Claude Levi-Strauss
Claude Levi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theory of structuralism and structural anthropology. He held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France between 1959 and 1982 and was elected a member of the Académie française in 1973. He received numerous honors from universities and institutions throughout the world and has been called, alongside James George Frazer and Franz Boas, the "father of modern anthropology"...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth28 November 1908
CountryFrance
order achievement world
The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of a complexity as yet unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious mass of noxious by-products which now contaminate the globe. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.
children order punishment
Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as an adult, in order to deny him consolation.
book order land
In the old days, people used to risk their lives in India or in the Americas in order to bring back products which now seem to us to have been of comically little worth, such as brazilwood and pepper, which added a new range of sense experience to a civilization which had never suspected its own insipidity... From these same lands our modern Marco Polos now bring back the moral spices of which our society feels an increasing need as it is conscious of sinking further into boredom, but that this time they take the form of photographs, books, and travelers tales.
began french-scientist
The world began without man, and it will end without him.
against although attributes capable comparable creator holds immense itself key language majority meaning minority music musical mystery people science since supreme tiny various
Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.
aware claim french-scientist men minds myths operate therefore
I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact.
answers french-scientist mind provide
The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.
alone among french-scientist individual man nor society
Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe.
facts mystery humans
These facts make the creator of music a being like the gods, and make music itself the supreme mystery of human knowledge.
thinking numbers criticism
I think that a society cannot live without a certain number of irrational beliefs. They are protected from criticism and analysis because they are irrational.
confused teaching greatness
Teaching and research are not to be confused with training for a profession. Their greatness and their misfortune is that they are a refuge or a mission.
past ideas race
Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of progress are in danger of failing to recognize... the immense riches accumulated by the human race. By underrating the achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accomplished.
years enhancement towns
In the case of European towns, the passing of centuries provides an enhancement; in the case of American towns, the passing of years brings degeneration. It is not simply that they have been newly built; they were built so as to be renewable as quickly as they were put up, that is, badly.
loss effectiveness savages
The work of the painter, the poet or the musician, like the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental and the only one really common to us all; scientific thought is merely the sharp point more penetrating because it has been whetted on the stone of fact, but at the cost of some loss of substance and its effectiveness is to be explained by its power to pierce sufficiently deeply for the main body of the tool to follow the head.