Claude Levi-Strauss Quotes on Nature
Claude Levi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology, reframed the relation between nature and human culture, and the quotes gathered here show how. Against the long tradition of a natural man prior to society, Levi-Strauss insisted that natural man did not precede society, nor is he outside it, since humanity is social and cultural through and through. He argued that the natural world enters human thought less as a resource than as a system of signs: natural species are chosen by cultures not because they are good to eat but because they are good to think, material for classification and myth. He also saw nature itself as structured economically, using a limited number of procedures that recur at every level of reality. His remark that the world began without man and will end without him, marked here as attributed, sets the human story within a vast indifferent nature.
Quotes
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Attributed to Claude Levi-Strauss:
“Myths get thought in man unbeknownst to him.”
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Attributed to Claude Levi-Strauss:
“The world began without man, and it will end without him.”
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Attributed to Claude Levi-Strauss:
“The savage mind totalizes; it thinks the whole through the parts.”
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“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.”
The Scope of Anthropology (1960) -
“We can understand, too, that natural species are chosen not because they are "good to eat" but because they are "good to think." [Les espèces sont choisies non commes bonnes à manger, mais comme bonnes à penser.]”
Totemism (1962), [ Le Totémisme aujourd'hui , as translated by Rodney Needham], p. 89 | Often paraphrased as "Animals are good to think with". -
“Nature has only a limited number of procedures at her disposal and that the kinds of procedure which Nature uses at one level of reality are bound to reappear at different levels.”
Myth and Meaning(1978) | Chapter 1 : The Meeting of Myth and Science -
“Natural man did not precede society, nor is he outside it.”
Tristes Tropiques(1955) | Chapter 38 : A Little Glass of Rum, p. 392