STRUCTURALISM
79
and animals which are not at all ferocious but on the contrary repre–
sent a special kind of natural value
(un canard sauvage
is a wild
duck, not a savage duck).
"La pensee sauvage"
is
therefore, as Levi–
Strauss himself remarks, "mind in its untamed state," and it repre–
sents not just the mind of savages but the human mind, and therefore
our
mind.
It
is this relevance of his work to contemporary man's un–
derstanding of himself that has placed Levi-Strauss at the center of
the current intellectual scene.
It
is
worth noting that the universality which Levi-Strauss at–
tributes to mind does not involve him in the absurdity, as some have
suggested, of maintaining that there is no essential difference be–
tween primitive societies and modern ones. The difference, however,
he sees as one of social organization and not as involving essentially
a disparity of mental powers or even of patterns of thought. In an
interview (one in a series with Georges Charbonnier, published as
an issue of
L es Lettres nouvelles
in 1961) he compares the two types
of society to two types of machine, clocks and steam engines: primi–
tive societies, like clocks, use a constant input of energy and "have a
tendency to maintain themselves indefinitely in their initial state,
which explains why they appear to us as societies without history and
without progress"; modern societies, on the other hand, like thermo–
dynamic rather than mechanical machines, "operate in virtue of a
difference of temperature between their parts . . . (which is realized
by different forms of social hierarchy, whether slavery, serfdom, or
class distinctions); they produce much more work than the others,
but consume and progressively destroy their sources of energy." This
is not doctrinaire Marxism of the kind that is to be found in
Althusser, for example, but it does represent a willingness, common to
all the structuralists, to take Marx seriously and to admit the validity
of many of his criticisms of Western civilization, an attitude which
is
in refreshing contrast to the polarity of disapproval and defiance
which still clings, now somewhat vestigially, to discussions of such
questions in the United States. In fact I think it is possible to account
for the difference in other than social terms without abandoning the
structuralist approach (and without, of course, mitigating the social
consequences), but that is getting ahead of the exposition.
It has by now become a commonplace of linguistics that the old–
est languages are not necessarily the simplest, from the point of view
either of grammar or of vocabulary. The complexity of ancient (and of
