The structural antropology and social science theories are to the
ontological Theory of Process as the nano hole to its product
whether stilll nano or returning the the stractural state.
One, of course, verfies the other.

The "filler" does not exists without a hole, and the structure has not
happened without a process (excepted is making teh nano hole with
the hammer and than waiting that the hole makes the thunder; excepted
structure still:))

Here are some new old thoughs from the stand point of structuralist.


Then and Now
We look back to a review of three books by Claude Lévi-Strauss

Recommend? (1)
Claude Lévi-Strauss died on 30 October, at the age of 100. This
reveiw, by David Hunt, was first published in the TLS of April 29,
1965.


There can be no doubt of M. Lévi-Strauss’s influence on the life of
ideas in France. It is, perhaps, second only to that of Sartre. But
the exact nature of that influence is not easy to define. Much of Lévi-
Strauss’s work is highly technical. In their manner of expression and
in the range of reference they assume, his more recent writings are
exceedingly intricate, almost hermetic. How many among those who
invoke Lévi-Strauss’s name and what they take to be the method of his
thought have, in fact, read La Pensée sauvage, the whole of the
Anthropologie structurale, let alone Le Cru et le cuit? The difficulty
itself may be part of the spell. As did Bergson, Lévi-Strauss has been
able to project a certain tone, a presence nearly dramatic, in a
culture which has traditionally seen ideas as highly individualized
and which, unlike England, gives to philosophic discussion a public,
emotionally sharpened context.

A page of Lévi-Strauss is unmistakable (the two opening sentences of
Tristes tropiques have passed into the mythology of the French
language). The prose of Lévi-Strauss is a very special instrument, and
one which many are trying to imitate. It has an austere, dry
detachment, at times reminiscent of La Bruyčre and Gide. It uses a
careful alternance of long sentences, usually organized in ascending
rhythm, and of abrupt Latinate phrases. While seeming to observe the
conventions of neutral, learned presentation, it allows for brusque
personal interventions and asides. Momentarily, Lévi-Strauss appears
to be taking the reader into his confidence, derričre les coulisses,
making him accomplice to some deep, subtle merriment at the expense of
the subject or of other men’s pretensions in it. Then he withdraws
behind a barrier of technical analysis and erudition so exacting that
it excludes all but the initiate.

But through his aloof rhetoric, with its tricks of irony and
occasional bursts of lyric elan, Lévi-Strauss has achieved a
fascinating, sharp-etched individuality. Rejecting the Sartrian view
of ordered, dialectical history as yet another myth, as merely another
conventional or arbitrary grouping of reality, Lévi-Strauss adds:
“Cette perspective n’a rien d’alarmant pour une pensée que n’angoisse
nulle transcendance, fűt-ce sous forme larvée.” The sentence is
characteristic in several ways: by its mannered Pascalian concision
and syntax; by the implicit identification which Lévi-Strauss makes
between his own person and the “abstract concretion” of une pensée;
but principally by its note of stoic condescension. It is that note,
the cool inward and downward look, the arrogance of disenchanted
insight, which fascinate Lévi-Strauss’s disciples and opponents. As
the young once sought to mime the nervous passion of Malraux, so they
now seek to imitate the hauteur and gnomic voice of the Professor of
Social Anthropology at the Collčge de France.

Related Links
The Pléiade edition of Lévi-Strauss's works to celebrate his 100th
anniversary, reviewed in the TLS of October 31st, 2008.
In making of anthropology the foundation of a generalized critique of
values, Lévi-Strauss follows in a distinctive French tradition. It
leads from Montaigne's subversive meditation on cannibals to
Montesquieu's Lettres persanes and to his use of a comparative study
of cultures and mores as a critique of ethical, political absolutism.
It includes the large use made by Diderot, Rousseau and the
philosophes of travel literature and ethnography, and extends to the
moral polemic so carefully plotted in Gide's narratives of his African
journeys. The moraliste uses "primitive" cultures, personally
experienced or gathered at second hand, as a tuning-fork against which
to test the discord of his own milieu. Lévi-Strauss is a moraliste,
conscious in style and outlook of his affinities with Montesquieu and
Diderot's Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville. The concept does not
translate readily into "moralist". It carries a literary, almost
journalistic stress which has no immediate analogy with, say, the
Cambridge Platonists. The moraliste can use fiction, journalism,
drama, as did Camus. Or he may, like Lévi-Strauss, work outward from
what is, in its origin and technical form, a highly specialized field
of interest.

Only the comparative anthropologist and ethnographer are equipped to
pass judgment on the solutions which Levi-Strauss puts forward to
complex problems of kinship and totemism, of cultural diffusion and
"primitive" psychology. The technical literature which has grown up
around the work of Lévi-Strauss is already large. But the bearing of
that work on the notion of culture, on our understanding of language
and mental process, on our interpretation of history is so direct and
novel that an awareness of Lévi-Strauss's thought is a part of current
literacy. "Like Freud", remarks Raphael Pividal, "Claude Lévi-Strauss,
while solving special questions, has opened a new road to the science
of man."

That road begins with the classic achievement in sociology and social
anthropology of Durkheim, Hertz and Mauss. In the latter's "Essay on
Certain Primitive Forms of Classification" (1901-2) we see outlined
important aspects of the study of taxonomy and "concrete logic " in La
Pensée sauvage. As he makes clear in his own "Introduction a I'oeuvre
de Marcel Mauss", it is to Mauss's way of thinking about kinship and
language, and above all to Mauss's Essai sur le don of 1924, that Lévi-
Strauss owes certain assumptions and methodologies which inform his
entire work. It is in this essay that Mauss puts forward the
proposition that kinship relations, relations of economic and
ceremonial exchange, and linguistic relations are fundamentally of the
same order.

Beginning with his paper on structural analysis in linguistics and in
anthropology (Word, 1945) and his first full-scale treatise, Les
Struclwes elementaires de la parentée in 1949, Lévi-Strauss has made
this conjecture of essential identity the core of his method and world-
view. Examining a specific problem of kinship nomenclature and marital
taboos, Lévi-Strauss argues that the evidence can only be sorted out
if the women exchanged in marriage are regarded as a message, allowing
two social groups to communicate with each other and to establish a
vital economy of rational experience. Beginning with the particular
instance, Lévi-Strauss has elaborated the view that all cultural
phenomena are a language. Hence the structure of human thought and the
complex totality of social relations can be studied best by adopting
the methodology and discoveries of modern linguistics. What political
economy is to the Marxist concept of history (the circumstantial,
technical basis underlying an essentially metaphysical and
teleological argument), the Work of Saussure, Jakobson, Halle and the
modern school of structural linguistics is to Lévi-Strauss.
As summarized in the chapters on "Language and Kinship" in the
Anthropologic structural, Lévi-Strauss's image of culture can be
expressed, quite literally, as a syntax. Through our understanding of
this syntax particular rites, processes of biological and economic
exchange, myths and classifications as they are set forth in native
speech may be analysed into "phonemes" of human behaviour. This
analysis will disclose the true interrelations of otherwise disparate
or even contradictory elements, for like structural linguistics Lévi-
Strauss's anthropology regards as axiomatic the belief that each
element of social and psychological life has meaning only in relation
to the underlying system. If we lack knowledge of that system, the
particular signs, however graphic, will remain mute.

Speaking to the Conference of Anthropologists and Linguists held at
the University of Indiana in 1952, Lévi-Strauss evoked the ideal of a
future "science of man and of the human spirit" in which both
disciplines would merge. Since then he has gone farther, and it is
hardly an exaggeration to say that he regards all culture as a code of
significant communication and all social processes as a grammar.
According to Lévi-Strauss, only this approach can deal adequately with
the question asked in each of his major works: how do we distinguish
between nature and culture, how does man conceive of his identity in
respect of the natural world and of the social group?

The actual way in which Lévi-Strauss applies the tools of structural
linguistics, or, more precisely, the analogue of linguistics, to deal
with problems of kinship, totemism and ecology among the Indian
peoples of North America and the Amazon basin has been much debated.
The attack of George C. Homans and David M. Schneider on Les
Structures élémentaires de la parenté (Marriage, Authority, and Final
Causes, 1955) has been met in Rodney Needham's Structure and Sentiment
(1962). A more subtle critique is argued in E. R. Leach's fascinating
paper on Lévi-Strauss in the Annales for November-December, 1964. Dr.
Leach shows how strongly Lévi-Strauss’s “linguistics of culture"
reflect the techniques and logical presuppositions of contemporary
information theory and linear programming. Myths and behaviour
patterns in primitive society store and transmit vital information as
does the electronic circuit and magnetic tape in the computer. Lévi-
Strauss regards mental and social processes as fundamentally binary,
as coded in sets of positive and negative impulses, finally balancing
out in an equation of belief or folk custom which is at once
harmonious and economic. Hence the binary elements which seem to
govern so much of his argument: animality/humanity, nature/culture,
wet/dry, noise/ silence, raw/cooked. But, as Dr. Leach points out, the
binary is not the only or necessary system of relations and
information coding. Analogue computers perform tasks which digital
computers are not suited for. In particular, says Dr. Leach, the
matrices which Lévi-Strauss sets up to tabulate linguistic-ethnic
relations, or totemic and mythical conventions, do not allow for
gradations of value, for partial choices between alternatives which
are not unambiguously positive or negative.

This is a controversy from which the layman would do well to abstain.
What is striking are the rich suggestions which Lévi-Strauss's "meta-
linguistics" bring to a general theory of culture, to poetics and
psychology. In the Anthropologie structural, for example, we find the
notion that our civilization treats language with immoderation,
wasting words in a persistent recourse to speech. Primitive cultures
tend to be parsimonious: "verbal manifestations are often limited to
prescribed circumstances, outside which words are used only
sparingly". And it is characteristic of Lévi-Strauss's ironic moralism
that the discussion of the grammar of marriage in primitive cultures—
words and women being set in analogy as media of communication—should
end with the aphorism: "A l'inverse des femmes, les mots ne parlent
pas."

Increasingly, the thought of Lévi-Strauss can be understood as part of
that revaluation of the nature of language and symbolism whose
antecedents may be traced to Vico and Leibniz, but whose most radical
effects have been modern. No less than Wittgenstein's Tractatus, La
Pensie sauvage and Le Cru et le cuit infer that man's place in reality
is a matter of syntax, of the ordering of propositions. No less than
Jung, Lévi-Strauss's studies of magic and myth, of totemism and
logique concrete, affirm that symbolic representations, legends, image-
patterns, are means of storing and conceptualizing knowledge, that
mental processes are collective because they reproduce fundamental
structural identities.

Where "domestic" and scientific thought strives toward the economy of
a single code, "savage" thought is a semantic system perpetually
regrouping itself and rearranging the data of the empirical world
without reducing the number of discrete elements. Scientific
methodology is obviously different from the "concrete logic" of
primitive peoples. But not necessarily better or more advanced. Lévi-
Strauss insists that "the science of the concrete" is a second major
way of apprehending nature and natural relations. He argues that the
great achievements of neolithic man—pottery, the weaving of cloth,
agriculture, the domestication of animals—cannot have been the result
of hazard or randomly perceived example. These brilliant "conquests"
which "remain the substratum of our civilization" are the product of a
science different from ours, but continuing a parallel life, of its
own. If magic had not proved to be a supple and coherent mode of
perception, why should science in the experimental-deterministic sense
have begun so late in man's history ?

Lévi-Strauss does not see history as a case of linear progression
(this is the crux of his debate with Hegelianism and Sartre's
dialectical historicism). By making of history a transcendental value,
a concealed absolute, Sartre excludes a major part of past and
contemporary humanity from the pale of significant experience. Our
sense of history, with its dates and implicit forward motion, is a
very special, arbitrary reading of reality. It is not natural but
culturally acquired. Chronology is an ever-changing code. The grid of
dates we use for prehistory is based on an entirely different scheme
of values and admissible data than the grid we use to conceptualize
the period from, say, 1815 to the present. It is of the essence of
primitive thought to be intemporelle (timeless, untimely), to conceive
of experience in simultaneous and partial imagines mundi. But as Lévi-
Strauss observes, such a mental praxis may not be unrelated to the
world-picture of quantum mechanics and relativity.

Since Tristes tropiques (1955), if not before, Lévi-Strauss has done
little to mask the general philosophic and sociological implications
of his technical pursuits. He knows that he is arguing a general
theory of history and society, that his specific analyses of tribal
customs or linguistic habits carry an exponential factor. Of late, as
if by some instinct of inevitable rivalry, he has challenged Sartre
and the relevance of the existentialist dialectic. This may, in part,
reflect the circumstances of contemporary French intellectual life.
More pervasive has been Lévi-Strauss's concern to delimit his own
thought from that of the two principal architects of rational
mythology, Marx and Freud. His work is in frequent self-conscious
dialogue with theirs.

One of the crucial statements occurs in the opening, autobiographical
section of Tristes tropiques (in their ironic, detached intimacy,
these chapters recall, The Education of Henry Adams, and it is Adams's
fastidious agnosticism which Lévi-Strauss's own posture most
resembles). Unfortunately, the entire argument is of extreme concision
and difficulty. Lévi-Strauss records his initiation to Marxism at
about the age of seventeen:

"a whole world was revealed to me. Since which time, my passionate
interest has never lapsed; and I rarely concentrate on unravelling a
problem of sociology or ethnology without having, beforehand, braced
my thought by reading some pages of the 18th Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte or of the Critique of Political Economy."

Marx has taught us

"to build a model, to study its properties and the different ways in
which it reacts in the laboratory, in order to apply these
observations to the interpretation of empirical data which may be far
removed from what one had foreseen." (This is, one should note, a
rather curious gloss on Marx, making of his concrete historicism an
almost abstract phenomenology.)

In the Anthropologic structurale, Lévi-Strauss cites Marx's well-known
remark that the value of gold as repository and medium of wealth is
not only a material phenomenon, but that it also has symbolic sources
as "solidified light brought up from the nether world", and that Indo-
Germanic etymology reveals the links between precious metals and the
symbolism of colours. "Thus"', says Lévi-Strauss, "it is Marx himself
who would have us perceive and define the symbolic systems which
simultaneously underlie language and man's relations to the world."
But he goes on to suggest, and this is the crux, that Marxism itself
is only a partial case of a more general theory of economic and
linguistic information and exchange-relations. This theory will be the
framework of a truly rational and comprehensive sociology of man. Not
surprisingly, the Marxists have challenged the "totalitarian" claims
of Lévi-Strauss's "science of man" and have attacked its
irrationalist, "anti-historical" aspects (the general issues are
carefully set out in Lucien Sebag's Marxisme et Structuralisme).

In Tristes tropiques Lévi-Strauss relates Marxism to the two other
main impulses in his own intellectual development and conception of
ethnography; geology and psychoanalysis. All three pose the same
primary question: "that of the relation between the experienced and
the rational (le sensible et le rationnel), and the aim pursued is
identical: a kind of super-rationalism seeking to integrate the former
with the latter without sacrificing any of its properties". Which may
be a very abstract way of saying that Marxism, geology and
psychoanalysis are aetiologies, attempts to trace the conditions, of
society, of physical environment, and of human consciousness, to their
hidden source. Social relations, terrain, and collective imaginings or
linguistic forms arc, in turn, the primary coordinates of Lévi-
Strauss's étude de I'homme.

As Lévi-Strauss advances more deeply into his own theory of symbolism
and mental life, the Freudian analogues grow more obtrusive and,
probably, irritating. Hence the sporadic but acute critique of
psychoanalysis throughout the Anthropologic structurale, the argument
that Freudian therapy, particularly in its American setting, does not
lead to a treatment of neurotic disturbance but to "a reorganization
of the universe of the patient in terms of psychoanalytic
interpretations". Hence also, one may suppose, Lévi-Strauss's
determination to appropriate the Oedipus motif to a much larger
context than that put forward by Freud. In Lévi-Strauss's ethnic-
linguistic decoding of the legend, and of its many analogues among the
North American Indians, the primary meaning points to the immense
intellectual and psychological problem faced by a society which
professes to believe in the autochthonous creation of man when it has
to deal with the recognition of the bisexual nature of human
generation. The Oedipus motif does not embody individual neurosis, but
a collective attempt to regroup reality in response to fresh and
perplexing insights. Again, as in the case of Marxism, the Freudian
theory of consciousness emerges as a valuable, but essentially
specialized and preliminary chapter in a larger anthropology.

How does Le Cru et le cuit fit into this powerful construct? It is a
detailed, highly technical analysis of certain motifs in the mythology
of the Indians of the Amazon, more exactly, in the creation myths of
the Bororo and Ge peoples. The present volume is the first of a
projected series and deals with one sub-topic of the larger binary
unit: nature/culture. This subtopic is the discrimination between raw
and cooked foods as reflected in Indian myths and practices. Starting
with one Bororo "key-myth", Lévi-Strauss analyses significant elements
in 187 Amazonian legends and folk-tales; by means of complex
geographical, linguistic and topical matrices, he shows that these
myths are ultimately interrelated or congruent. The argument leads to
the proposition that the discovery of cooking has profoundly altered
man's conception of the relationship between heaven and earth.

Before the mastering of fire, man placed meat on a stone to be warmed
by the rays of the sun. This habit brought heaven and earth, man and
the sun into intimate juxtaposition. The discovery of cooking
literally set back the sphere of the gods and of the sun from the
habitat of man. It also separated man from the great world of animals
who eat their food raw. It is thus an immensely important step in the
metaphysical, ecological, psychic severance of the genus Homo sapiens
from his cosmic and organic surroundings. That severance (there are
definite echoes from Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle and
Civilization and its Discontents) leads to the differentiation and
strenuous confrontation between the natural and cultural stages of
human development.

But the design of the book reaches beyond even this large theme. To
what Lévi-Strauss defines as the "primary code" of human language and
the “secondary code” of myths, Le Cru et le cuit aims to add "a
tertiary code, designed to ensure that myths can be reciprocally
translated. This is why it would not be erroneous to regard this book
itself as a myth: in some manner, the myth of mythology."

The formula is lapidary and obscure, but the idea itself is not new.
It crops up in Giordano Bruno, in Bacon's De Sapientia Veterum in
which myths or "fables" are regarded as a transparent veil occupying
"the middle region that separates what has perished from what
survives", and in Vico. Lévi-Strauss is seeking a science of
mythology, a grammar of symbolic constructs and associations allowing
the anthropologist to relate different myths as the structural
linguist relates phonemes and language systems. Once the code of myths
is deciphered and is seen to have its own logic and translatability,
its own grid of values and interchangeable significants, the
anthropologist will have a tool of great power with which to attack
problems of human ecology, of ethnic and linguistic groupings, of
cultural diffusion. Above all, he may gain insight into mental
processes and strata of consciousness which preserve indices (the
fossils or radioactive elements of the palaeontologist and geologist)
of the supreme event in man's history—the transition from a primarily
instinctual, perhaps prelinguistic condition to the life of
consciousness and individualized self-awareness. This, and the
flowering of human genius and "concrete logic" during the neolithic
era are, for Lévi-Strauss, realities of history far more important
than the brief adjunct of turmoil and political cannibalism of the
past 3,000 years.

Proceeding from the linguistic axiom that all elements in a complex
system are related, and that their sense can be derived only from an
analysis of their interrelations, of the place which the unit can
occupy in the set, Lévi-Strauss weaves a host of apparently disparate
Amazonian and North American hunt and creation-myths into a unified
pattern. In the course of the argument, he seeks to demonstrate that
successive variants of a myth cannot be discarded as irrelevant, that
the sum of related tales is a living aggregate, a code of cultural
reinterpretation in which single elements are regrouped but not lost
(the analogy being that of mathematical topology which studies those
relations that remain constant when configurations change). The result
is a kind of moiré pattern which we learn to read as the physicist
reads superimposed photographs of cloud-chamber particles.

Philosophically and methodologically, Lévi-Strauss's approach is
rigorously deterministic. If there is law in the world of the physical
sciences, so there is in that of mental processes and language. In the
Anthropologie structurale, Lévi-Strauss presages a time when
individual thought and conduct will be seen as momentary modes or
enactments "of those universal laws which are the substance of the
human unconscious" ("des lois universelles en quoi consiste l'activité
inconsciente de l'esprit"). Similarly, Le Cru et le cuit concludes
with the suggestion of a simultaneous, reciprocal interaction between
the genesis of myths in the human mind and the creation by these myths
of a world-image already predetermined (one might say "programmed") by
the specific structure of human mentality. If human life is,
basically, a highly developed form of cybernetics, the nature of the ,
information processed, of the feedŹback and of the code, will depend
on the particular psychosomatic construct of the mental unit. Digital
computers and analogue computers may learn to have different dreams.

Once more, the substance and empirical solidity of Lévi-Strauss's case
can be judged only by the qualified anthropologist (is he right about
this or that aspect of Bororo life and language?). But the general
implications are wide-ranging. This is particularly true of the first
thirty pages of Le Cru et le cuit, entitled "Ouverture". They
constitute the richest, most difficult piece of writing Lévi-Strauss
has produced so far. It is not easy to think of any text as tightly
meshed, as bristling with suggestion and fine intricacy of argument
since the Tractatus. At various points, in fact, the themes of the two
works come into contact.

Some of the difficulty seems gratuitous. There is hardly a proposition
in these opening pages which is not qualified or illustrated by
reference to mathematics, histology, optics or molecular chemistry.
Often a single simile conjoins several allusions to different
scientific concepts. Looked at closely, however, a good many of the
scientific notions invoked, are elementary or vaguely pretentious. How
much mathematics does Lévi-Strauss really know or need to know? But
this constant use of mathematical and scientific notations points to a
much larger and more urgent motif. In "Ouverture" Lévi-Strauss is
articulating a radical distrust of language. A theme which has been
latent in much of his work now comes to the fore: set against the pure
syntax and tautological efficiencies of mathematics, of symbolic logic
and of scientific formulas, traditional discourse is no longer a
predominant or wholly satisfactory medium.

EXCUSE ME, THAT IS NOT THE CASE. NO HOLE DEFIES THE LOGIC.

By universalizing structural linguistics, Lévi-Strauss is, in fact,
diminishing the unique genius and central authority of common speech.
As storehouses and conveyors (the vacuum lube and the electronic
impulse) of fell life and human conjecture, myths embrace words but go
beyond them towards a more supple, inventive, universal syntax.

Yet even they fall short of the "supreme mystery among the sciences of
man" which is music. That arresting formula concludes a dazzling
rhetorical flight in which Lévi-Strauss contends that "to think
mythologically” is to think musically.

OR METHODICALLY PROCESSUALY, WITH THe FULL CONGRUENCE WITH THE NATURE
( as we
did this summer playing accustic on the rock and changing the color of
the rock with the acustic wave;
TEAM! COULD BE THAT WE GETTING AHEAD?

Wagner has proved the quintessential kinship of myth and musical
statement. Among all languages, only music "unites the contrary
attributes of being both intelligible and untranslatable". It is,
moreover, intelligible to all—a fact which makes " the creator of
music a being similar to the gods ".

IT HAS BECOME MORE AND MORER TRANSLATIO  READY, BUT THERE ARE ALSO
ARGUMENTS TO KEEP THE 'MAGIC' . HOW LONG?

In consequence, Le Cru el le cuit is given the formal structure of a
piece of music: overture, theme and variations, sonata, fugue, three-
part invention, rustic symphony in three movements. The conceit is not
new: one finds it in Baudelaire's theory of "correspondance" (to which
Lévi-Strauss implicitly refers), in Mallarmé and in Broch's Death of
Virgil, a novel divided in analogy with the changes of mood and rhythm
in a string quartet. Levi-Strauss does little, moreover, to enforce
the musical mimesis. It remains a rather laboured jeu d'esprit. But
the underlying concept has a deep fascination. The idea that music and
myth are akin, that they build shapes of being more universal, more
numinous than speech, haunts the western imagination. It is incarnate,
as Elizabeth Sewell has shown, in the figure of Orpheus. He is myth
himself and master of life through his power to create harmony amid
the inertness of primal silence or the ferocity of discoid (the fierce
beasts pause and listen). His presence —order and perception as the
condition of the mind when that condition is nearest music—is
discernible in Pythagorean doctrine and in Bacon's Magna Instauratio;
it has the energy of living myth in Rilke and Valéry. In its
celebration of music and mathematics, in its proud obscurity and claim
to be itself a myth unfolding, a song of the mind, Le Cru et le cuit
is, in the literal sense, an Orphic book. Would that its opening
measures were quoted from a stronger source than Emmanuel Chabrier's A
la musique.

Le Cru et le cuit is work in progress, and it would be fatuous to pass
any general judgment on the complex ensemble of Levi-Strauss's
achievement to this date. That it is one of the most original and
intellectually exciting of the present age seems undeniable. No one
seriously interested in language or literature, in sociology or
psychology, can ignore it.

O, THEY DO TODAY, IN REFERENCE TO THE NANO HOLE!

At the same time, this newest book exhibits to a disturbing degree
characteristics latent in Lévi-Strauss's work, certainly since the
early 1950s. It is prolix, often arbitrary, and maddeningly precious
(a technical discussion of the relations between Amazonian myths and
the zodiac is entitled '" L'Astronomie bien tempérée "). The argument
is decked out with an apparatus of pseudo-mathematical notations which
appears to carry more weight and relevance than it actually docs. At
times, the hard astringent scruple of Lévi-Strauss's best style yields
to an odd, post-romantic lyricism (Chabrier after Satie). It is as if
the prophet were pausing to draw his mantle close.

Perhaps this is both the genius and the danger of the enterprise. It
is not, primarily, as anthropology or ethnography that this
fascinating body of work may come to be judged and valued, but as
extended poetic metaphor. Like so much in Marx and Freud, the
achievement of Lévi-Strauss may endure, to use a term from La Pensée
sauvage as part of "the mythology of our time ". It is too early to
tell; Le Cru et le cuit ends wiih a catalogue of myths, not with a
coda.



CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS
Structural Anthropology
Translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf.
410pp. Basic Books. Ł2 12s. 6d