Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part I: Society and culture
- Part II: Myth and mind
- 5 The two natures of Lévi-Strauss
- 6 On anthropological knowledge
- 7 The limits of classification: Claude Lévi-Strauss and Mary Douglas
- 8 The local and the universal
- 9 Lévi-Strauss and the question of symbolism
- 10 Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theoretical and actual approaches to myth
- Part III: Language and alterity
- Part IV: Literature and aesthetics
- Bibliography of works by Claude Lévi-Strauss
- Index
10 - Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theoretical and actual approaches to myth
from Part II: - Myth and mind
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part I: Society and culture
- Part II: Myth and mind
- 5 The two natures of Lévi-Strauss
- 6 On anthropological knowledge
- 7 The limits of classification: Claude Lévi-Strauss and Mary Douglas
- 8 The local and the universal
- 9 Lévi-Strauss and the question of symbolism
- 10 Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theoretical and actual approaches to myth
- Part III: Language and alterity
- Part IV: Literature and aesthetics
- Bibliography of works by Claude Lévi-Strauss
- Index
Summary
The apparent method
Reductionism and science
Claude Lévi-Strauss first expounded the basic tenets of structural anthropology in Structural Anthropology (1958a; 1963a). Many scholars of myth accuse Lévi-Strauss of being coldly scientific, probably because he has insisted that the logical patterns of myths can be expressed in a series of mathematical formulas, particularly what he calls the 'canonical formula' (which has the form a: b :: c : a-1), geometrical abstractions that enable him ultimately to distil a myth into an algebraic formula, expressing a homology between two sets of relations. It is this sort of thing that has driven Clifford Geertz, for instance, to write of the 'extraordinary air of abstracted self-containment' in Lévi- Strauss's work. He goes on to say:
'Aloof, closed, cold, airless, cerebral' - all the epithets that collect around any sort of literary absolutism collect around it. Neither picturing lives nor evoking them, neither interpreting them nor explaining them, but rather arranging and rearranging the materials the lives have somehow left behind into formal systems of correspondences - his books seem to exist behind glass, self-sealing discourses into which jaguars, semen, and rotting meat are admitted to become oppositions, inversions, isomorphism. (Geertz 1995: 48)
This is unfair. Lévi-Strauss has always been interested in the messiest, juiciest aspects of human culture - eating and killing and marrying. Is it just that mythology is full of those things, and Lévi-Strauss knows it (i.e. that mythology has a dirty mind)?
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- The Cambridge Companion to Lévi-Strauss , pp. 196 - 216Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
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