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LEVI-STRAUSS
December 4, 2021
"The Key to All Myths" by
Kawame Anthony Appiah
From "The New York Review of Books",
February 13, 2020 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/02/13/claude-levi-strauss-key-to-all-mythologies/
(paywalled)
A write-up of Claude Lévi-Strauss as
an intellectual phenomena, back in THE_FREUD_SYNDROME
the days when pseudo-scientists
dressed-up as pioneers of Social Lévi-Strauss's "structuralism"
Science dominated the intellectual was evidently quite the thing
landscape. from the late-1940s on through
the mid-1960s.
This is a remarkably strong piece:
intelligent and informative, with
commentary that's remarkably This author is
well-written and that to my ear, going on my lists:
never sounds a dubious note.
Kawame Anthony Appiah
Appiah's main deal seems to be
examining the shaky foundations
The title to this piece, of our ethnic and racial
"The Key to All Myths" is "identities", which doesn't
borrowed from a fictional seem terribly exciting to me,
scholarly project featured but someone on Appiah's level
in George Elliot's may be able to do something
"Middlemarch" (1872). with it.
MYTH_KEY With Lévi-Strauss, Appiah does
note the sexism and racism
inherent in many of his
theories, as well as making
fun of his heavily staffed and
highly armed "field work",
where he evidently feared the
(Appiah accuses this of savages would kill him given a
being "in the style of Sir chance.
Richard Burton", which is
not at all fair to Burton, "The French economist and
who had no problem with columnist Guy Sorman wrote
cultural "immersion"-- that 'Lévi-Strauss never
certainly not in the hid the fact that he was a
Middle East where he could conservative (though some
pass for a native.) preferred not to know)'..."
Appiah leads off with a discussion of how sketchy
Lévi-Strauss's early (and only) field work was in POSSESSIVES
Brazil, before he retreated to constructing cloud
castles of theory...
He sketches out some of Lévi-Strauss's
various systems, conceding that "nobody LEVI-STRAUSS_OPPOSITION_PARALLEL
had analyzed myth with such encyclopedic
range and apparent rigor", but making the
point:
"What's striking today is Lévi-Strauss's unabashed
scientism: _Bullfinch's Mythology_ filtered SCIENTISM
through _Principia Mathematica_. This and his
subsequent tomes on the topic were stippled with
mathematics-flavored references..."
Appiah goes over Maurice Godelier's criticisms and
defenses of Lévi-Strauss, but concludes:
"A less charitable reading is that Lévi-Strauss--
who admitted he was 'hopeless' at math as a
student-- had succumbed to a sort of cargo-cult
fetish of mathematical formalism."
And further:
"These formulations felt like insights, but which
could withstand scrutiny? For more earth-bound
anthropologists-- like Leach and Needham, who were
students of Malinowski and Evans-Pritchard-- the
issuances of Lévi-Strauss's brilliant mind began to
strain credulity."
"Lévi-Strauss on myth was like Freud on dreams, Leach
wrote: 'It is all so neat, it simply must be right.
But then you begin to wonder.'"
"Leach summarized Lévi-Strauss's mytho-logic with the
judgment: 'This is poet's country.' Yet in placing him
in a camp with say, the poet and critic William Empson,
he was voicing affection as well as disaffection ..."
Appiah dutifully covers the books he's
been asked to review, but points the
reader interested in Lévi-Strauss back
to an earlier work by Patrick Wilcken:
"Wilcken's gracefully written,
intellectually assured 2010 biography"
"Amid the tumult of May '68, a student
had chalked on a blackboard a searing
slogan of dismissal: 'Structures don't
take to the streets.' "
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