Claude Levi-Strauss died 30th October aged 100: the greatest anthropologist ever?

[Keith Hart]

Well, what do you think? It's worth a discussion, I would say. Let us have your opinion. Do you have photos, quotes, links you would like to share here or elsewhere in the OAC?

[NIKOS GOUSGOUNIS]

Of course, it's very important to make a obituary for this great Ethnologist ( even if personally I disagree with the basic terms of his structuralistic methodology). We can give many links here as saved by his 100 years festivities of last November. He was not so popular in the US even if he spent many years teaching in New York just after the war. Here and now is his last chance to be more known to the younger ethnologists.

[Keith Hart]

I would answer my own question in the affirmative, although I have never used a structuralist approach in my professional life. I admire L-S's nerve, the aspiration to generate all human cultural possibilities with the smallest number of rules. He redid L.H. Morgan's Ancient Society (1877), the book that launched modern anthropology, in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) where he derived humanity's move from nature to culture from the incest taboo. He cast himself as anthropology's Messiah to Mauss's Moses when editing the latter's collected essays (1950). Tristes Tropiques (1955) is a wonderful travelogue, hugely opinionated, but you gotta like someone who says he took his method of explaining surface appearances by deep structures from geology, Marxism and psychoanalysis. The series Mythologiques, published in the 60s, set out his stall on an appropriate canvas, restricted this time to the fabrications of the human mind. I will never forget the day when I was an undergrad student and Edmund Leach came into the lecture room waving a copy of The Raw and the Cooked (1961). "This is it!", he cried, and again "This is it!". What excitement, even if we didn't have a clue then who or what he was talking about. Part of me thinks he might have been a charlatan, but the other part tells me that all great anthropolgist have to be. And like Ali, he WAS the greatest.

[Felix Girke]

... the fact that the structuralist outlived the poststructuralists has always been noteworthy ...

As far as I can see, CLS has been underrepresented in recent anthropology, and I would venture that many undergrads today never read a single word he has actually written himself, and only -if!- get to know him through textbooks and readers.
This is a time, then, to reconsider his lasting contribution, as Nikos has suggested.

The greatest? Guesstimating a little bit: Not in terms of felt influence, not in terms of citations (ha!), not in terms of appearance in curricula, not in terms of famous students. But ... a hero, with nerve and verve, without whom the discipline's history (in several countries) would have run quite differently. Somebody get Boris Wiseman on the phone, maybe he would do an obit.

[John McCreery]

Keith has already mentioned one of my favorite passages from Tristes Tropiques, where L-S describes his search for deep structures as motivated by geology, Marx and Freud. There is also, of course, the image he conjured up of a Mendelevian table of the mind, a set of cultural elements of which all cultures are selections, permutations and combinations. That was exciting.

Binary oppositions? That was more, "Of course." I had already done enough logic and math as an undergraduate to know that any formula can be approximated to any desired degree of precision by a series of binary oppositions. No big news there. Just a lasting regret that L-S's education equipped him with the Hegelian method by which, he also tells us in Tristes Tropiques, he could answer any question by posing a thesis and antithesis and then coming up with a plausible-sounding synthesis.

To me the really exciting stuff was in the "Overture" to The Raw and the Cooked. To search, contra Leach, for "the logic IN tangible qualities," instead of brushing aside empirical detail as mere butterfly collecting — that was a genuine call to action. There was also the image of knowledge as a galaxy slowly coalescing out of cosmic dust, with stars lighting up and forming structures toward the center but no clear boundary to confine them. That captured so beautifully what I'd learned from philosophy and history of science, that science is a series of approximations that approach but never capture the sum total of reality.

That injunction, to search for the logic in tangible qualities and that image, in which each new insight is a star lighting up and entering into new relations with other stars, have inspired and shaped my thinking ever since.

[John McCreery]

Maurice Bloch has an interesting and anthropologically informed obituary in the Guardian.

[Kathleen Lowrey]

Doesn't that have to be decided by a cage match?

There is something really fitting about the fact that Lévi-Strauss lived so long [I'm sure he had his private reasons for doing so, as well :)] -- his work is simultaneously so contemporary and so insanely antiquated. I always enjoy teaching the first few chapters of the _Elementary Structures of Kinship_ (the middle bit, like Vol. 2 of Capital, is very little read nowadays as far as I can tell) just because it simultaneously sets out an amazing, revolutionary idea -- that the secret to culture is the existence of a rule -- side by side with a totally po-faced presentation of the most godawful mashup of sexist notions imaginable. I think it sort of sums up the formula for the progress of anthropological theory more generally: one part brilliant insight to two parts cringe-making assumption at which later generations will wince. I'm not excepting present work, of course; heaven knows which parts of today's best work will cause future anthropologists to giggle and writhe.

[Huon Wardle]

It is a bit like asking was he the greatest granddad ever - well we have never known anything else have we. I use the chapter from ESK called the 'Archaic Illusion' in introductory classes: why do we think any other way of thinking than our own is childlike? It is powerful stuff.

Here is the NYT obituary:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
November 4, 2009

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologist, Dies at 100
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called “primitive man” and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and ’70s, has died at 100.

His son Laurent said Mr. Lévi-Strauss died of cardiac arrest Friday at his home in Paris. His death was announced Tuesday, the same day he was buried in the village of Lignerolles, in the Côte-d’Or region southeast of Paris, where he had a country home.

“He had expressed the wish to have a discreet and sober funeral, with his family, in his country house,” his son said. “He was attached to this place; he liked to take walks in the forest, and the cemetery where he is now buried is just on the edge of this forest.”

A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of “structuralism,” a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France. And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.

“People realize he is one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century,” Philippe Descola, the chairman of the anthropology department at the Collège de France, said last November in an interview with The New York Times on the centenary of Mr. Levi-Strauss’s birth. Mr. Lévi-Strauss was so revered that at least 25 countries celebrated his 100th birthday.

A descendant of a distinguished French-Jewish artistic family, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was a quintessential French intellectual, as comfortable in the public sphere as in the academy. He taught at universities in Paris, New York and São Paulo and also worked for the United Nations and the French government.

His legacy is imposing. “Mythologiques,” his four-volume work about the structure of native mythology in the Americas, attempts nothing less than an interpretation of the world of culture and custom, shaped by analysis of several hundred myths of little-known tribes and traditions. The volumes — “The Raw and the Cooked,” “From Honey to Ashes,” “The Origin of Table Manners” and “The Naked Man,” published from 1964 to 1971 — challenge the reader with their complexinterweaving of theme and detail.

In his analysis of myth and culture, Mr. Lévi-Strauss might contrast imagery of monkeys and jaguars; consider the differences in meaning of roasted and boiled food (cannibals, he suggested, tended to boil their friends and roast their enemies); and establish connections between weird mythological tales and ornate laws of marriage and kinship.

Many of his books include diagrams that look like maps of interstellar geometry, formulas that evoke mathematical techniques, and black-and-white photographs of scarified faces and exotic ritual that he made during his field work.

His interpretations of North and South American myths were pivotal in changing Western thinking about so-called primitive societies. He began challenging the conventional wisdom about them shortly after beginning his anthropological research in the 1930s — an experience that became the basis of an acclaimed 1955 book, “Tristes Tropiques,” a sort of anthropological meditation based on his travels in Brazil and elsewhere.

The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, basing their approaches to life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food, clothing and shelter.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss rescued his subjects from this limited perspective. Beginning with the Caduveo and Bororo tribes in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, where he did his first and primary fieldwork, he found among them a dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins, a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths, and an implicit sense of order and design, even among tribes who practiced ruthless warfare.

His work elevated the status of “the savage mind, ” a phrase that became the English title of one of his most forceful surveys, “La Pensée Sauvage” (1962).

“The thirst for objective knowledge,” he wrote, “is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive.’ ”

The world of primitive tribes was fast disappearing, he wrote. From 1900 to 1950, more than 90 tribes and 15 languages had disappeared in Brazil alone. This was another of his recurring themes. He worried about the growth of a “mass civilization,” of a modern “monoculture.” He sometimes expressed exasperated self-disgust with the West and its “own filth, thrown in the face of mankind.”

In this seeming elevation of the savage mind and denigration of Western modernity, he was writing within the tradition of French Romanticism, inspired by the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom Mr. Lévi-Strauss revered. It was a view that helped build Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s public reputation in the era of countercultural romanticism in the 1960s and ’70s.

But such simplified romanticism was also a distortion of his ideas. For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, the savage was not intrinsically noble or in any way “closer to nature.” Mr. Lévi-Strauss was withering, for example, when describing the Caduveo, whom he portrayed as a tribe so in rebellion against nature — and thus doomed — that it even shunned procreation, choosing to “reproduce” by abducting children from enemy tribes.

His descriptions of American Indian tribes bear little relation to the sentimental and pastoral clichés that have become commonplace. Mr. Lévi-Strauss also made sharp distinctions between the primitive and the modern, focusing on the development of writing and historical awareness. It was an awareness of history, in his view, that allowed the development of science and the evolution and expansion of the West. But he worried about the fate of the West. It was, he wrote in The New York Review of Books, “allowing itself to forget or destroy its own heritage.”

With the fading of myth’s power in the modern West, he also suggested that music had taken on myth’s function. Music, he argued, had the ability to suggest, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society.

But Mr. Lévi-Strauss rejected Rousseau’s idea that humankind’s problems derive from society’s distortions of nature. In Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s view, there is no alternative to such distortions. Each society must shape itself out of nature’s raw material, he believed, with law and reason as the essential tools.

This application of reason, he argued, created universals that could be found across all cultures and times. He became known as a structuralist because of his conviction that a structural unity underlies all of humanity’s mythmaking, and he showed how those universal motifs played out in societies, even in the ways a village was laid out.

For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, for example, every culture’s mythology was built around oppositions: hot and cold, raw and cooked, animal and human. And it is through these opposing “binary” concepts, he said, that humanity makes sense of the world.

This was quite different from what most anthropologists had been concerned with. Anthropology had traditionally sought to disclose differences among cultures rather than discovering universals. It had been preoccupied not with abstract ideas but with the particularities of rituals and customs, collecting and cataloguing them.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s “structural” approach, seeking universals about the human mind, cut against that notion of anthropology. He did not try to determine the various purposes served by a society’s practices and rituals. He was never interested in the kind of fieldwork that anthropologists of a later generation, like Clifford Geertz, took on, closely observing and analyzing a society as if from the inside. (He began “Tristes Tropiques” with the statement “I hate traveling and explorers.”)

To his mind, as he wrote in “The Raw and the Cooked,” translated from “Le Cru et le Cuit” (1964), he had taken “ethnographic research in the direction of psychology, logic, and philosophy.”

In radio talks for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1977 (published as “Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture”), Mr. Lévi-Strauss demonstrated how a structural examination of myth might proceed. He cited a report that in 17th-century Peru, when the weather became exceedingly cold, a priest would summon all those who had been born feet first, or who had a harelip, or who were twins. They were accused of being responsible for the weather and were ordered to repent, to correct the aberrations. But why these groups? Why harelips and twins?

Mr. Lévi-Strauss cited a series of North American myths that associate twins with opposing natural forces: threat and promise, danger and expectation. One myth, for example, includes a magical hare, a rabbit, whose nose is split in a fight, resulting, literally, in a harelip, suggesting an incipient twinness. With his injunctions, the Peruvian priest seemed aware of associations between cosmic disorder and the latent powers of twins.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s ideas shook his field. But his critics were plentiful. They attacked him for ignoring history and geography, using myths from one place and time to help illuminate myths from another, without demonstrating any direct connection or influence.

In an influential critical survey of his work in 1970, the Cambridge University anthropologist Edmund Leach wrote of Mr. Lévi-Strauss: “Even now, despite his immense prestige, the critics among his professional colleagues greatly outnumber the disciples.”

Mr. Leach himself doubted whether Mr. Lévi-Strauss, during his fieldwork in Brazil, could have conversed with “any of his native informants in their native language” or stayed long enough to confirm his first impressions. Some of Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s theoretical arguments, including his explanation of cannibals and their tastes, have been challenged by empirical research.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss conceded that his strength was in his interpretations of what he discovered and thought that his critics did not sufficiently credit the cumulative impact of those speculations. “Why not admit it?” he once said to an interviewer, Didier Eribon, in “Conversations with Lévi-Strauss” (1988). “I was fairly quick to discover that I was more a man for the study than for the field.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss was born on Nov. 28, 1908, in Belgium to Raymond Lévi-Strauss and the former Emma Levy. He grew up in France, near Versailles, where his grandfather was a rabbi and his father a portrait painter. His great-grandfather Isaac Strauss was a Strasbourg violinist mentioned by Berlioz in his memoirs. As a child, he loved to collect disparate objects and juxtapose them. “I had a passion for exotic curios,” he says in “Conversations.” “My small savings all went to the secondhand shops.” A large collection of Jewish antiquities from his family’s collection, he said, was displayed in the Musée de Cluny; others were looted after France fell to the Nazis in 1940.

From 1927 to 1932, Claude obtained degrees in law and philosophy at the University of Paris, then taught in a local high school, the Lycée Janson de Sailly, where his fellow teachers included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He later became a professor of sociology at the French-influenced University of São Paulo in Brazil.

Determined to become an anthropologist, he began making trips into the country’s interior, accompanied by his wife, Dina Dreyfus, whom he married in 1932. “I was envisaging a way of reconciling my professional education with my taste for adventure,” he said in “Conversations,” adding: “I felt I was reliving the adventures of the first 16th-century explorers.”

His marriage to Ms. Dreyfus ended in divorce, as did a subsequent marriage, in 1946, to Rose-Marie Ullmo, with whom he had a son, Laurent. In 1954 he married Monique Roman, and they, too, had a son, Matthieu. Besides Laurent, Mr. Lévi-Strauss is survived by his wife and Matthieu as well as Matthieu’s two sons.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss left teaching in 1937 and devoted himself to fieldwork, returning to France in 1939 for further study. But on the eve of war, he was drafted into the French Army to serve as a liaison with British troops. In “Tristes Tropiques,” he writes of his “disorderly retreat” from the Maginot Line after Hitler’s invasion of France, fleeing in cattle trucks, sleeping in “sheep folds.”

In 1941, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was invited to become a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, with help from the Rockefeller Foundation. He called it “the most fruitful period of my life,” spending time in the reading room of the New York Public Library and befriending the distinguished American anthropologist Franz Boas.

He also became part of a circle of artists and Surrealists, including Max Ernst, André Breton and Sartre’s future mistress, Dolorès Vanetti. Ms. Vanetti, who shared his “passion for objects,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss said in “Conversations,” regularly visited an antique shop on Third Avenue in Manhattan that sold artifacts from the Pacific Northwest, leaving Mr. Lévi-Strauss with the “impression that all the essentials of humanity’s artistic treasures could be found in New York."

After the war, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was so intent on pursuing his studies in New York that he was given the position of cultural attaché by the French government until 1947. On his return to France, he earned a doctorate in letters from the University of Paris in 1948 and was associate curator at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris in 1948 and 1949. His first major book, “The Elementary Structures of Kinship,” was published in 1949. (Several years later, the jury of the Prix Goncourt, France’s most famous literary award, said that it would have given the prize to “Tristes Tropiques,” his hybrid of memoir and anthropological travelogue, had it been fiction.)

After the Rockefeller Foundation gave the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris a grant to create a department of social and economic sciences, Mr. Lévi-Strauss became the director of studies at the school, remaining in the post from 1950 to 1974.

Other positions followed. From 1953 to 1960, he served as secretary general of the International Social Science Council at Unesco. In 1959, he was appointed professor at the Collège de France. He was elected to the French Academy in 1973. By 1960, Mr. Lévi-Strauss had founded L’Homme, a journal modeled on The American Anthropologist.

By the 1980s, structuralism as imagined by Mr. Lévi-Strauss had been displaced by French thinkers who became known as poststructuralists: writers like Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. They rejected the idea of timeless universals and argued that history and experience were far more important in shaping human consciousness than universal laws.

“French society, and especially Parisian, is gluttonous,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss responded. “Every five years or so, it needs to stuff something new in its mouth. And so five years ago it was structuralism, and now it is something else. I practically don’t dare use the word ‘structuralist’ anymore, since it has been so badly deformed. I am certainly not the father of structuralism.”

But Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s version of structuralism may end up surviving post-structuralism, just as he survived most of its avatars. His monumental four-volume work, “Mythologiques,” may ensure his legacy, as a creator of mythologies if not their explicator.

The final volume ends by suggesting that the logic of mythology is so powerful that myths almost have a life independent from the peoples who tell them. In his view, they speak through the medium of humanity and become, in turn, the tools with which humanity comes to terms with the world’s greatest mystery: the possibility of not being, the burden of mortality.

Nadim Audi contributed reporting from Paris.

[Alice C. Linsley]

I agree with John that one finds "exciting stuff" in the "Overture" to The Raw and the Cooked.

Lévi-Strauss’ influence is felt beyond anthropology, of course. His structuralism influenced the thought of the Arabic-speaking Jewish philosopher Jacques Derrida (http://jandyongenesis.blogspot.com/2007/09/genesis-and-jacques-derr...) for without the binary distinctions one is unable to find the ontological center.

The above statement: "Jacques Derrida... rejected the idea of timeless universals" is false. This is NOT what Derrida ultimately concluded, although it is the general assumption about his deconstruction. He makes this evident in his series of lecture given at Villa Nova University.

I believe that Claude Lévi-Strauss' work certainly places him in the top 5 of the world's greatest cultural anthropologists.

[NIKOS GOUSGOUNIS]

Here is an interview ( one of his last ) of the year 2005 as cited by today's LE MONDE ( unfortunately in french)


Quand Lévi-Strauss dénonçait l'utilisation politique de l'identité nationale

En 2005, Claude Lévi-Strauss prononçait un discours mettant en garde contre les dérives de politiques étatiques se fondant sur des principes d'identité nationale. "J'ai connu une époque où l'identité nationale était le seul principe concevable des relations entre les Etats. On sait quels désastres en résultèrent", disait-il. Pour Philippe Descola, professeur au Collège de France et qui a succédé à Claude Lévi-Strauss à la tête du laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale, "c'est la double expérience, personnelle et politique d'un côté et d'ethnologue de l'autre, qui a conduit Lévi-Strauss à récuser et vivement critiquer l'accaparement, par des Etats, de l'identité nationale".

En quoi la pensée de Lévi-Strauss éclaire-t-elle l'actuel débat sur l'identité nationale ?

Philippe Descola : Lévi-Strauss a été très marqué dans sa vie personnelle par l'échec des démocraties européennes à contenir le fascisme. Alors qu'il avait été tenté par une carrière politique – il était un des espoirs de la SFIO (Section française de l'internationale ouvrière) lorsqu'il était étudiant et avait tenté de mener une campagne électorale dans les années 1930, interrompue par un accident de voiture –, il a expliqué par la suite qu'il s'était senti disqualifié pour toute entreprise politique pour n'avoir pas su comprendre le danger des idéologies totalitaires pour les démocraties européennes. Il a également été contraint à l'exil par les lois raciales de Vichy, donc il a pu mesurer, dans sa vie et dans sa personne, ce que signifiait l'adoption par des Etats de politiques d'identité nationale.

Par ailleurs, toute son expérience d'ethnologue montre que l'identité se forge par des interactions sur les frontières, sur les marges d'une collectivité. L'identité ne se constitue en aucune façon d'un catalogue de traits muséifié, comme c'est souvent le cas lorsque des Etats s'emparent de la question de l'identité nationale. Les sociétés se construisent une identité, non pas en puisant dans un fonds comme si on ouvrait des boîtes, des malles et des vieux trésors accumulés et vénérés, mais à travers un rapport constant d'interlocution et de différenciation avec ses voisins. Et c'est cette double expérience, personnelle et politique d'un côté et d'ethnologue de l'autre, qui l'a conduit à récuser et vivement critiquer l'accaparement, par des Etats, de l'identité nationale.

Le thème de la diversité culturelle lui était cher. Or ses écrits n'ont pas toujours été très bien compris, notamment Race et Culture, dans lequel il affirme le droit de chaque culture de se préserver des valeurs de l'autre…

Claude Lévi-Strauss a été un des artisans, après la guerre, de la construction d'une idéologie à l'Unesco qui rendrait impossible les horreurs de la seconde guerre mondiale et ce qui l'avait provoquée : le racisme et le mépris de l'autre. C'est dans ce cadre qu'il a rédigé deux ouvrages. Le premier, Race et Histoire, met en forme le credo de l'Unesco : il n'y a pas de race. S'il existe des différences phénotypiques, celles-ci n'ont aucune incidence sur les compétences cognitives et culturelles des différentes populations. Ce qui compte, c'est la capacité à s'ouvrir à autrui et à échanger de façon à s'enrichir de la diversité culturelle.

Le deuxième texte, Race et Culture, visait à préciser certains aspects du premier, mettant l'accent sur le fait que pour qu'il puisse y avoir échange et contraste entre sociétés voisines, il faut qu'elles conservent une certaine forme de permanence dans les valeurs et les institutions auxquelles elles sont attachées. Lévi-Strauss voulait souligner que l'échange n'implique pas l'uniformisation. Quand il est entré à l'Académie française, on lui a reproché d'intégrer une institution vieillotte. Or il répondait que les rites et les institutions sont fragiles et que par conséquent, il faut les faire vivre. Il portait, sur les institutions de son propre pays, un regard ethnographique, le "regard éloigné", celui que l'on porte sur des sociétés distantes.

L'incompréhension du texte Race et Culture ne vient-elle pas aussi d'une confusion entre identité et culture ?

C'est en Allemagne, au XIXe siècle, que le terme de culture se développe comme concept et comme outil politique. A l'époque, l'Allemagne est travaillée de toutes parts par la question de l'unité nationale. Les intellectuels germanophones s'emparent de la notion de culture pour définir ce que serait le creuset d'une nation allemande à venir. En France ou au Royaume-Uni, en revanche, le terme était très peu usité. On parlait plutôt de civilisation.

La notion de culture a migré de l'autre côté de l'Atlantique avec la première génération d'anthropologues américains – tous d'origine allemande. C'est avec sa fortune dans l'anthropologie américaine qu'elle est revenue en Europe après la guerre. Lévi-Strauss a lui-même fait usage de cette notion de culture, à la fois dans une tradition classique philosophique et dans un sens technique, celui de la tradition allemande.
En Europe, le principe de culture – qui est une façon propre à l'Occident de penser l'identité – a rencontré un succès imminent, avec l'inconvénient de faire croire que les identités sont constituées de systèmes clos. La tradition muséologique a joué un rôle dans ce sens. Croire que l'on peut mettre une culture dans un musée en réunissant des objets à l'intérieur de quelques vitrines est extrêmement réducteur.

Y a-t-il dès lors des alternatives à ce concept de culture ?

Je m'efforce de dépasser ce dualisme entre nature et culture au sein duquel nous sommes plongés. Pour y échapper, il faut imaginer une façon pour les collectifs à la fois humains et non humains de construire ensemble des destinées, des projets. Lévi-Strauss insistait beaucoup sur le fait que c'est dans le rapport aux animaux et aux plantes que se construit l'humanité. C'est dans ces systèmes d'interaction qu'on peut concevoir une façon nouvelle d'appréhender la vie sociale. Ce chantier a été rendu possible grâce à la pensée et l'œuvre de Claude Lévi-Strauss et on peut espérer qu'il aura des conséquences politiques.

Propos recueillis par Mathilde Gérard

[Huon Wardle]

This appears to be Prof. Descola discussing CLS from a somewhat Descolian point of view. The quote from Levi-Strauss and the problem for anthropology remains very telling:
"J'ai connu une époque où l'identité nationale était le seul principe concevable des relations entre les Etats. On sait quels désastres en résultèrent"

[Sheyma Buali]

Maybe interesting for some to see this slide-show. Though it has many "official" shots of the Levi-Strauss himself, it also has some from the field : http://bit.ly/4FC1Lf

[NIKOS GOUSGOUNIS]

So, Huon maybe we have to agree with the old man CLS that national identity as a relation among states can provoke many troubles. To us remains to discover by what mechanisms our personal identity and its subjective side can be transformed to a national or not to a national one ( cosmopolitan to say).

Keith, your first link from Guardian seems not to open.