Le regard éloigné

by Claude Lévi-Strauss

These essays encompass more than forty years of analysis and contain arguments that are as relevant today as they were when Claude Levi-Strauss first wrote them.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Humanities

398 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist, well-known for his development of structural anthropology. He was born in Belgium to French parents who were living in Brussels at the time, but he grew up in Paris. His father was an artist, and a member of an intellectual French Jewish family. Lévi-Strauss studied at the University of Paris. From 1935-9 he was Professor at the University of Sao Paulo making several expeditions to central Brazil. Between 1942-1945 he was Professor at the New School for Social Research. In 1950 he became Director of Studies at the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes. In 1959 Lévi-Strauss assumed the Chair of Social Anthroplogy at the College de France. His books include The Raw and the Cooked, The Savage Mind, Structural Anthropology and Totemism (Encyclopedia of World Biography).

Some of the reasons for his popularity are in his rejection of history and humanism, in his refusal to see Western civilization as privileged and unique, in his emphasis on form over content and in his insistence that the savage mind is equal to the civilized mind.

Lévi-Strauss did many things in his life including studying Law and Philosophy. He also did considerable reading among literary masterpieces, and was deeply immersed in classical and contemporary music.

Lévi-Strauss was awarded the Wenner-Gren Foundation's Viking Fund Medal for 1966 and the Erasmus Prize in 1975. He was also awarded four honorary degrees from Oxford, Yale, Havard and Columbia. Strauss held several memberships in institutions including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society (Encyclopedia of World Biography).

Reviews

[Sam Schulman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This late book is a must because it contains the essential essay "Race and Culture," which scandalized UNESCO (which commissioned it) in 1971 when he delivered it as an address, because of "five sins" against orthodoxy, partially because of his careful delineation of what racism really is, because as LS says, "nothing so much comprimises the struggle against racism, or weakens it from the inside, or vitiates it, as the undiscriminating use of the word racism... " Racism IS "a false but explicit theory," it is NOT "a set of "common inclinations and attitudes from which it would be illusory to imagine that humanity can one day free itself or even that it will care to do so."
His sins:
1. The old arguments against the old pseudo-science of physical anthropology,measuring skin color, etc., are not sufficient. "The struggle against racism requires a broad dialogue with population genetics."
2. It is an abuse of language to confuse racism in the strict sense of the term with "attitudes that are normal, even legitimate, and in any case unavoidable." Racism is NOT the feeling that one places "one way of life or thought above all others or to feel little drwawn to other people or groups whose ways of life, respectable in themselves, are quite remote from the system to which one is traditionally attached." This "relative incommunicability" is "not at all repugnant," except if it authorizes someone to "repress or destroy the values one has rejected," which is. In fact L-S says this loyalty to one's own group and values "may even be the price to be paid so that the systems of values of each spiritual family or each community are preservedd and find within themselves the resources necessary for their renewal." :human societies "exhibit a certain optimal diversity beyond which they cannot go, but below which they can no longer descend without danger" - and this diversity results from an admirable and necessary "desire of each culture" "to be itself" - by resisting "the cultures surrounding them,."
3. To declare that the end result of true multicult (though he doesn't use the word) would be "a world whose cultures, all passionately fond of one anther, would aspire only to celebrate one another ... each would lose any attraction it could have for the others and its own reasons for existing."
4. Saying that it was not enough to "revel in high-flown words" if yuou wanted to change humanity.
5. Asking UNESCO to note the self-contradiction of simultaneous goals like "creative affirmation of each identity" and "rapprochement of all cultures."
Read it.
Also this volume includes the best brief summation I know of every possible kind of marriage among societies known to history and social science, which does include marriage between two women, but does not include heretofore marriage between two men.
And there is a memoir of coming to New York City in the 40s as a refugee and living there as a foreigner which is as marvelous as anything by Dawn Powell.

[Luke Coughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Levi-Strauss frames mythology as Stephen Jay Gould does evolution: mankind, like all organic material, has a limited toolbox. Our various environments have forced us to make innovative use of these tools, or to adapt our limited minds to comprehend divergent and alien situations. The popular (and ascendant) ideas of Jung are found in a more scientifically and professionally rigorous form in the works of Levi-Strauss, whose field work finds commonalities in the strangest and most diverse cultures; vast differences are explained by way of specific instruments, by intra-group antagonism, by small environmental differences which created historically significant cleavages and rivalries. Changes evident in modern history are found in myth and the workings of these myths reflect the same human tendencies from Canada to New Guinea. Emerson says that nature makes uses a select few laws to create infinite variety in her works; here, we see how a few small changes in human society created an incredible range of cultures, and how myth can be used to trace these changes back to simple origins. An enlightening book.