Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction An intellectual biography
- Chapter 1 Lévi-Strauss, linguistics and structuralism
- Chapter 2 Kinship as communication
- Chapter 3 The illusion of totemism
- Chapter 4 Myths without meaning?
- Chapter 5 Structuralism, shamanism and material culture
- Chapter 6 The structure of nostalgia
- Chapter 7 Lévi-Strauss and the study of religions
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 1 - Lévi-Strauss, linguistics and structuralism
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction An intellectual biography
- Chapter 1 Lévi-Strauss, linguistics and structuralism
- Chapter 2 Kinship as communication
- Chapter 3 The illusion of totemism
- Chapter 4 Myths without meaning?
- Chapter 5 Structuralism, shamanism and material culture
- Chapter 6 The structure of nostalgia
- Chapter 7 Lévi-Strauss and the study of religions
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The human sciences will be structuralist or they will not be at all… The ethnologist, faced with thousands of societies and the incredible multiplicity of facts, must do one of two things: Either he can only describe and take inventory of all this diversity, and his work will be very estimable but it will not be scientific. Or else he will have to admit that behind this diversity there lies something deeper, something common to all its aspects. This effort to reduce a multiplicity of expressions to one language, this is structuralism. Maybe someday it will no longer be called that; I don't know and I don't care. But the effort to find a deeper and truer reality behind the multiplicity of apparent realities, that seems to be the condition of survival for the human sciences, whatever the undertaking is called.
(Claude Lévi-Strauss, There are no Superior Societies)According to Lévi-Strauss, the conjunction of structural linguistics and social anthropology is a “revolution” akin to a “paradigm shift,” to borrow Kuhn's (1970) famous phrase, in the social sciences. “A transformation of this magnitude,” he writes, “is not limited to a single discipline” (Lévi-Strauss 1993a, 33). As such, Lévi-Strauss confidently claims that structural linguistics will play a “renovating role with respect to the social sciences” (Lévi-Strauss 1993a, 33), an argument premised on the notion that structural linguistics is the only one of the social sciences “which can truly claim to be a science” (1993a, 31), and that social anthropology, at least until this momentous conjunction of forces, has lacked the necessary synthetic rigour through which it might properly call itself a science.
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- Information
- Lévi-Strauss on ReligionThe Structuring Mind, pp. 9 - 28Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2008