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Title: Structural Anthropology by Claude Levi-Strauss ISBN: 0-465-09516-X Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: January, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.67 (3 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Inspiring
Comment: Levi-Strauss ranks with Darwin for being hugely misunderstood. Like Darwin, what people say about Levi-Strauss is so often completely wrong that I strongly doubt he's ever really read.
Levi-Strauss believed that all cultures share the same basic characteristics. "Struturalism is the search for hidden harmonies," he said. One of my favorite quips from him is how interesting it is to see how the same personality type will be cast in different cultural roles--how the same basic humanity signifies radically different things to different cultures.
Levi-Strauss believed it is not important to try and figure out when a culture branched off from another, or what preceeded what: culture should be considered on its own terms. If a pot is interesting, it's interesting, no matter what its context.
The reason this physicist is curious about a dead anthropologist is that many of the misunderstandings of regular old evolution can be cleared up, as Saussure recommended, by considering both evolutionary history--how dinosaurs turned into birds--and evolutionary structure--why, at any given step in evolution, the dino-bird was best adapted to its enviornment. Gould has made a career out of clearing up this confusion; too bad our schools leave students in the dark.
And it's also interesting from the point of view of physics. Clouds, for instance, have a structure which is determined by wiggling water vapor. By looking at the shape of the clouds, we can determine just how the vapor is wiggling.
All cloud shapes can be predicted--not by solving deterministic physical laws (i.e. time evolution) but by making strucutral predictions based on guesses. It is a sort of physical law which corresponds to the structuralist view of evolution: at any given time, a cloud looks the way it does because it solves a kind of 'best fit' problem. It does *not* look that way because we can solve the time evolution; those equations are in principle unsolvable because the degrees of freedom is so high. The cause of cloud shape is not force or energy, but information and order (I use the terms precisely--they all have units of measurement--the statement has mathematical consequences).
Prigogine (a chemist) pointed Levi-Strauss out in his Nobel lecture. There's only a handful of people in the world who really understand why. I encourage you to find out!
Rating: 5
Summary: Foundational Text
Comment: Structural Anthropology is a translation of Claude Levi-Strauss's well-known collection of essays, Anthropologie Structurale. I am hopeful that I can do him and this translation justice through this short review but I could well be accused of doing to Levi-Strauss what Levi-Strauss is accused of doing himself - reductionism. Despite it all looking like a kind of psychological reductionism, and since I am particular about reduction, I would really like to know what everything is being reduced to.
The essays contained in this collection deal with a variety of topics covering the whole range of Levi-Strauss's interests. They include the classical "Social Structure" which is now canon reading along with "The Structural Study of Myth". What is this thing called "structure"? Levi-Strauss refers fairly often to structural linguistics (see Course in General Linguistics by Ferdinand De Saussure) to give form to his concepts; for sociologists, maybe, reference to what has come to be known as the "cybernetic model" might be more communicative. Systematic interaction has two "hierarchies," an energic one and an informational one, conceived as counter "flows." Information controls energy and energy is the condition of actualization of information. This is the sense of Levi-Strauss's "structure": it is information, ultimately, a "code." Levi-Strauss is not interested in what is but rather in what gives form to and controls what is. Levi-Strauss searches for the formative codes of interaction. These he calls "structure." What he seems to be looking for are "unconscious processes" which somehow underlie the manifestations we call institutions. That they are located in the "mind" seems clear. It seems that certain mental operations (association, contradiction, dichotomization, resolution of dissonance, etc.) are at the back of the "structure" of societies, language, kinship systems, myths, art forms and all other aspects of culture. Thus analysis consists of taking varying manifestations and reducing them to a structural base such as the resolution of opposites or something like that. The model, method is that of De Saussure, et al.
What is really astonishing is that despite the profound nature of his infusing Anthropology with the findings of Structural Linguistics and making a fetish of inexactness and possibility, Levi-Strauss may have stumbled into a method that has proven useful in its critique and the doors with which it has opened. He has stumbled on a method, which pays dividends without actually knowing why it is paying dividends. We can all benefit from the works of Levi-Strauss, De Saussure and Foucault, as we need to know more about this unconscious. Structural Anthropology has become canon reading and is a classic for all times.
Miguel Llora
Rating: 5
Summary: Great work by a forerunner of Anthropology!
Comment: I personally consider this book to be one of the greatest works in the field of Anthropology. It is an exhaustive treatment on a particular way of looking at how Anthropology is performed. Through various examples from different cultures the author attempts to show how this *structural* approach to Anthropology is viewed. This book changed how many social Anthropologists did their work. Written by one of the most pre-eminent Anthropologists of our time it will most undoubtly stand the test of time for many decades to come.
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Title: Myth and Meaning : Cracking the Code of Culture by Claude Levi-Strauss ISBN: 0805210385 Publisher: Schocken Books Pub. Date: 14 March, 1995 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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Title: Course In General Linguistics by Ferdinand Desaussure ISBN: 0070165246 Publisher: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages Pub. Date: 01 June, 1965 List Price(USD): $18.75 |
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Title: The Savage Mind by Claude Leevi Strauss, Claude Levi-Strauss ISBN: 0226474844 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: June, 1966 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books Classics) by Clifford Geertz ISBN: 0465097197 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: January, 2000 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Forest of Symbols Aspects of Ndembu Ritual by Victor Witter Turner ISBN: 0801491010 Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr Pub. Date: June, 1970 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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