Word: levi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...LAST year or so Levi-Strauss has become a kind of cult. For Americans his structural anthropology is new, brilliant, maybe even a way out of the jumble of inexplicable data collected over the years by social science. But a more important part of his appeal is his brashness. Levi-Strauss is a theorist attempting to discover in the materials of culture the universal structures of the human mind. His objectives are just that large, and one senses he may be already part of the way there...
...traditional anthropologists Levi-Strauss is a problem. He doesn't observe their rules-rather than empirical investigations and an emphasis on the behavioral act, LeviStrauss has evolved a formula for cultural analysis that centers on linguistic structures. He goes beyond the observable, and no longer takes as given symbolic meanings, communication and the structure of understanding...
Most Anglo-American criticisms of structural anthropology attack the nature of its evidence. Levi-Strauss's most energetic critic, David Maybury-Lewis, points to inconsistencies, even manipulations of traditional ethnographic data to fit the structural schema. But Levi-Strauss would argue the definitions of social fact must be reevaluated. The functionalist anthropologist's notion that social fact is simply observable social action is too narrow. Structural anthropology expands the definition by trying to observe societies at both their conscious and unconscious levels...
...regardless of the debate over evidence, it must be recognized that Levi-Strauss has made a major, perhaps pivotal, contribution to the way we perceive the world. The implications of structuralism outside anthropology are only beginning to be explored. What is needed most right now is not more obscure criticism of obscure ethnographic details, but a clearer understanding of what Levi-Strauss is trying...
Edmund Leach's Claude Levi-Strauss has been published this year in the Modern Masters series that includes works on Wittgenstein, Marcuse, Guevara, Chomsky, Joyce and others. Concerned primarily with bringing together some of the major themes in contemporary thought, the series (edited by Frank kermonde) has been written by scholars for the general reader...