Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Take your GOP plan out of the witness protection program.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

Second rate reporter says what?

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

You are here: Home / We Are All Levi-Strauss Now

We Are All Levi-Strauss Now

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From the NYT obituary for Claude Lévi-Strauss:

The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, basing their approaches to life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food, clothing and shelter.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss rescued his subjects from this limited perspective… he found among them a dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins, a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths, and an implicit sense of order and design, even among tribes who practiced ruthless warfare…

“The thirst for objective knowledge,” he wrote, “is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive.’ ”

Of course humans have always had an obsessive interest in the odd ways of That Tribe Across the River, but how many scholars can say they’ve had so much influence on the way “we” discuss “they” today, whether as political bloggers or Media Village Idiots?

Reader Interactions

51Comments

  3. 3.

    slag

    You can’t blame us because the teabaggers are “intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational”. They pride themselves on it.

  4. 4.

    Kid G

    I had no idea who this guy was. At first I thought this was going to be an obituary for a Blue Jeans magnate :P

  5. 5.

    aimai

    Jeezus, that Times article is abysmal:

    A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of “structuralism,” a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations.

    No, he was not an “avatar” of Structuralism. He might be called its originator, or an exponent, or a student, or a believer, or a scholar of Structuralism. But he was not an Avatar. Unless the Times is subscribing to some very seriously weird jungian notions or smoking some serious shit.

    aimai

  7. 7.

    geg6

    @Brachiator:

    That was an excellent overview of a great man’s life and work there in the Guardian. His work was all the rage when I was a first-year undergrad. I took a couple of anthro classes with a prof who was passionate about structuralism and who almost talked me into majoring in anthro instead of poli sci.

  9. 9.

    Dave

    He was a unique thinker and a man that has no ready replacement.

    But what galls me is how his passing has gone by so quietly. One of the great intellectuals of the 20th and 21st Century…and Jon and Kate still get more press. Jesus wept.

  10. 10.

    Third Eye Open

    @Dave: Sometimes I wonder how the political landscape will look when Noam Chomsky finally sheds this mortal coil…?

  12. 12.

    AlanDean

    An Anthropology Prof. at Cal Berkeley said this of the man:

    “The depth of his scholarship is matched only by the opacity of his words.”

    And that was a compliment. I had more luck reading Paul Feyerabend.

  13. 13.

    R-Jud

    Unless the Times is subscribing to some very seriously weird jungian notions or smoking some serious shit.

    They employ David Brooks, so I’m opting for “smoking some serious shit.”

  15. 15.

    The Bearded Blogger

    @AlanDean: I once asked a colleague of mine that studies psychoanalysis whether Lacan’s writing was so difficult because a) the topic was difficult, b) he was a poor writer, or c) he was a bastard.

    Her answer was c), and she love his work. Feyerabend and Levi-Strauss have nothing on Lacan

  16. 16.

    woody

    Wow. A sad topic…

    A true giant, a formative influence on more than one or two generations of social scientists. He was reviled, of course, as an apologist for ‘cultural relativism.’ Was he uniquely a philosophical anthropologist? He was among a select few.

  17. 17.

    Paula

    Third Eye Open:

    Depends on which Chomsky you mean. Chomsky was/is a pioneer in cognitive linguistics. His legacy there is already secured, at least among people who follow that field.

    As a “public intellectual” speaking about politics, colonialism, mass media, and anti-corporatism/anti-capitalism/anti-globalization, he has not had something to contribute that wasn’t already in many ways elucidated by everyone coming from the school of or influenced by post/structural continental theorists from the late thirties to the late seventies — that is to say, from Frantz Fanon, Roland Barthes, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault to current intellectuals like Stuart Hall, Edward Said, and Marxist historians like EP Thompson. So while he’ll probably get a flashier obit than these guys, his impact in terms of original theory is actually quite small to non-existent, at least at the moment.

  18. 18.

    Brachiator

    @geg6:

    That was an excellent overview of a great man’s life and work there in the Guardian. His work was all the rage when I was a first-year undergrad. I took a couple of anthro classes with a prof who was passionate about structuralism and who almost talked me into majoring in anthro instead of poli sci.

    I had to contend with structuralists as part of various literature and literary theory classes, but found my way to some of Levi-Strauss’ work when I found that I liked some anthro classes (especially stuff on primatology and human evolution).

  20. 20.

    slippy

    @R-Jud: I’m opting for “hires people who write like shit.” Possibly leading to “randomly finding idiots like Ross Douthat wandering in the streets.”

    The quality of professional “writing” has declined noticeably since I graduated from high school 20 years ago. I see road signs that look like they were hastily emailed by someone with two or three fingers taped together, not hand-placed by someone on a ladder. Easy words are misspelled, nobody seems to understand how to use apostrophes or use the correct plural form of virtually anything.

    I’m not a grammar snob or anything. I understand the very real fact that usage dictates how language is used, and standing behind a dictionary and calling people out for not following an arcane set of “rules” originally meant to separate commoners from the aristocracy is not my purpose. I evaluate whether someone’s got the skills based on how intelligible they are, and even in supposedly professional newsrooms, apparently as long as the words fit into the column they’re correct.

  21. 21.

    Xenos

    In spite of being an Anthro major some 20 years ago I have never really understood Levi-Strauss’ structuralism. But while I was never a great fan of his most serious work I loved Tristes Tropiques, and once I master some more French I long to attempt it.

    The humanism, the grace, the love of his fellow man, no matter how alien, hard to understand and seemingly perverse, flow through his work. I am sure Tristes Tropiques will be read and studied 1,000 years from now. It already seems like a relic of a great civilization, one for us to ponder sadly in our debased and miserable state of ignorance, pettiness, and spiritual poverty. Once there was such a world worth saving…

  22. 22.

    tavella

    @AlanDean: An Anthropology Prof. at Cal Berkeley said this of the man:

    “The depth of his scholarship is matched only by the opacity of his words.”

    And that was a compliment. I had more luck reading Paul Feyerabend.

    I don’t get that. I read some pretty opaque stuff as an Anthro major, but Levi-Strauss wasn’t one of them; he was quite understandable.

    For example, the Atlantic obit claimed this as an example of him being hard to understand:

    An example: Instinctive “culinary distinctions between roasting and boiling.” He pulls from Levi-Strauss’s pages: “‘Boiling provides a means of complete conservation of the meat and its juices, whereas roasting is accompanied by destruction and loss,’ he wrote. ‘Thus one denotes economy; the other prodigality; the latter is aristocratic, the former plebian.'” Unsurprisingly, given this sentence, Reuters’s Estelle Shirbon also recalls the scholar’s erudition: “Levi-Strauss was not the most accessible of thinkers and many of his works are impenetrable to laymen

    I had forgotten or never run into that distinction, but I went “Wow, yes, that makes perfect sense. What do we think of as peasant food? The humble stew. What do we think of as a king’s feast? Vast platters of roasted meat.”

  23. 23.

    The Bearded Blogger

    @Paula: I see Chomsky the political commentator as more of a famous figure lending his name for a cause; that is, the fame of linguist Chomsky is used to give a certain political point of view visibility. Chomsky himself said that his work as a public intellectual is not nearly as demanding as his work on linguistics. He is more of a publicist in the political arena… I fear he has been so marginalized by the Liberal Media, though, that his death could only help his visibility in that area.

  24. 24.

    Anne Laurie

    @slippy:

    … even in supposedly professional newsrooms, apparently as long as the words fit into the columnpublishers’ narrow worldview they’re correct.

    Fixted.

  25. 25.

    The Bearded Blogger

    @tavella: You are right, that’s not opaque at all. But he does have some writing that is hard to understand.

    On the topic of plebean and aristocratic foods: many plebean foods mix whatever ingredients are available into a base of corn, rice or potatoes: stews, chinese rice, mexican rice, burritos, etc… more aristocratic cultures have dishes which call for very definite ingredients, and don’t allow a more efficient usage of whatever is available.

  27. 27.

    Anne Laurie

    @tavella:

    “Wow, yes, that makes perfect sense. What do we think of as peasant food? The humble stew. What do we think of as a king’s feast? Vast platters of roasted meat.”

    Or, to take it back to snark, among our highly evolved suburban tribes, women make casseroles, salads, and weekday dinners; MEN barbeque big hunks ‘o meat over a raging flame!

  28. 28.

    Ahasuerus

    @Anne Laurie: OT, but the Lexicon definition for Pie has a bad link; the URL in the phrase “First used here…” has a space where the question mark should be.

    @cleek: May you feel the constant embrace of the FSM’s noodly appendage for bringing such bakery goodness into our lives.

  31. 31.

    General Winfield Stuck

    OT

    Mean and crazy comes to a town near you.

    The Glenn Beck crowd are out there yelling anti-choice crap. They will bring the same anger and hatred they brought to the town halls that they disrupted. This is going to put a lot of stress on local police forces.

    2010 is gonna be a blast. Pun could be intentional.

  33. 33.

    Paula

    @ The Bearded Blogger

    Well, we’re not in France, so all intellectuals tend to get sidelined. But I have a problem w/ how many self-identified leftists read some of him, Naomi Klein, Howard Zinn, and George Monbiot and think they know all there is to know about left intellectual history.

    Those guys’ work are good tools for accumulating a certain kind of historical record, but they are not original theorists in the way academics are. They use theory for polemic rather than nuance, and so what we’re being presented via Chomsky et al is less an examination of systems than a catalog of what bad is done in the world.

    A lot of the nuance and difficulty and questioning presented by earlier social and cultural theory — as well is political philosophy — gets lost in translation, it seems. At that point it’s good to remember that politics is not actually his intellectual field of expertise and not to treat his word in this area as some kind of gospel.

  36. 36.

    The Bearded Blogger

    @Corey: Oh my god, I followed that link…

    With every lame attempt to turn our kids against us, we now call them on it and point out how ham-fisted, clumsy and square they are. The Left’s worst nightmare came true: The conservatives are the hip ones.

    “Sesame Street” can awkwardly slam FoxNews from the comfort of their stodgy old PBS studios… Meanwhile, we have the cool kids on our side: Dennis Miller, Greg Gutfeld, Andrew Breitbart and yes, even Glenn Beck. And our cool kids are pointing out just how boring, lame, predictable and lazy the other side has become. No longer will middle-America sit back and feel powerless as these snobs pass judgment on what we find to be informative and entertaining.

    We no longer NEED their approval. We see them for what they are: bitter, pompous and desperate

    Greg-has some show at three am in the morning that hardly anbody knows about except for like four canadians cause he pissed them off- Gutfeld is COOL? Dennis-couldn’t fill a room in Vegas if they gave away free beer-Miller is COOL?

    Also, dude, don’t go up against Sesame Streets. Those guys will kick your ass. Specially Elmo

  37. 37.

    Quiddity

    Re: “The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational …”

    Yes, that’s because primitive societies didn’t have telescopes, microscopes, a knowledge of chemistry, or advanced logic. Without such tools, you just can’t get very far. At least not far along the axis of empirical reality – which is what really matters.

    BTW, as bad as Levi-Strauss was, the poststructuralists like Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, are even worse. I’d argue that they diverted many on the left into a cul-de-sac of theoretical irrelevance. (An argument made by Alan Sokal that I found persuasive.)

  38. 38.

    Xenos

    @Corey: It is really sad that 230 people are in there commenting about how Sesame Street is anti-conservative, and that we need a right-wing version of Sesame Street, and so on. These people really long for an alternate reality where everybody is just like them.

  39. 39.

    General Winfield Stuck

    Since we don’t have an Election Open Thread…

    I say we hijack this one because we can.

  40. 40.

    Zuzu's Petals

    @AlanDean:

    Having studied The Raw and the Cooked, I was thrilled to be able to hear him speak at Berkeley.

    The auditorium was packed with people like me hanging over the balconies to catch every word.

    I was too embarrassed to admit his accent was so thick I could barely understand a thing he said.

  41. 41.

    The Bearded Blogger

    @Paula: Oh, I agree completely. I’m a Hardt/Negri guy myself, and I wish people like Peter Singer had more exposure… of course, Singer is smart and provocative and left-leaning so no dice…

  42. 42.

    The Bearded Blogger

    @Paula: Oh, I agree completely. I’m a Hardt/Negri guy myself, and I wish people like Peter Singer had more exposure… of course, Singer is smart and provocative and left-leaning so no dice…

  43. 43.

    Corey

    Seriously, I’ve never actually read Big Hollywood before. While I was over there, there were two posts attacking Sesame Street (the one above, and another one because it promotes multicultural values) and another attacking a PBS documentary of the Great Depression for failing to adhere to conservatives’ completely false narratives on how FDR made it “worse”.

  44. 44.

    The Bearded Blogger

    @Xenos: All of the muppets would a single color: white. Also, it would suck.

    @Quiddity: While I agree that radical constructivism has become a trap for the left, I think an attitude of respect and openness towards non-western cultures, that is, the openness to the possibility of learning something from non-western cultures, is important. Maybe you are lumping too many thinkers in a single bag? The guy to point fingers at is Richard Rorty…

  45. 45.

    Paula

    @ Quiddity

    “I’d argue that they diverted many on the left into a cul-de-sac of theoretical irrelevance.”

    Depends on who’s using it and how. Also, anyone who thinks that deconstruction was introduced as a way to help the working class either 1) does not understand anything about structuralism or poststructuralism or 2) is deliberately misunderstanding them. Also, Sokal is a mathematician, not a literary critic or a sociologist or an anthropologist or a linguist.

  46. 46.

    Max

    @General Winfield Stuck: Who do you think will be the first talking head to say that the results in NY-23 are a referendum on Obama (omitting the fact that a dem hasn’t held that seat in over 100 years).

    My guess(es) is(are) Racist Patty B or Candy Crowly.

  47. 47.

    Brachiator

    @Quiddity:

    Yes, that’s because primitive societies didn’t have telescopes, microscopes, a knowledge of chemistry, or advanced logic. Without such tools, you just can’t get very far. At least not far along the axis of empirical reality – which is what really matters.

    Matters?

    To who?

  49. 49.

    inkadu

    @Xenos: It’s sad that conservatives think PBS should give a shit what conservatives think after 30 years of conservative attempts to kill PBS.

    Big Bird can rip off puppet George Bush’s head and shit down his neck and it won’t make conservatives hate PBS any more than they do already.

  50. 50.

    Keith G

    @inkadu:

    Big Bird can rip off puppet George Bush’s head and shit down his neck

    …

    …while Elmo shakes with uncontrollable laughter.

  51. 51.

    licensed to kill time

    just making my reply arrow show back up by submitting comment. nothing to see here, just move along.

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