Word: strauss
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It’s true that in many ways, Lévi-Strauss was the artifact of a much different world. His great legacy is structuralism, the idea that universal patterns of thought—most notably, the desire to create myths—underlie all human activities. Though that take may not be in vogue today (even in the ‘70s, one Cambridge University professor wrote that “despite his immense prestige, the critics among his professional colleagues greatly outnumber the disciples”), there’s something to admire in the impulse...
Despite numerous expeditions to study peoples as foreign as the Nambikwara tribe of São Paulo or the policy apparatchik of Washington D.C., though, Lévi-Strauss himself remained consummately European. “Every man carries within himself a world made up of all that he has seen and loved; and it is to this world that he returns incessantly, though he may pass through and seem to inhabit a world quite foreign to it,” wrote Chateaubriand a century earlier, an author whose "Voyage en Italie" Lévi-Strauss had read and quoted...
...world on which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world that I like.” Part of this had to do with the ascendance of Derrida & Co., who gradually replaced his universalizing tendencies with their more fragmentary perspectives. In a sense, Lévi-Strauss lived out the greatest tragedy that can befall a philosopher: that of surviving long enough to watch his own ideas crack...
...sense of wonder never abated. Describing his first brush with Anglo-American anthropology after a cloistered education at the Sorbonne, Lévi-Strauss wrote that: “My mind escaped from the closed circuit, which was what the practice of academic philosophy amounted to: made free of the open air, it breathed deeply and took on new strength. Like a townsman let loose in the mountains, I made myself drunk with the open spaces, and my astonished eye could hardly take in the wealth and variety of the scene.” Until the very...
...Strauss is best immortalized by the title of one of his greatest books, “La Pensée Sauvage.” “Pensée” translates literally as “thought,” but in its secondary meaning it can also signify a kind of flower. Lévi-Strauss combined both of these ideas in his own person—the unruly directions in which his thought bloomed speaking to a consuming intellect at once exquisitely savage and fiercely beautiful...