “primitive” or “archaic”, the distance is less great than one might think’.

It is therefore mistaken to criticize anthropologists, certainly if they are structuralists, for ignoring history and considering the societies that they study as though they were static, despite the fact that, like our own, they exist in time, even if they may not situate themselves in time in the same fashion. This criticism rests upon a misunderstanding which Lévi-Strauss, however, tried to forestall very early. It is significant that it was in 1949 —the year in which his Elementary Structures appeared—that he published an essay with a title—‘History and Ethnology’—which he was to use again for his conference paper in 1983. In his article of 1949 he emphasized that the difference between the two disciplines was a consequence of their very complementarity, ‘history organizing its data with reference to conscious characterizations, ethnology with reference to the unconscious conditions of social life’. In 1983, taking into account what has come to be called the ‘nouvelle histoire’, this complementarity is restated, but at another level. In fact ‘it was through their contact with ethnology that the historians recognized the importance of those obscure and partly submerged facets of life in society. In return, as a consequence of the renewal of its field of study and its methods, history, under the name of historical anthropology, has become a source of considerable assistance to ethnologists’. Thus anthropology and history can serve each other, at least if historians do not concern themselves only with the succession of kings and queens, with wars, with treaties and with the conscious motives of actors, but study customs, beliefs and all that which is covered by the vague term mentalité, in a given society at a given time; especially if the anthropologist recognizes that the past of so-called complex societies increases ‘the number of social experiments which are available for the better knowledge of man’.

It is true that in his inaugural lecture at the College de France in 1960 Lévi-Strauss opposed ‘cold’ societies—those which chose to ignore their historical aspect, and which anthropologists had traditionally preferred to study—and ‘hot’ societies—those which, on the contrary, valued their historicity and which were of especial interest to historians. Nevertheless, this opposition did not put in question the historicity of one or other type of society, but rather their attitude to their respective pasts. Every society presents a double aspect: structural and historical. But while one aspect might be especially favoured, this does not lead to the disappearance of the other. And in truth, the cold societies do not deny the past: they wish to repeat it. For their part, hot societies cannot totally deny their ‘coldness’: the history that they value is theirs only by virtue of a certain continuity which guarantees their identity. This explains the paradox that the very peoples who are most concerned with their history see themselves through stereotypes. And recognizing, or desiring, a history, does not prevent them from thinking of others, and especially their neighbours, in a static mode. One might instance the set fashion in which, for example, the French and the English represent each other. Thus structuralism does not put history in question, but rather an idea of history which is so common: the idea that history can concern itself only with flux, and that change is never-ending. Yet although nature does not, apparently, make jumps, history does not seem to be able to avoid them. Certainly one might interest oneself in the moments of transition. One might equally interest oneself in the intervening periods, and is history not in essence constituted by such periods? The times within which different states of society succeed each other are not less discontinuous than the space within which societies contemporary in time but equally different, often ignorant of each other, share a border. It matters little whether the distancing—which appears to ethnologists to be the condition of their research, since it is ‘the other’ as such which is the object of their research—is temporal or spatial.

Obviously it is not necessary to accept the notion of a possible fusion between anthropology, as conceived by Lévi-Strauss, and history. Historians strive to surmount discontinuity, their goal being to establish genealogical connections between one social state and another. Anthropologists, on the contrary, try to profit from discontinuity, by discovering, among distinct societies (without concerning themselves as to whether or not they figure in the same genealogical tree) homologies which attest to the reality of a shared foundation for humanity. Lévi-Strauss has always striven to recognize this ‘original logic’ beneath a diversity of expressions which have often been judged to be absurd, explicable only by positing the priority of affect over intellect, but which are ‘a direct expression of the structure of the mind…and not an inert product of the action of the environment on an amorphous consciousness’ (Totemism, 1962).

If one might talk of a Kantian aspect to structuralism (and Lévi-Strauss has never denied it), one should note that its course inverts that of Kant in two ways. First, instead of positing a transcendental subject, it tries to detach, from the variety of concrete systems of representations, collective modes of thought. Second, from among these systems it selects those which diverge most from ours. Kantianism without a transcendental subject thus, although the ambition of discovering in this way ‘a fundamental and communal matrix of constraints’, or in other words invariants, would seem nevertheless at the least to evoke its shade.

Such an enterprise appears to dispose of subjectivity, or at least to put it within parentheses, and this has indeed been one of the reproaches directed at structuralism: that it does not deal with man as a subject. There is a misapprehension here. As Lévi-Strauss, indeed, remarked in his ‘Introduction a l’oeuvre de Marcel Mauss’ (1983 [1950]):

Again, in the same text: ‘In the last analysis, the ethnological problem is a problem of communication.’ That is to say, communication between subjects, between ‘the Melanesian of whatever island’, as Mauss put it, ‘and the person who observes him, listens to him… and interprets him’. A similar point was made in La Pensée sauvage, published twelve years later, which ended with a consideration of the convergence between the laws of ‘savage thought’ and modern theories of information, that is, of the transmission and reception of messages. Thus the subject is not neglected or denied, but (while avoiding a solipsism which would obviously be the negation of anthropology) one might say that there is always a plurality of subjects, without which indeed the problem of communication would not present itself, and it is their relations which are significant. This remains a constant principle of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism: it is the relations which matter, not the terms.

That is also the principle which has guided this brief review. It has been concerned less with the analysis of texts, each considered in itself, than with their relations—from a point of view as much synchronic as diachronic—the aim being to abstract the invariant features of a body of work which is at once complete yet always open.

Jean Pouillon

College de France, Paris

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963 [1945]) ‘Structural analysis in linguistics and anthropology’, Structural Anthropology, New York. (Originally published as ‘L’analyse structurale en linguistique et en anthropologie’, Word 1.)

——(1969 [1949]) The Elementary Structures of Kinship, London. (Original edn, Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté, Paris.)

——(1983 [1950]) Introduction to Marcel Mauss, London. (Originally published as ‘Introduction à l’oeuvre de Marcel Mauss’, in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie, Paris.)

——(1984) Paroles données, Paris.

Hayes, E.N. and Hayes, T. (eds) (1970) Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Anthropologist as Hero, Cambridge, MA.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1961 [1955]), World on the Wane, New York. (Original edn, Tristes Tropiques, Paris.)

——(1963 [1949]) ‘History and ethnology’, Structural Anthropology, New York. (Originally published as ‘Histoire et ethnologie’, Révue de Métaphysique et de Morale.)

——(1963 [1958]) Structural Anthropology, New York. (Original edn, Anthropologie structurale, Paris.)

——(1970 [1964]) The Raw and the Cooked, London. (Original edn, Le Cru et le cuit ([vol. 1 of Mythologiques]), Paris.)

——(1972 [1966]) From Honey to Ashes, London. (Original edn, Du Miel aux cendres ([vol. 2 of Mythologiques]), Paris.)

——(1978 [1968]) The Origin of Table Manners, London. (Original edn, L’Origine des manières de table ([vol. 3 of Mythologiques]), Paris.)

——(1981 [1971]) The Naked Man, London. (Original edn, L’Homme nu ([vol. 4 of Mythologiques]), Paris.)

——(1977) ‘The scope of anthropology’, Structural Anthropology, II. (Inaugural lecture, Collège de France, 1960; published in Anthropologie structurale, II, Paris, 1973.)

——(1983) Le Regard éloigné, Paris.

Steiner, G. (1966) ‘A conversation with Claude Lévi-Strauss’, Encounter 26.

See also: structuralism.

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