لوی استروس

by Edmund Leach, Hamid Enayat (Translator)

In this lucid guide to the often abstruse works of Claude Levi-Strauss, Edmund Leach synthesizes the thought of one of the twentieth century's greatest anthropologists and provides a thoughtful introduction to the theory and practice of structuralism.

Genres: Anthropology, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Biography, British Literature, Sociology

205 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Sir Edmund Ronald Leach was a British social anthropologist.

Reviews

[Ahmad Abdulbaset · Rating 4 out of 5]

يتناول الكتاب تخطيطية لأهم الأفكار التي جاء بها الأنثروبولوجي الفيلسوف كلود ليفي شتراوس، ويتحدث عن المنهج البنيوي الذي أسسه شتراوس في الوصول إلى مبادىء كونية تحكم ذهنية العقل البشري عن طريق التحليل البنيوي للأساطير الإنسانية و التعالقات الجغرافية الإقتصادية الإجتماعية وغيرها التي كانت تشكل خيط نور يأمل شتراوس أن يهتدي من خلاله إلى شيء كوني حول الإنسان يتجاوز الخصخصات الثقافية التي تمتاز بها كل جماعة انسانية عن أخرى.. يتبدى من خلال ثنايا الكتاب طموح شتراوس الذي يتجاوز التجربة والذي يحلق بفضاءات التجريد و التفلسف حول الثقافة الإنسانية و فرقها عن الطبيعة متناولا بهذه الأنحاء قضايا الترميزات الثقافية التي تؤسس لإنسانية الإنسان وتمايزه عن الحيوان.. وطبعا لطالما نشهد في فصول الكتاب تشابه مع منهج التحليل النفسي وتحليل فرود للأسطورة والأحلام، فضلا عن الإرتباط الذي لابد منه بمباحث اللغة و الألسنيات العامة كونها تشكل أس المنهج البنيوي.

الكتاب كان مفيدا جدا بالنسبة لي، وأعتقد أنه سيفيد كل الذين لديهم فضول حول الإنسان وتاريخ تطوره، وأعطيته تقييما يتمثل بـ 4 نجوم كونه أفاد بتكثيفه، لكنه أجحف بالعرض والإسترسال حول قضايا ذات ارتباط وثيق أحببت لو لم يتم سلقها بهذا الشكل، الكتاب بالنهاية يحتاج بعضا من التركيز و الجو الهادىء والأهم: الشغف حول موضوعه المبحوث.

[Leon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leach' light, eloquent tone promises an accessible introduction to Claude Levi-Strauss yet, even when anthropologically trained, this is no easy read. Leach breaks down the main theories of the structuralist master without simplifying. He is a fair yet very firm critic, giving credit where due, yet mainly focussing on fallacies of Levi-Strauss' extensive body of work. For, as he states: "even the study of fallacies can be rewarding". One great mind taking on another. Tough yet stimulating little book.

[Kristofer Dubbels]

This small book was published as part of the iconic Fontana Modern Masters series five years after Leach wrote a significant essay on Lévi-Strauss for the New Left Review. The book is more expansive than the article but covers much of the same territory. In the intervening five years from article to book, Lévi-Strauss’ most well-known work in the Anglophone world, The Savage Mind, was first published in English, and the structuralist moment in France had given way to the post-structuralist moment. Lévi-Strauss was enjoying a certain vogue outside of France but, as Leach makes clear, it was not a vogue within anthropology itself - the title of Leach’s article for the New Left Review is “Claude Lévi-Strauss– Anthropologist and Philosopher.”

Leach sets the table right away: Lévi-Strauss is gaining popularity outside of anthropology as a philosopher. His prose and arguments have the confounding quality of a flimflam man. He relies on an outdated conception of linguistics that ignores the Chomskyan revolution. His field work is meager, spending a few weeks at a time amongst his subjects, as opposed to years. As Lévi-Strauss does not bother to master the languages of his subjects, his observations of their culture and social systems can’t help but be superficial. He engages in more theorizing than empirical work; the theory itself is already obscure and parochial. We might leave it at that, but Leach still has a contractually obligated word count to fulfill for the Modern Masters series.

Before going into Lévi-Strauss’ actual thought in any depth, having acknowledged its many shortcomings, the reader might be tempted to ask - why was Lévi-Strauss popular enough to warrant a monograph alongside volumes on Freud, Che Guevara and Chomsky? Furthermore - a question Leach could not yet have posed at the time - why has Lévi-Strauss, despite outliving every single major name of structuralism and post-structuralism, not retained the lasting popularity of Foucault, Derrida, or Deleuze?

The problem facing Lévi-Strauss, first and foremost, is that while he shares the gnomic quality apparently endemic to French academic writing of the era, is that he simply made too much sense. As Leach notes, Lévi-Strauss’ own propositions, while clearly having a positivist-scientistic basis of some kind, are effectively unfalsifiable. But this is the worst of both worlds: the mantic outlook of Derrida was ultimately untethered from any conception of truth by design. It was the mantic outlook - not Derrida’s thought itself - which took the world by storm. But it took the world by storm under the signifier “Derrida.” Lévi-Strauss - nominally a social scientist - could never find a mass audience by these means.

But what of Lévi-Strauss’ initial popularity? As Chomsky and Merquior have explained in reference to “French Theory,” the French social sciences were parochial to the core at the time. And yet, there was a counter-current within the Anglosphere which considered Anglo-American social science and philosophy to themselves be parochial. Thus a bizarre series of dialogues in which Lacan - a psychiatrist - finds his greatest influence is on film studies. Derrida and Deleuze - philosophers - are completely ignored in American philosophy departments but attain canonical status in literature departments, not to mention their own para-academic cults that last to this day. Perry Anderson has noted that part of the editorial outlook of the New Left Review in the 1960s was a feeling that British theoretical culture was too insulated from intellectual developments on the continent, closed off from developments in German Critical Theory and French structuralism. That these developments themselves were mostly not in dialogue either with each other or with Anglophone social science and philosophy was, at the time, apparently of less significance.

Now, one might wonder, why read Lévi-Strauss at all? The arguments are bad, or at least obscure, and perhaps both. His popularity has waned significantly since the high tide of structuralism. He is canonical while also being almost completely unread outside of anthropology, and still largely unread within it. And yet, as Derrida might say, “and yet”! If one works backwards from the importance of Derrida and Althusser to the intellectual history of the last century, one must confront that Lévi-Strauss remains a towering figure. That Lévi-Strauss is today unread both within and outside the academy doesn’t diminish his historical significance. That is, Lévi-Strauss can still be appreciated for his significance to intellectual history; whether his arguments merit much attention is peripheral to the concerns of anyone interested in intellectual history (my primary interest). But now it has come time to actually consider some of Lévi-Strauss’ own arguments and ideas.

Lévi-Strauss’s understanding of totemism begins with what he takes to be what distinguishes man from animal: the language faculty. But man shares with animals the capacity to make category distinctions. Before the language capacity in an individual is developed, category formation is animal-like rather than human-like. As Leach explains:

For human (as distinct from animal) survival every member of society must learn to distinguish his fellow men according to their mutual social status. But the simplest way to do this is to apply transformations of the animal level categories to the social classification of human beings. This is the key point in Lévi-Strauss’ Structuralist approach to the classic anthropological theme of Totemism. (39-40).

The seemingly universal tendency to worship plants and animals, then, can tell us something universal about the human mind itself. Comparing totemic systems - cultural products of the human mind - can tell us something about the human mind. This is a crucial methodological point as well - the highly abstract and algebraic nature of Lévi-Strauss’ analysis still relies on empirical material to be possible. Lévi-Strauss may be faulted for the shallowness of his own fieldwork, but it would be wrong to say that he is only interested in grand theorizing.

For Lévi-Strauss, then, human society exists at all through symbolic exchange - we exchange words, we exchange signs, and so forth. As Leach puts it, “These words and gifts communicate information because they are signs, not because they are things in themselves.” (44) And yet, for Lévi-Strauss, the primary model for exchange in all society is the incest taboo itself (Leach is quick to qualify that the incest taboo is not, despite Lévi-Strauss’ claim to the contrary, universal. Leach is also quick to clarify that he takes Lévi-Strauss’ conclusion to be apparently so absurd as to perhaps simply be the product of his - Leach’s - own misunderstanding.) Leach summarizes it thus:

The basis of human exchange, and hence the basis of symbolic thought and the beginning of culture, lies in the uniquely human phenomenon that a man is able to establish relationship [sic] with another man by means of an exchange of women. (44)

Leach is quick to point out that Lévi-Strauss’ account is unverifiable; I would go further and say more damningly that it is also unfalsifiable. It certainly won’t teach us anything new about any particular culture; can it teach us anything about the human mind? And, importantly, what would it take to show Lévi-Strauss is wrong? Could anything? If it is merely a classificatory scheme, why ought we prefer this one to any other? Lacking any mechanism for generating a “grammar” of myth (of the type Chomsky is concerned with in linguistics), it would seem to instead be primarily an exercise in an inductive classification that then makes generalizations about the human mind (failing to meet the criterion of falsifiability is also potentially a characteristic of aspects of Chomsky’s thought as well, at least as I understand it).

It is this, the theory of primitive classification, that Leach clearly takes to be the most interesting area of Lévi-Strauss’ thought. He is dismissive of Lévi-Strauss’ earliest work in kinship theory, and not entirely dismissive, but still highly critical, of Lévi-Strauss’ work on myth. The same critiques emerge over and over: Lévi-Strauss’ inability to meet criteria or verification or falsification, low standards of empirical field work, grand theory that is ultimately too grandiose.

Leach sums up Lévi-Strauss’ basic outlook thus:

Lévi-Strauss is not an idealist in the style of Bishop Berkeley; he is not arguing that Nature has no existence other than in its apprehension by human minds. Lévi-Strauss’ Nature is a genuine reality ‘out there’; it is governed by natural laws which are accessible, at least in part, to human scientific investigation but our capacity to apprehend the nature of Nature is severely restricted by the nature of the apparatus through which we do the apprehending. Lévi-Strauss’ thesis is that by noticing how we apprehend Nature, by observing the qualities of the classifications which we use and the way we manipulate the resulting categories, we shall be able to infer crucial facts about the mechanism of thinking. (25-26)

The basis of this entire procedure, however, becomes suspect once we start to gather the evidence for it. As Leach repeatedly reminds us, Lévi-Strauss never engaged in any significant fieldwork of the type that had already long been standard in Anglo-American anthropology departments. Here the problem of falsifiability rears its head - on just what basis could we reject Lévi-Strauss’ structural anthropology altogether? Or, at minimum, by what criteria could we reject any part of the theory?

Leach ultimately pulls off quite the feat, laying bouquets even as he bruises and bashes. Leach repeatedly assures us: Lévi-Strauss may be wrong, but he is wrong in an interesting way - particularly regarding primitive classification, and to a lesser degree, with regard to the structure of myth. Yes, Lévi-Strauss’ prose may be difficult and perhaps tinged with claptrap, but it is worth reading nonetheless. This is not quite the stuff of social science, but then again - maybe it is, and it is just better to be sober about the matter. J.G. Merquior suggests in his own book on structuralism that structuralism can be characterized in part by its “mantic outlook”:

[Structuralism] rejoices in pointing at the place of meaning without naming it. Like a cryptic soothsayer, the Pythian oracle of Barthes’s own example, the structuralist analysis loves to spot meaning as an obscure vibration, a dim discharge of deeply enigmatic sense. Hence the mystique of the signifier, the obsessive dream of non-denotative languages. (Merquior 191)

Leach, writing a decade and a half earlier, would seem to concur:

…Lévi-Strauss is a visionary, and the trouble with those who see visions is that they find it very difficult to recognise the plain matter of fact world which the rest of us see all around. (18)

[Gary Bruff · Rating 4 out of 5]

For structuralists like Levi-Strauss, culture is a grammar destined to be deciphered. Social behavior, on the other hand, is more akin to a text which can be read responsibly and accurately only after the cultural grammar has been analyzed into a system of contrasting signs. These signs are moreover decomposed into distinctive features, forming binary oppositions. Here, Levi-Strauss owes a debt to Saussure, who divined over a hundred years ago that language can be studied as a patterned system (langue), which is logically prior to individual acts of speech (parole). The elements of these patterned systems are defined negatively, for a term’s significance emerges only by its being opposed to another term in the system. Levi-Strauss also maintained that while symbolic expression is highly variable cross-culturally, the principles of structure underlying all human symbolic communication are themselves innate and universal. (Such was the Cartesian dream, anyway.)

For Levi-Strauss, the human brain is timeless. Primitive classification is human classification. Just as all human language operates on two axes: the linear succession of linguistic units (sounds in a word, words in a sentence…), and the substitutional possibilities for those linguistic units (dog v. hog, the dog died v the cat died), so do cultural signs find structure through locality/contiguity and contrast/distinction. In any given culture, some foods naturally go together, and some foods are easily contrasted as possible substitutes for one another. Clothes are similar. Some things go together (like pieces of a suit) and some allow substitutions (bolo tie for a necktie).

Contiguity and difference can be a lot of fun when applied to systems of mythology. In his analysis of Native South American myths, Levi-Strauss discovered (or devised) a ‘culinary triangle’ with three contrasting terms: raw, cooked, and rotten. They are related this way: “...cooked food may be thought of as fresh raw food which has been transformed by a cultural process, whereas rotten food is first raw food which has been transformed by nature.” (p.65) I played around with this reasoning long ago and found what I think is a better system:

cooked food is raw food transformed by humans for the benefit of humans (fire)
sacrificed food is raw food which is transformed by humans for the benefit of nature (air)
raw food is created by growing, where seed is transformed by nature for the benefit of humans (water)
rotten food is raw food which is transformed by nature for the benefit of nature (earth)

This matrix of features reinforces the Levi-Strauss/Leach model of cooking:rotting::culture:nature::people:gods. What does rotting have to do with the gods? Well, in classical Greece, the ergot fungus, found on decomposing barley, was the food of the gods. The ergot fungus produces lysergic acids like LSD, the mythical ambrosia in the flesh. Wasson writes about the evidence for this hallucinogenic sacrament in the Eleusinian mysteries, and Levi-Strauss appears to concur with Wasson’s findings on ancient Greece in Structural Anthropology Volume 2. But if you would prefer not to picture your favorite Greek author tripping away, you could just as easily see ‘rotting’ as nature feeding itself in the form of compost or fertilizer.

But how did structuralism become a pivotal paradigm in the discourse of anthropology? For a time, structuralism passed for hard science. Speaking grammatologically, structuralism’s scientific legitimacy rested on the formal algebraic notations employed in kinship studies. Yet here we encounter another rhetorical blind alley: Is culture a substance or a form? In the 1960’s, anthropology was all about form. Today, ethnology is all about ethnography, which in turn is all about the substance of a culture, what it is that makes a culture resourceful and unique. In the mid-twentieth century, Levi-Strauss devised some natural laws of kinship which turned out to be not very universal. One such law said that if sister’s brother is familiar with ego, then the father of ego demands respect; and if the maternal uncle demands respect, dad can be counted on for familiarity. There is an intuitive feeling that this makes sense, for the two relationships seem to be opposites, generated by exogamous kin groups who trade sisters for wives. But a rule’s tidiness does not make it true. And if the truth be told, Levi-Strauss managed to generate a formidable body of formal theories without much substantiating fieldwork. According to Leach, “Levi-Strauss is liable to become so fascinated by the logical perfection of the ‘system’ he is describing that he disregards the empirical facts.” (p.103). Or how about “...the whole system seems to have developed into a self-fulfilling prophesy which is incapable of test because, by definition, it cannot be disproved.” (p.127).

As every linguist should know, the crime of rationalism lies in the rationalist’s tendency to find what they are seeking everywhere they look. After an age of reflexivity and hermeneutics in anthropology, cold and rigorous structuralists are no longer welcome at the banquet of culture theory. Anthropology failed to locate “a very limited number of universal cultural distinctive features” which would generate a formal blueprint applicable to all the world’s cultures. This failure should at least hint that the syntactician's holy grail of universal grammar is largely chimerical. I agree with both Levi-Strauss and Leach that children are not born with an innate language but rather with an innate capacity to reason and act symbolically. I think Chomsky would disagree, since he appears to aver that there is an innate language (i-language or biolanguage), albeit only discernible formally, as the perfect system informing but never fully determining specific languages (e-languages).

What I admire most about Leach’s take on Levi-Strauss is his abstinence from any hagiography or fawning. Yes, structuralism can be very clever, and in 1970 the tenets of structuralism made its adherents both prestigious and powerful. But Leach saw plenty of room for improvement. Leach preferred a semiotic system with a greater appreciation of context, especially the social behavior in which signs are embedded. Like an old-school classicist, Levi-Strauss privileges the myth over the ritual, the grammar over the utterance. Leach proposes a saner and more engaging approach to semiotics, where human actors relate to one another by means of both cognitive structure and social function.

If I must level a stern criticism against Leach’s book on Levi-Strauss, I would have to say that Tristes Tropiques was given short shrift. I believe that some of Levi-Strauss’ best work was not characterized by grammatical formalism. In particular, I would recommend two chapters from Tristes Tropiques: “A Little Glass of Rum” (about relativism and the problem of evil) as well as “A Writing Lesson” (about power and knowledge at the dawn of civilization). Leach didn’t talk about these chapters, preferring to explicate in a more or less thorough way Totemism, Savage Mind, and Raw and the Cooked. While Leach handled these books well, he was animated by the spirit of Levi-Strauss’ method and not by the letter of his modeling. Leach’s Claude Levi-Strauss is a short book, so naturally a lot is left out. And yet Leach’s secondary works on Levi-Strauss were astonishingly influential in bringing French Structuralism to the attention of Anglophone anthropologists, not to mention English speaking literary critics, political economists, and social historians.

So Claude Levi-Strauss is an important little book. If you are new to structuralism, this can provide a decent foundation. And if you are like me and have read five or six books by Levi-Strauss over the past 30 or 40 years, Leach’s treatment develops interesting critical insights that supplement his review of some of the most interesting works the world of anthropology has yet to produce.

[J.D. Steens · Rating 1 out of 5]

This study surveys Levi-Strauss' work through the late 1960s. It is not for the novice, either because Levi-Strauss' work leans heavily toward the technical or because Leach is not much inclined to translate for those not in the field (though Leach comments often enough on the difficulty of understanding what Levi-Strauss puts forward). Levi-Strauss' search for universal structures (infused to some degree by Freud's influence) strikes one as artificial, as forced truths of logic imposed from the outside. Leach has his own concerns in this regard. An alternative account of Levi-Strauss' structures based on biological, evolutionary theory might be an interesting exercise. Language, myth and kinship may express universals relating to human hopes and fears and the organic ties of the individual to kin and tribe.

[Harry Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the only piece of writing that really allowed Levi-Strauss' writing make sense to me.

'Claude Levi-Strauss' is clearly written, and breaks down what would otherwise be a corpus of often contradictory works into a more sensible manifesto of L.S.'s actual thoughts. Perhaps this clarity is facilitated by Leach's ever-scientifically minded and critical take on L.S.'s somewhat mystifying allegations of the algebraic Structure of the human mind. Leach doesn't conceal his skepticism in this regard, the book is not intended as a straight-up summary of L.S.'s work but a critique (although, as a brief summary and study guide for the works of L.S. I would highly recommend!).

[AC · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this many, many years ago (I considered going into Anthro, instead of Classics) -- it is a good and strong critique of Levi-Strauss and structuralism (I think... if I recall aright)

[Ethan Rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

This brief and engaging introduction does a good job of bringing out the interest and, at times, the absurdity of Levi-Strauss’s approach to anthropology. Contrasted with the detailed ethnographic work that attempts to describe particular communities and that dominates anglophone anthropology, Levi-Strauss is more interested in using the ethnographic products as evidence for describing universal human nature. In short, by observing human beings in widely varied conditions, Levi-Strauss wants to find the constant limits of human thought. According to Levi-Strauss, human beings have a tendency to parse the world in characteristic ways, into characteristic groups of interrelated objects. These are the "structures" of structural anthropology. These structures, Levi-Strauss believes, can be analyzed with the methods of structural linguistics in order to produce a universal grammar of any possible human culture. It is a questionable and fascinating thought.

[Elina Thomas-Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

i’m an anthropology student and was recommended this by my lecturer to help me further understand levi-strauss. in short, it has done just that. it’s a quick and easy read so i would recommend it to anyone struggling with levi-strauss or even if you just want to further your knowledge!

[Christopher McCaffery · Rating 2 out of 5]

A Key to All Mythologies

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

AN EXCELLENT BRIEF SURVEY OF THE FRENCH SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGIST

Author Edmund Leach wrote in the first chapter of this 1970 book, “Claude Lévi-Strauss… is, by common consent, the most distinguished exponent of this particular academic trade to be found anywhere outside the English-speaking world, but scholars who call themselves social anthropologists are of two kinds. The prototype of the first was Sir James Frazer (1854-1941), author of ‘The Golden Bough.’ He was a man of monumental learning who had no first-hand acquaintance with the lives of the primitive peoples about whom he wrote… The prototype of the second was Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942)… who spent most of his academic life analyzing the results of research which he himself had personally conducted over a period of four years in a single small village in far off Melanesia… He was more interested in the differences between human cultures than in their over-all similarity… In contrast, Claude Lévi-Strauss is a social anthropologist in the tradition though not in the style of Frazer. His ultimate concern is to establish facts which are true about ‘the human mind’ rather than about the organization of any particular society or class or societies.” (Pg. 1-2)

He acknowledges, “By Malinowski standards Lévi-Strauss’ field research is of only moderate quality. The outstanding characteristic of his writing… is that it is difficult to understand; his sociological theories combine baffling complexity with overwhelming erudition. Some readers even suspect that they are being treated to a confidence trick. Even now… the critics among his professional colleagues still greatly outnumber the disciples. Yet his academic importance is unquestioned.” (Pg. 3)

He points out, “many would argue that Lévi-Strauss… is insufficiently critical of his source material. He always seems to be able to find just what he is looking for. Any evidence, however dubious, is acceptable so long as it fits with is logically calculated expectations; but wherever the data run 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. So we need to remember that Lévi-Strauss’ prime training was in philosophy and law; he consistently behaves like an advocate defending a cause rather than a scientist searching for ultimate truth.” (Pg. 13)

He notes, “Lévi-Strauss is not an idealist… [his] Nature is a genuine reality ‘out there’; it is governed by natural laws which are accessible… to human scientific investigation, but our capacity to apprehend the nature of Nature is severely restricted by the nature of the apparatus through which we do the apprehending. Lévi-Strauss’ thesis is that by noticing HOW we apprehend nature, by observing the qualities of the classifications which we use and the way we manipulate the resulting categories, we shall be able to infer crucial facts about the mechanism of thinking.” (Pg. 21) He adds, “in his view, the universals of human culture exist only at the level of structure, never at the level of manifest fact.” (Pg. 22)

He states, “Lévi-Strauss repeatedly makes an assumption that other modes of cultural expression, such as kinship systems and folk taxonomies, are organized like human language. This culture/language analogy … has not exploited the additional insights which might have been derived from Chomsky’s thinking about generative grammars. Incidentally, Chomsky has expressly declared that Lévi-Strauss’ use of linguistic analogies is unjustified…” (Pg. 23)

He says, “Lévi-Strauss has argued that when we are considering the universalist aspects of primitive mythology we shall repeatedly discover that the hidden message is concerned with the resolution of unwelcome contradictions of this sort.” (Pg. 62)

He admits of Lévi-Strauss’ ‘Mythologiques’, “to be frank, this grand-scale survey of the mythology of the Americas, which extends to two thousand pages … often degenerates into a latter-day ‘Golden Bough,’ with all the methodological defects which such a comment might imply.” (Pg. 66)

Leach argues, “My disagreement here is basic. Lévi-Strauss has said… that he considers that social anthropology is ‘a branch of semiology,’ which would imply that its central concern is with the internal logical structure of the meanings of sets of symbols. But for me the real subject matter of social anthropology always remains the actual social behavior of human beings. Whether or not kinship nomenclatures can be regarded as ‘authentic objects of scientific research’ is perhaps a matter for debate, but most emphatically the logical analysis of these term systems cannot be used to determine whether any particular body of documentary material is or is not ‘reliable.’” (Pg. 109)

This short but enlightening book will be of great interest to those seeking an introduction to Lévi-Strauss.

[paniJadwiga]

Szalenie podoba mi się kpiarski stosunek Leacha do Lévi-Straussa. Z książki wynika, że mottem L-S jest „delulu is the solulu” - badacz wolał sobie naginać rzeczywistość do teorii „[…] Lévi-Strauss wydaje się bardziej zainteresowany algebrą możliwości, niż faktami empirycznymi.”

„ To wyniesienie trosk osobistych do godności problemów filozoficznych, stwarza za wielkie ryzyko wylądowania w metafizyce na użytek panienek sklepowych.”

„Za każdym sensem kryje się nonsens.” :>

„My, Europejczycy, od wczesnego dzieciństwa uczymy się być egocentrycznymi indywidualistami, wystrzegając się skazy obcych rzeczy.”

„Człowiek staje się świadomy […] dopiero, kiedy osiągnie umiejetność używania metafor przy określaniu różnic i dokonywaniu porównań.”

„Logika jest kluczem do rozumienia totemizmu i mitu.”

„Dzicy Lévi-Straussa są równie wyrafinowani, jak my, tylko używają innego systemu znaków.”

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun read, leach is colorful with his critique and praise (admittedly the latter is on the scarce end of the spectrum). Lost a star for me because the chapter that talks about kinship relationships doesn't discuss lines of feliety that involve anything other than sex semetrical offspting when contrasting forms of unilineal descent, which composes the bulk of the chapter. Would like to know levi-strauss' thoughts here, or even if it's not discussed in the original texts, that would be worthwhile to mention.

Otherwise a great introduction to levi-strauss and semiotic structuralism in particular.

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book does it's level best to unpick, explain and understand the complex work of Levi-Strauss. I think it does this well considering the complexity of many of the concepts and theories it deals with.

When I picked it up I was unsure what to expect. I have previously seen some quotes from Leach that I found suspect, and maybe a little blase. This book however turned out to be detailed and meticulous. I am glad I have read it and feel it is a good primer to more fully engage in the work of Levi-Strauss. The books generously critical approach comes across well for Leach.

Partially due to the complexity and size of Levi-Strauss's work it can be a bit hard to read in places. I do not think this reflects on Leach so much as my knowledge of Levi-Strauss's work. However, giving it 5 stars seems a stretch when some sections fail to entirely explain the work to the semi-lay reader.

[Lysergius · Rating 3 out of 5]

A useful, critical introduction to the work of the French anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss.

Edmund Leach is skeptical of some of the conclusions Levi-Strauss draws from his researches which adds a touch of balance.

[Craig Herbertson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Never quite got a hold off this short treatise on Levi-Strauss except one rather facetiousness example how the word fox had a more vulgar progenitor. (think of connies and rabbits)

[Minäpäminä · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strukturalismia ymmärrettävässä muodossa, hurraa! Leach painottaa toistuvasti yksinkertaistavansa sitä vähää, mitä Lévi-Straussin ajatuksista kertoo, mikä tekee siitä hyväksyttävää. Leach myös kritisoi, mikä on kaksipiippuista, mutta niinhän kaikki.