Word: vi
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...vi-Strauss junks this notion as a complacent and self-serving modern myth. In its place, structuralism substitutes the heretical theory that the human intellect has been fully operative, and in the same fundamental pattern, since the creation of human society. Savage and civilized cultures together play the same game and play it equally well, despite an enormous variation in the results. In short, Lévi-Strauss has asked man to open a profound-and profoundly unsettling-new dialogue with himself...
...vi-Strauss personally, the dialogue began 30 years ago in the South American bush. Born in Brussels to middle-class Jewish parents who did not accept their faith or any other, he grew up in France in a posture of skepticism toward traditionalist thought. At the Sorbonne he read for a philosophy degree-"not because I had any true vocation for it, but because I had sampled other branches of learning and detested them...
...Marx, but his interest was more scientific than ideological. Marx seemed to be talking about realities, hidden behind surface thought, that controlled some of man's responses to his environment. A chance appointment as professor of sociology at the University of Sāo Paulo dispatched Lévi-Strauss in 1935 to Brazil. The new arrival's intellectual curiosity shortly lured him into the jungle on anthropological field trips. The experience permanently altered his appreciation...
...vi-Strauss had expected to find primitive and ignorant peoples frozen in cultural patterns, which, like the toys of childhood, civilization had long since put by. Instead, he found his intellectual peers. The Bororo, a naked tribe of the Brazilian interior, introduced him to a concept of life that might have been taken from the most sophisticated human thought. Whenever a native dies, the Bororo believed, "an injury is done not only to those near him but to society as a whole...
...geometrical face paintings of the Caduveo Indians, Lévi-Strauss recognized not meaningless makeup, but a subtle statement of man's place in the world: "The face paintings confer upon the individual his dignity as a human being: they help him to cross the frontier from nature to culture, and from the 'mindless' animal to the civilized man." He decided that, "without any play on words," both the Caduveo and the Bororo "could be called in their different ways 'learned societies...