Claude Levi-Strauss Quotes on Knowledge
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), the French anthropologist whose four-volume Mythologiques (1964–71) and the earlier The Savage Mind (1962) established structuralism as the dominant mid-twentieth-century paradigm in anthropology, developed an explicit theory of the cognitive equality of modern scientific and traditional mythical thought. The famous distinction between the "engineer" who works from a stock of purpose-made tools and the "bricoleur" who works from a heterogeneous collection of materials accumulated for prior tasks frames the analysis: mythical knowledge is not pre-logical but logical, working through the systematic combination of culturally available elements according to formal structures the structural anthropologist's task is to reconstruct.
Quotes
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Attributed to Claude Levi-Strauss:
“The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers; he is one who asks the right questions.”
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Attributed to Claude Levi-Strauss:
“The savage mind totalizes; it thinks the whole through the parts.”
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“The entire village left the next day in about thirty canoes, leaving us alone with the women and children in the abandoned houses. [Le village entier partit le lendemain dans une trentaine de pirogues, nous laissant seuls avec les femmes et les enfants dans les maisons abandonnées.]”
Notes in an early work, often cited as an extreme example of androcentrism , even among leading anthropologists, " Contribution à l'étude de l'organisation sociale des Indiens Bororo " (1936) p. 283 -
“Notes in an early work, often cited as an extreme example of androcentrism , even among leading anthropologists, " Contribution à l'étude de l'organisation sociale des Indiens Bororo " (1936) p. 283”
The entire village left the next day in about thirty canoes, leaving us alone with the women and children in the abandoned houses. [Le village entier partit le lendemain dans une trentaine de pirogues, nous laissant seuls avec les femmes et les enfants dans les maisons abandonnées.] -
“The Scope of Anthropology (1960)”
Our science arrived at maturity the day that Western man began to see that he would never understand himself as long as there was a single race or people on the surface of the earth that he treated as an object. Only then could anthropology declare itself in its true colours: as an enterprise reviewing and atoning for the Renaissance, in order to spread humanism to all humanity. -
“These facts make the creator of music a being like the gods, and make music itself the supreme mystery of human knowledge.”
Mythologiques I: Le cru et le cuit (1964) -
“Mythologiques I: Le cru et le cuit (1964)”
These facts make the creator of music a being like the gods, and make music itself the supreme mystery of human knowledge.