11 - Explaining religious concepts: Lévi-Strauss the brilliant and problematic ancestor

Summary

Claude Lévi-Strauss was arguably the most prominent anthropologist of the twentieth century, certainly one who went further than most in renewing our understanding of universal constraints on human cultures. Surprisingly, his findings and theories have had very little influence on contemporary accounts of religion. This I would contend stems from three reasons. First, Lévi-Strauss was a proponent and an eminent practitioner of something I call the “science mode” in anthropology, while most scholars of religion work from a rather different perspective. Second, Lévi-Strauss clearly had no trust in the notion of “religion”. He did not believe that the term denotes any coherent set of phenomena. He was, I will argue, quite right about that, but this of course did limit the appeal of his models for scholars of religion, many of whom do assume that there is such a domain as “religion”, distinct in important ways from other domains of culture. Third, Lévi-Strauss did not relate his hypotheses and models of cultural phenomena to any precise cognitive models of psychological processes, for the perfectly good reason that the latter did not exist at the time he put forward the basic tenets of structural anthropology. As a result, most structural models lack the psychological precision required to account for actual religious concepts and behaviours.