Word: straussed
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...geometrical face paintings of the Caduveo Indians, Lévi-Strauss recognized not meaningless makeup, but a subtle statement of man's place in the world: "The face paintings confer upon the individual his dignity as a human being: they help him to cross the frontier from nature to culture, and from the 'mindless' animal to the civilized man." He decided that, "without any play on words," both the Caduveo and the Bororo "could be called in their different ways 'learned societies...
Only faith, for instance, will carry most readers past Lévi-Strauss's tenet that the mind may be the prisoner of a secret code, locked in the unconscious, that often has as little to do with conscious reality as the rules of grammar have to do with the function of speech. If order exists anywhere-in the behavior of the atom, the dance of heated particles, the orbit of the stars-then, say the structuralists, order must exist everywhere, even in the brain. Just as the law of gravity determined the fall of Newton's apple...
...Strauss postulates two orders of reality, only one of which is susceptible to human control. At the controllable level, man applies his intellect to the universe about him and builds social systems to suit his needs. But at a deeper level, the implacable pattern that is ingrained in the human intellect, much like the program that decrees the functioning of a computer, directs the shape of everything built by social man. It may work, says Lévi-Strauss, like "the least common denominator of human thought...
...taproots of culture, the foundation of speech exists beneath the level of awareness and the superimposed discipline of grammatical rules. The linguists and the structural anthropologists are united in the suspicion that the origin of human speech and of human society may have been equivalent events. Lévi-Strauss's books reflect his conviction that communication is the sine qua non of society, and that speech is only one of many ways by which society explicates itself. Music, art, ritual, myth, religion, literature, cooking, tattooing, the kinship systems founded on intermarriage, the barter of goods and services...
...unlocked the code that the human mind obeys. But Lévi-Strauss presents fascinating speculation on how the code may work. It seems based, for instance, on a universal human desire to organize the chaos of the universe-to attach meaning to things. "The thought we call primitive," he writes, "is founded on this demand for order. This is equally true of all thought...