Lévi-Strauss: Myth's Magician The Language of Antropology

Extract

By the language of anthropology I mean Lévi-Strauss’s language of anthropology, and in particular, the language used by Lévi-Strauss in the three volumes of his Mythologiques which have appeared to date, LeCru et le Cuit (The Cooked and the Raw) 1964; Du Miel auxCendres (From Honey to Ashes) 1966; and L’Origine des Manures de Table (The Origin of Table-Manners) 1968. Since these three thick books have been produced with such amazing rapidity, and since they are little known here in England as yet, and since they represent a radical new departure in anthropological language, it seems useful to make a preliminary estimate of their contents and probable significance.

Lévi-Strauss’s ‘debts’ to structural linguistics, especially that of Jakobson and the Prague School, have been enormously overestimated. The time has come to suggest another view of things, to suggest in what ways the language of anthropology’ as used by Lévi-Strauss is not tied down by an unrelenting linguistic method, is not co-extensive wdth present tendencies in the linguistics of, say, Chomsky. Lévi-Strauss’s language of anthropology is a breakthrough entirely sui generis whose importance is certainly underestimated if it is compared to current linguistic models.

For Lévi-Strauss regards structural analysis as the discovery of a language which is inherent in the materials he studies, not imposed upon them from above by reference to some artificial linguistic schematism. In fact, even by 1952, when he and Jakobson and others met at Bloomington, Indiana, at a Conference of Anthropologists and Linguists, Lévi-Strauss had already found the methods of Jakobson insufficient and partly irrelevant to the work he wanted to do himself.