Unstructured thoughts

The genius Claude Lévi-Strauss has died, just shy of his 101st birthday.


For those of you not enthused by the social sciences, and who were not students in the 70s or 80s, his name may mean little. But he was probably the single most eminent anthropologist of the second half of the twentieth century.


He undertook some rather famous fieldwork with indigenous peoples in Brazil, but it is not that for which he is revered: it is for his development of structuralism.


Immensely influential (how many people have an entire approach named after them?), Lévi-Strauss was a humanist who believed that, no matter how different our societies, we all have fundamental things in common. His insight was to search for those underlying processes, social structures or ways of thinking which were common to all of us.


A far better writer than me summed up his approach rather well in one of the laudatory obituaries that have started to appear:

The basis of the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss is the idea that the human brain systematically processes organised, that is to say structured, units of information that combine and recombine to create models that sometimes explain the world we live in, sometimes suggest imaginary alternatives, and sometimes give tools with which to operate in it. The task of the anthropologist, for Lévi-Strauss, is not to account for why a culture takes a particular form, but to understand and illustrate the principles of organisation that underlie the onward process of transformation that occurs as carriers of the culture solve problems that are either practical or purely intellectual.

His influence spread far beyond the narrow world of anthropology, quickly gaining ground in archaeology before taking over many literature and linguistics faculties.


I spent many happy hours with texts by him and about him (this one by one of his chief English cheerleaders, Cambridge academic Edmund Leach, is a brilliant introductory):


As the same obituary writer summed up:

Many claim and have claimed to be structuralists but it usually turns out that only a limited aspect of his thought has an influence on them, and at worst the adoption of the label "structuralist" was merely a matter of passing fashion. He is a lonely, if imposing, figure in the history of thought.

Claude Lévi-Strauss: He was some kind of a man.