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Personally I found the original version (based on false data)
neat and convincing; the new version (based on accurate data) is
simply special pleading and does not convince me at all.
This exemplifies another general difficulty about these essays;
many of them are explicit commentaries on some other essay either
by Levi-Strauss himself or by another author, so that it is often dif–
ficult to understand what the argument is all about. Thus chapter 1,
"Race and Culture" (1971), is an ingeniously transformed version of
the conclusion of
Race
et
Histoire
(1952) which thereby becomes an at–
tack on the contemporary platitudes of UNESCO's purported "struggle
against racism." But unless one looks up the original version it is
easy to miss the point.
Comparably, chapter 8, originally printed in Levi-Strauss's an–
thropological journal
L'Homme,
consists of a highly polemical attack
on an article by Marvin Harris which was itself designed to be offen–
sive and was originally published in French in the same issue of
L'Homme.
Harris subsequently published an English version in his
book
Cultural Materialism
(1979). Read side by side, both essays, in
their respective styles, seem to me to be equally silly examples of
pedantic nitpicking, but taken in isolation without access to the
counterargument, both become almost meaningless.
The essays that I like best in the present collection come at the
end in a section entitled "Constraint and Freedom." Here at last our
author can feel relaxed; he is not defending himself against the
imagined hostility of his professional colleagues or defending an im–
possible and long outdated intellectual position against all comers.
He can stop bothering about what is or is not the proper subject mat–
ter of anthropology.
These items include two essays about artists (Max Ernst and
Anita Albus) which show up the kinship between Levi-Strauss's
structuralism and surrealist painting; an essay about how he remem–
bers New York as it was in 1941; an odd piece abou t the education of
creative children; and an essay entitled "Reflections on Liberty,"
which uses the recent high-level political debates about human rights
as an excuse for reflecting once more on the French ideas of liberty
that were advocated by Montesquieu and Rousseau and a supposed
contrast with prototypical English views on the same theme. It is
nothing very profound, but the essay manages to point up a number
of the key issues in the contemporary debate in a civilized and pene–
trating fashion.
