Claude Lévi-Strauss

A Critical Study of His Thought

Maurice Godelier

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781784787073
• eBook ISBN: 9781784787080
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Anthropologist Claude L?vi-Strauss was among the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. In this rigorous study, Maurice Godelier traces the evolution of his thought. Focusing primarily on L?vi-Strauss's analysis of kinship and myth, Godelier provides an assessment of his intellectual achievements and legacy. Meticulously researched, L?vi-Strauss is written in a clear and accessible style. The culmination of decades of engagement with L?vi-Strauss's work, this book will prove indispensible to students of his thought and structural anthropology more generally.

PART ONE

Kinship

The Elementary Structures of Kinship, originally published in French in 1947, was Lévi-Strauss’s first major work and it rapidly earned him an international audience and fame. In France, with the exception of an article by Simone de Beauvoir in Les Temps modernes, the work attracted little attention. However, subsequently and throughout his life Lévi-Strauss would continually be at the centre of research on kinship, discovering new problems, developing new concepts, responding to attacks and criticisms, and revisiting and enriching certain theses dear to his heart. An overview of his research and publications in this area reveals four periods.

The first period, from 1943 to 1956, weighs heavily on his later trajectory. It began in 1943, with a short text in which Lévi-Strauss analysed the social use of kin terms among the Nambikwara Indians of the Brazilian state of Matto Grosso, with whom he had stayed during his expeditions into Amazonia before World War II.¹ Here we already find the idea of the importance, in a system where marriages are contracted between cross cousins, of the exchange of women between groups and of the maternal uncle. In 1945 he laid out the principles of structural analysis in his first major theoretical article, published in the journal Word; it was at this time, too, that the notion of ‘atom of kinship’ first appeared.²

But the dominant work of this period is clearly The Elementary Structures of Kinship, which he completed in New York on 24 February 1947. I will devote lengthy analysis to it in these pages.³ The book would be completed in 1956 by a very important analysis of the theoretical status of the family in the functioning of kinship systems.⁴ The article reviews various forms of family found in Asia, among American Indians, etc., which are very different from the Western European monogamous family. He raises the possibility that it may actually be the women who exchange men, and then rejects it in view of the facts. Furthermore, one part of the famous Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss (French edition, 1949–1950),⁵ that dealing with the appearance of symbolic thought – the source, according to The Elementary Structures, of the incest taboo and explanation of the fact that it is the women who are exchanged by the men and not the other way around – is an indispensable extension and complement to The Elementary Structures of Kinship.

The second period (1965–1967) centres on the text of the 1965 Huxley Memorial Lecture, given before the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, and entitled ‘The Future of Kinship Studies’. In it, Lévi-Strauss answers his Anglo-Saxon colleagues, who had criticized his use of the notions of structure and model in The Elementary Structures.⁶ But above all, he urges anthropologists to analyse the transitional forms between elementary and complex structures, what he calls ‘semi-complex structures’ of kinship, whose operating rules he defines and illustrates by an example from what are known as the Crow-Omaha systems; I will examine this question later in the present book. These new developments can be found again in 1967, in the Preface to the second French edition of The Elementary Structures of Kinship.⁷ Here Lévi-Strauss declares he is forgoing his plans to write a book on the complex structures of kinship, but, in response to popular demand, is nevertheless publishing a new edition of The Elementary Structures, whose documentation seems to him twenty years later somewhat out of date even though it ‘required [him] to consult more than 7,000 books and articles’; and, above all, because he considers the entire part devoted to China and India to have been ‘outstripped by the progress of anthropology’.⁸ A few chapters were nevertheless reworked: those dealing with the Kachin system, for instance, for which Lévi-Strauss was strongly taken to task by Edmund Leach.

The third period (1973–1986) is dominated by the discovery of the both theoretical and historical importance of one form of kinship organization, the ‘house’ (as in the expression ‘the house of Windsor’), a concept he developed in The Way of the Masks to illuminate the nature of the Kwakiutl and Tlingit kinship systems and those of other peoples of the American Northwest and Canada, which Boas had never managed to characterize. However, the notion of ‘house’ in this sense was already used by historians of the European Middle Ages or of Japan in analysing aristocratic marriage strategies.⁹ For the next nearly ten years, until his last year at the Collège de France (1982), he concentrated on identifying this form of kinship organization in Melanesia, Polynesia, Africa, Madagascar and Indonesia, where paradoxically it was widespread, not only in certain Melanesian groups that used to be listed among the ‘primitive societies’, but also in strongly ranked societies headed by paramount chiefs (Polynesia), kings (Africa, Madagascar, Europe) and even emperors (Japan). Increasingly, the anthropology of kinship was to look to history, feed on it and seek in it the reasons for these transformations.

His findings would appear in 1984, in Anthropology and Myth,¹⁰ of which they constitute a major part. But in 1973, before having discovered the importance of ‘houses’, Lévi-Strauss had returned to his analysis of the notion of atom of kinship, which appeared in his 1945 article in Word. And in the same year as he published the French edition of Anthropology and Myth (1984), he parried the objections raised to his theory of women being exchanged by their father or their brothers by marriages between children of the same father or the same mother – as practiced in Ancient Athens or Sparta, but also in other periods or in other parts of the world (Egypt, Polynesia, Peru, etc.). His response was the article published in L’Homme, ‘Du mariage dans un degré rapproché’.¹¹

In his next work, which is worth pausing over, Lévi-Strauss rebounded with a further contribution to the domain of kinship studies. In the spring of 1985, he visited Japan for the fourth time and gave three remarkable lectures, which would be published only after his death, in the form of a small book translated into English as Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World.¹² In the second of these lectures, he takes a stand on some of the most debated questions of the day in the Western world, in the domain of kinship: surrogate mothers, same-sex parents, medically assisted reproduction, etc. He was very open to legal, social and other solutions, an attitude some of his disciples had not yet adopted, persuaded as they were that, when it came to kinship, everything had already been invented. But Lévi-Strauss reminds us that all societies must maintain themselves over time and are thus obliged to find remedies for sterility or the death of childless couples, and that these means are indispensable to the continuity of a family line and name. He goes on to describe seven customs invented by various peoples in Africa or the Americas, some of which are the equivalent of insemination with a donor’s sperm. Unfortunately, these analyses remained unknown to the general public as well to anthropologists, and therefore had no impact on the debates that continue to rage in Western media, parliamentary commissions, religious circles and public opinion.

From 1998 to 2000, in the last years of his life, Lévi-Strauss battled on in defence of his theses, in particular that of kinship as the exchange of women by men. He refuted the hypothesis advanced by certain ‘evolutionist’ anthropologists, according to whom the loss of oestrus or its dissimulation in the ancestors of the human female allowed women to retain men by exchanging sexual favours for food brought back to camp by the men, and for protection for themselves and their children, summed up by the formula ‘sex for food and care’. Men’s attachment to women, and hence to the human family, it was argued, stems from the capacity of humans to make love at any time. Lévi-Strauss would treat this hypothesis with irony and disdain, first of all in a text published in Italian in La Repubblica and then in an article in Les Temps modernes.¹³

There was one last controversy. In his ‘Apologue des amibes’,¹⁴ published in 2000, Lévi-Strauss concedes that Tylor’s formula, which had served him well in The Elementary Structures and in the article ‘The Family’ – namely that early on, men had no other choice than ‘marrying out or being killed out’ – was merely a mythic view of an imaginary past. Years after having asserted that all society rests on the exchange of women, signs and their meanings (culture), he conceded that ‘not everything in society can be exchanged’, but went on to state the obvious, that ‘if there were no exchange, there would be no society.’

The final act was the publication, also in 2000, of the afterword to a special issue of L’Homme devoted to kinship. Lévi-Strauss writes of being struck by the ‘uneasiness that appears here concerning the exchange of women’.¹⁵ Once again he repeats that it is indifferent from the standpoint of theory whether it is the men who exchange the women or the women who exchange the men. He goes on to add a few words about the controversial problem of so-called ‘Arab’ marriage. Finally, he revisits the distinction developed in The Elementary Structures between restricted and generalized exchange, and emphasizes that as far as he is concerned – he had modified his initial positions years earlier – he now considers restricted exchange as a ‘special case of generalized exchange’. I will return to this question later, but only after having examined the whole work, text by text.

This rough outline of the evolution of Lévi-Strauss’s theory of kinship reveals two clear character traits: first, his passion to understand; and second, his feistiness, his readiness to respond to criticism, to reply to attacks and to defend, to the end, some of the theses he had developed in his first texts on kinship and whose validity he took for granted.

1

The Beginnings (1943–1945): What
Came Before The Elementary
Structures of Kinship

We will not dwell on the 1943 American Anthropologist article analysing the social and political importance of the use of the term ‘brother-in-law’ among the Nambikwara Indians. Simply put, Lévi-Strauss outlines a kinship system with marriage between cross cousins that today would be classed as Dravidian. He indicates the existence of the possibility for a man to marry one of his older sister’s daughters and the importance of the maternal uncle. He would find this form of ‘oblique’ marriage again in Asia, and would mention it in The Elementary Structures. One originality of the text is his use of observations contained in the accounts of sixteenth-century French travellers and Portuguese missionaries, such as Jean de Léry, Yves d’Évereux or Soares de Sousa, who describe in great detail the exchange of sisters between men and the authority they exercise over their nieces. Throughout his life, Lévi-Strauss would pay the greatest attention to such testimony as well as to historical sources in general.

It was in his first major theoretical article, in 1945, that Lévi-Strauss – convinced for several years already by his scientific exchanges with Roman Jakobson that modern linguistics was the single social science ‘which can truly claim to be a science and which has achieved both the formulation of an empirical method and an understanding of the nature of the data submitted to its analysis’ – wrote that structural analysis is the only method that would enable anthropology to progress and gradually stand as a science.¹

By modern linguistics, he of course meant the school of thought inaugurated by Ferdinand de Saussure, but above all the ‘revolution’ of structural phonology, illustrated by the work of its founder, Nikolaï Troubetzkoy, and the Prague circle of linguists, of which Jakobson was a member. In 1933, Troubetzkoy had reduced the structural method as practiced in phonology to four basic operations. Indeed, reading them, it is easy to understand why this summary corresponded to the programme Lévi-Strauss then and there set for himself in anthropology. The first operation shifts from the study of conscious linguistic phenomena to that of their unconscious infrastructure; the second invites us to base the analysis on the relations between the terms and never to treat the terms as independent entities; the third consists in supposing that ‘phonemes are always part of a system’; and fourth, the analysis should aim to discover ‘general laws either by induction “or by logical deduction, which would give them an absolute character”’.²

Lévi-Strauss’s application of this last principle – to discover general laws by logical deduction – explains the approach he takes in The Elementary Structures, something shocking and alien for the Anglo-Saxon anthropologists and sociologists of the time, since he begins the book by positing the universality of the incest taboo and then goes on to deduce the reasons for the exchange of women and the basis of cross-cousin marriage, etc. It is only in Chapter Eleven that he begins to analyse specific cases – the Australian kinship systems as typical examples of restricted exchange, and then the systems of China, India and peripheral regions as typical of generalized exchange.

Of course, Europe did not wait until the twentieth century (that is, for Saussure, followed by Troubetzkoy and Jakobson) to discover that people’s relations with one another and with the natural environment form systems, that these systems differ in their structures, that these structures explain the logic behind the particular way each system works, and that these structures are not directly visible to the naked eye, but must be discovered by analysis and reconstructed in and through theory. For this reason, coming to know the structures of a system cannot be reduced to the representations of it held by the individuals and groups who make up this system and ensure its and their own reproduction. Because social systems are sets of interlocking relations, it is the very nature of these relations and of their articulation that determines the position and signification of the components (moieties, clans, castes, classes, religious groups, etc.) in the system.

The reader will have recognized in the foregoing the theoretical approach that Marx defined in his text on method included in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859),³ and developed later in Capital.⁴ There he showed that, in the capitalist system, capital and labour are bound together by relations that are at once complementary and opposed, and that the wages paid by the owners of capital in exchange for the use of the workers’ manual and intellectual labour is not what it is supposed to seem – the equivalent of the market value created by this use – but represents only part of this value. To wages, a category indispensable to the practical functioning of the capitalist system (based principally on the generalization and exploitation of wage labour) are thus attached representations that obscure and contradict, when it comes to theory, the real process by which the value of material and immaterial commodities are produced as reconstructed by the analyst. Marx had already clearly set out the methodological principle according to which one cannot study the genesis of a system until one knows its structure, thus repudiating historicism, as Lévi-Strauss would in turn do a century later.

Lévi-Strauss was certainly not unaware of Marx. As a student, he had read part of Capital and had devoted a text to it. But in 1945, structural linguistics, unlike Capital, was not the object of scientific or ideological controversy. More particularly, in his article Lévi-Strauss’s only aim was to apply structural analysis to the study of the relation between two...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One: Kinship
• Part Two: Myths and Mythical Thought
• By Way of a Conclusion
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Indexes