Claude Lévi-Strauss, anthropology, and postmodernism

When the expanded edition of Explaining Postmodernism: From Rousseau to Foucault was being published, I re-read several transition figures, i.e., those twentieth-century intellectuals who were important in preparing the groundwork for postmodernism.

One is anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), whom I first read as an undergraduate. Lévi-Strauss formally studied philosophy and law, but because the bulk of his influential career was in anthropological field studies and theory he is sometimes labeled the father of modern anthropology. He is enough of a metaphysical realist not to be a postmodernist, but his positions on other major philosophical issues put him among the forerunners.

Here are three excerpts from his The Savage Mind (University of Chicago Press, 1962).

First, on his and Jean-Paul Sartre’s common inheritance from Karl Marx: “Although in both our cases Marx is the point of departure of our thought, it seems to me that the Marxist orientation leads to a different view, namely, that the opposition between the two sorts of reason is relative, not absolute” (p. 246).

Second, on his anti-humanism, which he shares with Martin Heidegger: “I accept the characterization of aesthete in so far as I believe the ultimate goal of the human sciences to be not to constitute, but to dissolve man” (p. 247).

Third, on his carrying on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s glorification of the primitive: “we therefore remain faithful to the inspiration of the savage mind when we recognize that the scientific spirit in its most modern form will, by an encounter it alone could have foreseen, have contributed to legitimize the principles of savage thought and to re-establish it in its rightful place” (p. 269).

So: Lévi-Strauss is a post-Marxian anti-humanistic primitivist, and thus one of the gurus of the emerging postmodern movement that took off in the late 1960s and is still with us.

Related: