[lit-ideas] Not The Trouser Guy


In a message dated 11/4/2009 2:22:17 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,  
ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:

You clearly haven't tried "Tristes Tropiques," the post punk  band.

 
----
 
When they tour in England they go by "A World on the Wane".
 
Excerpts from the obit in the D. Telegraph:
 
"Levi-Strauss's] originality was to interpret myth and custom not so much 
as  the distinct creation of a particular culture, but as different 
expressions of  images universally innate to homo sapiens. In elucidating these 
common  mental structures he relied less on meticulous observation in the field 
than  upon a series of imaginative insights which were often greeted with 
scepticism  in the pragmatic Anglo-Saxon world." 
Typical DT ideo-stereotype if ever there was one.  
"The true meaning of myth, Lévi-Strauss held, lay below the narrative  
surface, and was to be detected by considering the changes apparent in 
different 
 versions of the same legend. In his own metaphor, he studied the 
relationship  between various narratives rather as a musician would seek to 
weave 
together  different instrumental parts to form a symphony." 
A mixed metaphor, if ever there was one. More like 'variations on a theme', 
 if you ask me. Thus, you'll agree that the Little Red Riding Hood story is 
 pretty much the same in the original grim version of the brothers as the  
more romantic Perreault we are all familiar with via Walt Disney.  
"Though comprehensiveness was the very essence of Lévi-Strauss’s approach,  
his researches were concentrated chiefly on various tribes of Amerindians. 
He  maintained that the structure of the human mind was more easily elicited 
in  “cold” primitive societies, where the existing way of life was not 
questioned,  than in the “hot” societies of the developed world, where the 
pursuit of  progress undermined stability." 
"Lévi-Strauss’s principal anthropological monument is Les  Mythologiques, a 
four-volume work which demands from the reader both  penetration and faith. 
The first volume, Le Cru et le Cuit (1964),  presents the origins of 
cookery as a paradigm of the transition from nature to  culture that runs 
through 
a legion of myths." 
"The second volume, Du Miel aux Cendres (1966), considers honey and  
tobacco as ritual embodiments of fundamental antitheses pre-existing in the  
brain." 
Well, I wouldn't say about honey but tobacco was a main problem with is  
cigarrettes. But, as Claude says, it's a pre-existing antithesis in the brain  
(of the smoker).  
"The third volume, L’Origine des manières de table (1968), and the  fourth, 
L’Homme Nu (1971), concentrate on the North American Indians. The  same 
myths, Lévi-Strauss insisted, manifested themselves in both North and South  
America, but “from one region to the other an interior transformation evolved  
deep within them”. Whereas for the South American Indians the advent of  
civilisation is symbolised by the passage from the raw to the cooked, for the  
North Americans it is represented by the invention of ornmanents and 
clothing,  and eventually by the introduction of trade." 
"The text of Les Mythologiques was littered, though hardly  illuminated, by 
all manner of visual aids — diagrams, arrows, charts of the  night sky, 
fragments of algebra, and an array of small boxes shaded with  hatchings and 
cross-hatchings." 
"While Lévi-Strauss’s capacity for creating complex intellectual jigsaws 
was  never in question, it was not always obvious what relation his hypotheses 
bore  to reality. The English anthropologist Sir Edmund Leach drew 
attention to the  Frenchman’s propensity for discovering exactly what he was 
searching for. “Any  evidence, however dubious,” Leach complained, “is 
acceptable 
so long as it fits  with logically calculated expectations; but wherever the 
data runs counter to  the theory, Lévi-Strauss will either bypass the 
evidence or marshal the full  resources of his powerful invective to have the 
heresy thrown out of court.”  
Well, it takes a DT reader that this is damn by faint praise! The 
ad-hocness  galore. Popper would be turning on his grave. 
"Lévi-Strauss himself accepted the limits of his method." 
And L. Helm was wondering about one. 
"“The idea behind structuralism”, he explained, “is that there are things 
we  may not know but we can learn how they are related to each other. This 
has been  used by science since it existed and can be extended to a few other 
studies —  linguistics and mythology — but certainly not to everything. “
The great  speculative structures are made to be broken. There is not one of 
them that can  hope to last more than a few decades, or at most a century or 
two.”" 
"The son of a painter, Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in Brussels on November 
 28 1908. When the First World War broke out he was sent to Paris to live 
with  his grandfather, a rabbi, in whose household he soon lost his faith. He 
was  educated at the Lycée Janson de Sailly in Paris and at the Sorbonne, 
where he  read Law and Philosophy." 
A lot of Bergson we assume, but little more. 
"As a teenager he became interested in Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxism. 
 After completing his studies, Lévi-Strauss taught in secondary schools. 
Among  his colleagues was Simone de Beauvoir, who remembered him warning his 
students  “in a deadpan voice, and with a deadpan expression, against the 
folly of the  passions”." 
It has always struck me that those diatribes are mostly uttered by the  
most passionate of men! With French secondary students it _IS_ different --  
hence the deadpan voice, I assume.  
"In 1934 Lévi-Strauss became Professor of Sociology at Sao Paulo 
University,  which had recently been founded on a French initiative." 
Read: zillions of francs. The Brazilians objected to the teaching in 
French,  though. And Claude had to learn a Portuguese of sorts. ("What money 
can't 
 buy"). 
"During his four years with the faculty he travelled extensively in the  
interior of Brazil, visiting the communities of Caduveo and Bororo Indians." 
Oddly he missed the ornaments, if not the tobacco. True, they go around  
mainly naked, it would seem. But then, the weather.  
"In 1938 he resigned his Chair and embarked on a year-long expedition, 
funded  by the French government, up the Rio Machado to the wilds of Matto 
Grosso, where  he studied the Nambikwara and Kawahib tribes and encountered 
another, previously  quite unknown to anthropology, whose members referred to 
themselves as  Mundé." 
And here the comment is on that hateful DT (Daily Telegraph) use of the  
particle 'quite'. He is quite dead. It was quite unknown. NOT translatable! 
And  in need of 'disimplicature'. Oddly, if you disimplicate the explicature 
it  becomes, 'he encountered an unknown tribe'. The free paraphrasis of the  
statement in its healthy logical form shows it is a SILLY thing to say! For 
we  may assume that if there _were_ 'anthropologists' (serious students of  
their own kind) among the Munde, they knew about them (the Munde). 
"The Second World War saw Lévi-Strauss as a French army officer, 
responsible  for liaison with the British." 
"After the fall of France he escaped to the United States," 
Not the verb that you'll read in "Le Figaro" obit! Makes  him sound like a 
veritable rodent. 
"where he took up a visiting professorship at the New School for Social  
Research in New York City. In this post he was greatly influenced by Roman  
Jakobson, who had developed a mathematical view of language which stressed not 
 so much the meaning of individual words as the overall configuration of 
the  grammatical relationships between them." 
"Back in France after the war, Lévi-Strauss published La Vie familiale et  
sociale des Indiens Nambikwara (1948), and Les Structures Elémentaires de  
la parenté (1949). In opposition to “Functionalist” anthropologists, who  
argue that kinship systems are a response to differing patterns of social  
organisation, Lévi-Strauss contended, in the second book, that kinship systems  
reflected underlying principles of the human mind." 
"A basic principle, he sought to demonstrate, was an unconscious – and  
therefore fundamental – aversion to incest (the incest taboo) which was  
interlinked with systems of exchange and gift-giving throughout the ages." 
Wasn't this FREUD's discovery? But then, beware of Freud. Look  at what 
Freud says about homosexuals. The Oedipus Complex not  resolved, etc. And then 
you see a straight man praising (and perhaps babylike  sucking) the mammary 
glands of a female and makes you wonder if it's not the  straight man who 
has, if anyone does, an unresolved Oedipus complex. It's all  very --- 
complex, and 'taboo's the word. (Cfr. Geary' obit on the 'uncle'  playing the 
sexual role of the 'father' in Amerindian tribes of the Matto  Grosso). 
"These in turn were symbolic gestures that underwrote the whole network of  
relationships that were the basis of human society. A work of enormous 
erudition  if, at times, almost ludicrous complexity, it established 
Lévi-Strauss as one of  the foremost anthropologists of his generation." 
'Ludicrous complexity' is, with 'quite unknown', one of those Daily  
Telegraphisms you have to bear and grin to. I find it ludicrious that  they 
would 
use that adjective, since the implicature would seem that  the complexity 
was NOT ludicrous to CLS, but then it was!  
"In 1950 he became director of the laboratory of Social Anthropology at the 
 Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes at Paris University, and in the early 
1950s did  field work in East Pakistan and the South Pacific. His short study, 
Race et  Histoire, was published by Unesco in 1952. Then, three years later, 
came his  masterpiece, Tristes Tropiques — translated into English by John 
Russell  as A World on the Wane (1961)."

Because he thought that "Sad  Tropics" missed the clever alliteration. 
"This was an intellectual autobiography concentrated on his pre-war travels 
 in Brazil. Lévi-Strauss described how the book sprang out of depression: “
So I  said, 'I had enough, I shall never come to anything, so I can write 
very freely  about whatever passes through my head.’" 
Geary crossed this out, "crossed my mind", he wrote. "It goes over your 
head,  but it crosses your mind, never your head", he explains. "French people 
should  not aim at English puns" 
""I wrote without scientific scruples, without worrying whether the result  
was scientifically sound. The result was a sort of wild fantasy.” In the 
book,  Lévi-Strauss formulated his distinction between “Nature” and “Culture”
 based on  language and man’s unique ability to see an object not merely as 
itself, but  also as a symbol. It was in this ability to symbolise, a 
characteristic shared  by all humans, no matter how primitive, that he sought 
the 
unconscious  similarities of the human mind." 
This 'homo symbolicus' of CLS strikes me as utterly narrow-minded. Hey,  my 
cat uses many symbols!  
"These “universal attributes” were the inspiration for Lévi-Strauss’s  
intellectual quest. But in detecting them, he was also accused of reductionism. 
 Even his severest critics would not deny his importance, however, his 
immense  influence beyond his chosen field, or the sense of intellectual 
excitement he  was able to generate. This lay in his highly original 
interpretation 
of data, in  the poetic scope of his associations and in his methodology, 
which was always  capable of shedding new light on established facts even if 
his conclusions were  sometimes subject to doubt. By the time that Tristes 
Tropiques was  published the tribes about which he wrote had largely 
succumbed to famine and  disease, a fate which the author seemed to regard as a 
foreshadowing of that in  store for Western culture." 
"“I knew that, slowly and steadily, humanity was breeding such situations 
as  a sick body breeds pus,” he wrote. “It was as if our race was no longer 
able to  cope with its own numbers... War and defeat had accelerated a 
universal process,  and facilitated the establishment of an infection that 
would 
never again  disappear from the face of the world.” In 1958 Lévi-Strauss 
issued a collection  of his essays under the title Anthropologie Structurale 
(1958, English  translation 1964). Two years later he took over the Chair of 
Social Anthropology  at the Collège de France; his inaugural lecture was 
published in Britain as  The Scope of Anthropology (1967). La Pensée Sauvage — 
the English  translation of which, The Savage Mind, appeared in 1966 — was 
one of his  most important books. It presented the complex totemism prevailing 
among  Australian aborigines as the expression of the world view that 
orders and  explains their everyday lives. Lévi-Strauss’s later works included  
Anthropologie Structurale Deux (1967), La Voie des Masques (1975,  English 
translation 1983), Le Regard Eloigné (1983), Paroles Données (1984), La 
Potière Jalouse (1985) and Histoire de Lynx (1991).  The sage’s views were 
never 
predictable. Asked to deliver the 1971 Unesco  lecture on the causes of 
racism, he took the opportunity, even while condemning  all forms of 
discrimination, to attack anti-racist propaganda for undermining  “ancient 
individualism”
 and for driving humanity towards the insipid goal of a  world 
civilisation. He was appointed a member of the Légion d’honneur in 1964  and 
elected to 
the Academie Française in 1973" 
"taking Henri de Montherland’s chair. In 1978 President Giscard d’Estaing  
solicited Lévi-Strauss’s aid to ensure that France remained “a lighthouse 
for  the world in the evolution of ideas and societies, as it has done 
throughout its  history”. Lévi-Strauss did so by continuing to give lectures, 
write articles and  indulge his love of music." 
"His attempt to create a scientific basis for the study of culture was  
recognised by the Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique, which awarded  
him its Gold Medal, the highest French scientific distinction. Though bound 
to  Paris, Lévi-Strauss preferred to live in Burgundy. “I like trees, I like 
plants,  I like animals,” he explained. “But I am not very fond of humans.”
 Claude  Lévi-Strauss married first, in 1932, Dina Dreyfus; secondly, in 
1946, Rose Marie  Ullmo — they had a son; and, thirdly, in 1954, Monique 
Roman, with whom he had  another son." 
May he R. I. P. 
J. L. Speranza 
The Swimming Pool Library, Villa Speranza,  Bordighera

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