Lévi-Strauss , tel que je l'ai connu
Par Guy Sorman - Mis en ligne le 06.11.2009 à 17:35
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| Claude Levi -Strauss who just died in Paris at the age of 101 , had been the seminal French public intellectual. His influence has been felt all over the world and still is , in the field of culture and anthropology . So many obituaries have been published all over the place that one does not need to add one more . What may have been forgotten or not enough underlined , is how much he owed to New York . “ When I lived in New- York, Levi -Strauss told me , when we used to meet at his Paris apartment for tea , I discovered that the whole world could be found in New York “. By that , he meant two things . First , as a passionate collector of antique and so called primitive art , he would scout New York antique shops . In those shops, not as an anthropologist working in the field, he discovered American Indian artefacts and rituals. Later on, he would write score of books about the North Western American Indians and their totems. Also , New York was the place where Levi Strauss joined a circle of other Jewish refugees : himself had escaped from occupied France in 1941. He could reach the US with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation . He was then hired by the New School of social science , then he became a cultural attaché for the French embassy , until 1947 when he returned to Paris. Two scholars he met in New -York would prove decisive and turned around his world view. One could argue that Levi Strauss became the Levi Strauss we know while in New York : without his New York experience , he may have remained an anthropologist among others. Franz Boas, a German refugee , the most influential anthropologist of his time , expelled from Germany by the so called Aryan laws , conveyed to Levi Strauss his notion of cultural relativism. Before Boas, most western scholars would apply the concept of evolution to cultures : western cultures were perceived as being at the summit of evolution and primitive cultures at the bottom , in a permanent stage of infancy . Not so, according to Boas : he taught that all cultures were equally complex and mature , all different but none superior to any other . Levi Strauss started from where Boas left ( he died in 1942) : he demonstrated , book after book how all supposedly primitive cultures were coping with the same essential and existential challenges as the modern man : life , death , marriage , God…Like Boas , Levi -Strauss will show how cultures did not coincide with race : before him, both had often been confused . If culture and race were distinct , if no culture was superior , then racism had no justification whatsoever. The global aura of Levi Strauss comes very much from his scientific demolition of racist prejudice : you do not need to have read Levi Strauss to be aware of that . Such an equanimity does not exclude , according to Levi Strauss that some cultures are better equipped than others to solve human problems or to confront changes . Levi Strauss was not naively in love with anything deemed as primitive : he certainly was not against scientific progress. He considered however that six billion people on earth was a lot , too much for him to feel at ease in the twentieth century. The other decisive encounter was the linguist Roman Jakobson , also an exiled Jewish intellectual in New York , from Russia. Jakobson had shown that all languages shared common structures : like cultures, they were all different but had all to solve similar communication problems . Levi Strauss would then borrow from Jakobson his concept of “invariable structure “ and apply it to the social world of culture . Thus , the reputed Levi Strauss structuralism was born : any rituals in any culture , according to Levi Strauss , were structurally similar. Equipped with this systemic tool , Levi Strauss would spend the rest of his life , in showing the inherent , hidden structure behind apparently mysterious, cryptic and mythological rituals and habits. This would allow Levi Strauss not to travel to remote places which he found quite uncomfortable : he better stayed at home and analyzed the ethnographic discoveries brought to him by explorers and anthropologists. “ They are happy to spend a year in a tropical land and I am happy , he told me, to stay in Paris and write in my “ laboratory” , listening to classical music “. Levi Strauss structuralism has been under attack since the 1960s , mostly from a Marxist and Existentialist perspective : structuralism was accused of being ignorant of social changes and social struggles. Well, Levi -Strauss never his the fact that he was a conservative ( some would prefer not to listen ) . To the end of his life , with a sharp humor , he defended his New York mentors and his Structuralist theory . American anthropologists , he told me, behave like fiction writers , novelists , not scientists : they travel to exotic spots , they tell what they saw but do not understand it. They have no scientific rigor . “ Structuralism, he said , is like a magnifying glass : without such an eyeglass glass , you do not see clearly . With a eyeglass , many things appear which you would have missed” . “ However , you must remember how unperfect your eyeglass is “! Was Levi- Strauss the remote scientist he appeared to be ? Not really . He was strangely fond of politics and always rejoiced when conservatives won elections , be it in France or in his beloved New York. New-York, 6 novembre
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