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number of years. We're given a diversified picture of the author's
preoccupations with myth, kinship structures, and the status and scope
of anthropology, as well as homages to Rousseau ("founder of the
human sciences"), and Durkheim, plus odd pieces on subjects like
sacred mushrooms and the Bureau of American Ethnology.
Dissatisfaction with what he saw as philosophy's parlor game
abstractions brought Levi-Strauss into the fi eld, where tha t first shock
of similarity engendered the kernel of what was to become structural
anthropology. For what people of ostensibly remote cultures have in
common are the structures embodied in myths, in marriage and
kinship customs, and in systems of classification. Inveighing against
the distortions produced by fixation on an evolutionary perspective,
Levi-Strauss argues that the really fundamental thing isn't the distinc–
tion between the "science of the concrete" of so-called primiti ves and
our own "science of the abstract," but how the human mind in
whatever setting constructs systems of opposition and association.
Further, cognition's ultimate components are not overt myths and
customs of particular societies but universal covert structures. These
structures are unconscious and not to be confused with regularities
found on the empirical level. Levi-Strauss describes a jigsaw puzzle,jts
pieces cut to shape by a mechanical saw, the latter's movements
determined by moving cams. Now, if we are to speak of the puzzle's
structure, this will be manifest not in the shapes of the p,ieces or the
way they fit together (at least not in the relevant sense), but only in
terms of the mathematical formula regulating the cams. (Levi-Strauss
is never at a loss for neat analogies.)
"Every civilization tends to overestimate the objective orientation
of its thought and this tendency is never absent," he writes in
The
Savage Mind.
The apparent superiority of modern science is at least
partly due to our criteria being unavoidably a product of one kind of
objective orientation. Not all investigators have equalled Levi-Strauss's
humility and respectfulness. "Our science reached its maturity," he
writes, "the day that Wes tern man began to understand that he would
never understand himself as long as there would be on the surface of
the earth a single people whom he would treat as an object."
But however deep his identification with other cultures he remains
aware that the anthropologist must always function as an outsider, this
being what delineates anthropology as such: social science applied to
societies other than one's own.
Some of the most engaging discussion, particularly in the chapter
entitled, "Race and History," concerns the perspective formed by
members of a culture on outsiders. All societies tend to be ethnocentric:
