Structural Anthropology Zero. Claude Levi-Strauss. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Claude Levi-Strauss
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: Культурология
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781509544998
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watch over the entire process and offered invaluable suggestions, as a reader always keen to maintain the “right distance.”

      The photographs in this volume are by Claude Lévi-Strauss. All © Editions du Seuil and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

      1 Figure 1 Kaduveo child with painted face

      2 Figure 2 Motif by a Kaduveo woman

      3 Figure 3 Motif by a Kaduveo woman

      4 Figure 4 Life in a Tupi-Kawahib village: a monkey being skinned

      5 Figure 5 Life in a Tupi-Kawahib village: production of corn beer

      6 Figure 6 Life in a Tupi-Kawahib village: a Tupi-Kawahib mother and her baby

      7 Figure 7 Life in a Tupi-Kawahib village: a child carrier

      8 Figure 8 Nambikwara family shelter

      9 Figure 9 Nambikwara woman piercing a mother-of-pearl earring

      10 Figure 10 Nambikwara man wearing a jaguar skin headdress

      11 Figure 11 Nambikwara man weaving a bracelet

      12 Figure 12 Indians of the Pimenta Bueno River

      13 Figure 13 Indians of the Pimenta Bueno River

      14 Figure 14 Indians of the Pimenta Bueno River

      15 Figure 15 Huari ax (copied from Nordenskiöld, 1924b, fig. 26)

      16 Figure 16 Guaporé musical instruments: left, Amniapä trumpet; upper right, Guaratägaja bird whistle; bottom right, Arua double pan flute (copied from Snethlage, 1939)

      17 Figure 17 Macurap pseudo-panpipe (copied from Snethlage, 1939)

      18 Figure 18 Huari flutes made of bone (copied from Nordenskiöld, 1924b, fig. 43)

      In retrospect, it seems clear that the publication of Structural Anthropology marked a crucial stage in the rise and spread of structuralism. The carefully conceived organization of the book undoubtedly played an essential role in this. It highlighted the extremely innovative character of the thought as well as the theoretical ambition of a body of work that relied on very precise anthropological data even while opening up onto other disciplines (linguistics, history, psychoanalysis, etc.) and the anglophone literature in the field. It thus lent the work a certain force, further enhanced by its programmatic title. It should be recalled that this was by no means a sure bet. Against the sense of inexorability conveyed by retrospective accounts, which lay out a chronology of editorial and institutional successes, it is important to remember that the adjective “structural” was considered at the time to be something of a vulgarism and that the entire enterprise was a bit of a gamble. After all, intellectual history is strewn with stillborn neologisms, conceived in the heat of the moment as banners and manifestos.

      Structural Anthropology was thus both more than and altogether different from collections of contributions artificially bound together by a title. This is also true of Structural Anthropology, Volume II, which came out in 1973 and whose organization is rather similar to that of the first volume: the “Perspective Views” that explore the history and pre-history of modern anthropology are followed by two sections, entitled “Social Organization” and “Mythology and Ritual,” closing with a final (and long) section entitled “Humanism and the Humanities.” Here again, the order reflected stages of thought, with chronology playing no part. The book even concludes with the essay “Race and History,” which had been first published twenty years earlier, in 1952; however innovative it might have been (and still is), this short treatise on cultural diversity and evolutionism had not found its rightful place within the architecture of the first volume – more affirmative and more disciplinary, less concerned with locating anthropology within a set of reflections that made the destiny of humanity its object – while it provided an ideal complement to meditations on the notions of humanism and progress.

      In any case, two conclusions may be drawn. First, the Structural Anthropology volumes were indeed conceived as books – i.e. as theoretical interventions into debates that they sought to shape and not as simple collections of essays. Second, the way Lévi-Strauss understood anthropology, its methods and objects, did not evolve much over the course of his career. The only true exception is probably with regard to the status of the distinction between nature and culture: initially presented (in The Elementary Structures of Kinship, in 1949) as an anthropological invariant, in line with social science since its origins in the eighteenth century, it became a distinction of “primarily methodological importance,” according to his formulation in The Savage Mind in 1962.4 With the exception of this shift, in keeping with his redefinition of the concept of symbol,5 Lévi-Strauss’s thought remained very faithful to a few governing principles, and its evolution has to do more with the diversity of objects to which it was applied than with any change in the “rustic convictions” (to quote Tristes Tropiques) that guided his project.

      A prehistory of structural anthropology