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ing the accumulation of empirical evidence to the contrary, his long
ago speculations concerning the marriage practices of certain groups
of Australian aborigenes are still to be preferred to the arguments of
his critics because the latter are "condemned by current conditions to
know only aboriginal groups whose traditional culture has greatly
deteriorated ..."
That word "deteriorated" needs to be noted. The imaginary
human beings who provide the subject matter for Levi-Strauss's an–
thropological analyses live in a never-never land, a utopian para–
dise, a golden age. He views them from afar through the wrong end
of a telescope. At that distance they seem to dance out the patterns
required by his theories; when real people are seen at close range
they do not behave like that. So their culture must be debased.
This is a very standard type of Levi-Straussian argument. When
originally devised back in the 1940s, his theories seemed to fit rea–
sonably well with the very crude ethnographic records available
prior to 1914, i.e., prior to the development of "modern" techniques
of anthropological field research. Generally speaking, his theories fit
very badly with the empirical data of later field research. This
awkward fact is repeatedly explained by Levi-Strauss asserting that
the "traditional" culture of primitive peoples was entirely different
from the contemporary culture of their descendants. Therefore we
can ignore the empirical findings of recent field research because it
relates only to modern contemporary culture.
Because these "traditional cultures" (considered to exist in the
plural) were altogether different from Western industrial culture, we
can look at them only "from afar." But his title has other facets. The
author is looking back from afar at his own anthropological past.
The conservatism with which he performs this feat is unqualified.
He saw the light sometime around 1945, and he has never subse–
quently deviated from the truth, but all who came after him have
erred and strayed like lost sheep.
If
you were to believe the argument of these essays, Levi–
Strauss has never made a serious mistake. In chapter 18 he admits to
having committed an error in a Canadian broadcast talk made in
1978 and subsequently published: "I made a slip of the tongue (sub–
stituting Hagen for Gunther) which destroyed my whole line of rea–
soning." But this doesn't worry him in the least; it takes him only
four pages to reconstruct the original argument on the basis of pre–
cisely reversed empirical facts.
