Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss is a anthropologist, Ethnologue and Philosophe French born with Brussels the November 28th 1908.

It is one of the founders of the structuralist thought .

Biography

Youth

His/her father is painter of portrait, that the arrival of photography ruined and his/her large father is the rabbi of the synagog of Versailles. ; then higher learning with the Faculty of Law of Paris (license) and with the Sorbonne (second with the aggregation of Philosophy in 1931, arts doctorate in 1948). It is for this period, briefly on the left committed.

Let us note that it had already evoked this feeling, in very close terms, on July 26th, 1972 (discussion with JeanJosé Marchand) and on May 4th, 1984 (discussion with Bernard Pivot).

Its work

The rebellion against sociology durkheimienne

The French school of sociology was based on the definition of social like “objective order of things”, which the study would concern a specific scientific explanation. This thesis occupies a central place in the work of Durkheim, according to which the social one would constitute an irreducible whole with the sum of the parts which compose it. This theoretical proposal implies in particular that the union of the individuals produces a higher totality which acts on the individual consciences with the manner of a cause external with the personal wills, such reality overhanging the individuals. Moreover, this design supposes a methodological distance compared to the studied object.

Because he affirms that the anthropological step is a step which leads the anthropologist to maintain a position of externality compared to the object of research, or, according to his words, to have a “distant glance” on the studied culture, Claude Lévi-Strauss can be regarded as that which, after Marcel Mauss, prolonged epistemology durkheimienne, while extending to the fields of study traditionally reserved for anthropology, the requirement of distance of the ethnologist compared to his object of study. Claude Lévi-Strauss appears in his design of social like a continuator of the French school of sociology. However, he refutes of “heir criticizes” the chosification of social expensive in Emile Durkheim, reproaching him his subjacent Substantialisme in particular.

Thus, Claude Lévi-Strauss although it accepts work durkheimienne the idea of a structured social order, refutes substantialism present in the design choseist of Emile Durkheim. Indeed, that the facts can, according to the first of the “Rules of the sociological method”, being defined as of the “things” implies, on the one hand, than the company is presented in the form of a “whole” higher than the whole of its parts, and, on the other hand, than this “whole” constitutes a unified totality higher than the units which compose it. This assertion means that, in the whole of the social relations between the men, there is a point where those seem “unified”. In this direction, the vision durkheimienne of the social world is a vision potentially organicist, in what she postulates that the company is organized like a body made up of under-parts interdependent and essential to survival of the “whole”.

However, it would be false to conclude starting from this only criticism which the social order would constitute for Emile Durkheim the prolongation of the human biological tendencies: the author of the “Rules of the sociological method” affirms on the contrary that between the vital one and the social one is added a radically new element which is precisely the representation of the whole, so that the study of social would be also and especially an analysis of the mental one, and sociology a psychology of the conscience of group able to clarify the causality of the collective phenomena.

The originality of this design of social appears, for example, in the theoretical use which Durkheim of makes what the anthropologists then called the “primitive companies”. Durkheim does not regard these companies as “asocial”, with the direction where those would be controls by the only biological tendencies which one believed inherent in the man, but on the contrary as the social groups simplest which are, those where the social things are given to see most clearly. Indeed, for Durkheim, the going beyond of the state of nature appears in them by the fact that these companies first join together and solidarize a small number of individuals between them by what it names “mechanical solidarity”, principle which bases its effectiveness on the interchangeability of the individuals between them. Thus, these companies are, for Durkheim, those which separate from the original biological order by the existence of a conscience of group and by existing conscious solidarity between their elements.

This is why, the primitive companies are not for Durkheim of the companies first to the historical direction of the term, but to the logical direction, because this state first of the things which characterizes them mark the starting point of any human community “forming company”. This passage of the state of “human horde” to the state of “primitive company” would be explained, according to Durkheim, by a “socialization of the affectivity”, which would constitute the point departure where the social one would be expressed before any representation. Recovery and developed by Levy-Bruhl, this thesis will try to explain the transformation of the human groups into human society according to the assumption according to which the going beyond of primitive mentality means the result at higher stage of the logic of affectivity.

Claude Lévi-Strauss opposes this thesis clearly and finds at Marcel Mauss the tools to fight against such a design. Indeed, the primitive companies are not characterized according to Marcel Mauss by their affectivity, but by their intelligence in the establishment of forms of classification. Marcel Mauss shows indeed that, if simple it is, any human society is divided into antagonistic clans and seeks to solve this antagonism by representing the unit of the clan symbolically. In conclusion, which according to Marcel Mauss is logically first is, neither affectivity, nor even the experiment of the world lived, but the conflict and requirements sociopolitic of its resolution.

Thus, in his Test on the gift, Marcel Mauss sees in the exchange of the goods effective means of solving this fundamental antagonism, by the establishment of bond of reciprocity between the clans which give and those which receive. However, Claude Lévi-Strauss joined only partially criticism of Mauss to the theses of Levy-Bruhl on the logical origin of the human society, because it makes in Mauss the same reproach as in Durkheim: that to conceive the social one in a too substantialist way, like an order of things. Claude Lévi-Strauss thus reproaches the school durkheimienne for wanting to study the social facts by taking as starting point of sociological work the study of the genesis of the social one. This is why, with the diagram durkheimien which see a continuity between the vital one, mental and the social one, conceived like successive centered totalities, Claude Lévi-Strauss sees as for him a series of unhooking and off-centrings between the levels of structures, but does not find in sociology durkheimienne any track or indication allowing him to state the principles of fitting of them.

The influence of anthropology culturalist

Fleeing France of Vichy, Claude Lévi-Strauss unloads in 1941 in New York. He will be subject to there the influence of the cultural anthropology then dominant in the United States, incarnated by the anthropologist of German origin Franz Boas. Claude Lévi-Strauss will take as a starting point the theoretical proposals of this school to define the culture. Influenced by German philosophy, the school American culturalist conceives the culture like the whole of elements, arts, leisures, beliefs, family ties, etc, linking a company and controlling its harmony. This design, however, runs up against the following problem: what, in the whole of the conceivable cultural features, leads a company to take such form rather than such other? The anthropologist culturalist Ruth Benedict, for example, supports that this choice is done according to purely esthetic criteria. According to this design, each company would be equipped with a certain freedom of choice, and would incarnate a unit closed on itself, not easily able to interact with the companies which border it. In spite of obvious failures, this thesis has nevertheless the merit theoretically to found the cultural relativism by which it is necessary to understand not only the methodological requirement to study a company without projecting on it criteria of appreciation come from another company, but also an ontological and moral thesis on the effective irreducibility of the companies ones with the others, as well as the need for respecting each culture in its “individual choice”.

Such is however the position of Franz Boas, for whom the true theoretical problem posed by the existence of differentiated cultures consists, on the one hand, to clarify the reasons which bring a whole of differentiated cultures, which one supposes that they function according to identical principles, to adopt distinct cultural features, and, on the other hand, to define the explanatory principles of this differentiation without resorting neither to the racial explanation, neither with the ethnocentrist explanation, nor still to make these differences a question in choices consciously operated by each culture. Sensitive to discovered linguistics, Boas will privilege the explanation of this historical differentiation by the language who answers according to him all the epistemological requirements defended by anthropology culturalist.

Indeed, whereas the produced language, in a given linguistic surface, different languages made up of different words, one can easily locate forms of expression common to the various languages of this surface. Franz Boas affirms that these differences are entirely of cultural origin, because the diversity of the languages prohibited to bring back the differentiation of the languages to a homogeneous biological function. However, it adds, these differences are not conscious, because the characteristic of a language is that one can speak it without knowing the whole of the rules of it. The language thus appears the place par excellence by which can analyze the cultural communication, because only is capable to produce the differences for him which make conspicuous the cultures all while connecting them to the whole of humanity: indeed, any language comes from loans made with other languages and is unconsciously exchanges some with other languages with which it shares turnings, words, sonorities, etc

The introduction of structural linguistics in anthropology

Claude Lévi-Strauss will be interested of close with the work of Boas, without to adhere to the design of the language defended by the German anthropologist, which it reproaches his adhesion the scientific project associated with the philosophical formalism whose claim was to discover the forms and the principles originating in the language by the reduction of the differences empirically observable with certain universal linguistic precepts.

Lévi-Strauss will prefer with this approach a relativistic design of the language of which it will find the bases in the linguistic structuralism professed by Roman Jakobson of which it makes the meeting in New York in 1941. The Russian scientist is distinguished indeed from the formal approach in what he does not seek the forms common to a whole of linguistic phenomena, but, on the contrary, its attention concentrates on the whole of the invariants registered in a field of differences given, i.e. on the rules which govern the distribution of these linguistic differences.

Structural linguistics, such as it is then defined by Roman Jakobson, takes its starting point in the reflection saussurienne on the unit constitutive of the language which is the sign. According to Ferdinand de Saussure, the language does not consist of words, conceived as of the paramount entities which would be then combined in sentence, but of signs, entities double which link a physical phenomenon (the sound, or meaning) and mental phenomenon (the direction, or meant). The sign thus does not have in itself any direction and remains intrinsically variable. The only thing able to fix the sign and to give him a significance, then seems to be the relationship between the sound and the direction, or between meaning and meant. The sign thus does not return to nothing (it is not a representation), and is only one relationship between a sound and an idea.

Consequently, which must be studied in the language, it is well the whole of the relationship inside the sign and between the signs themselves. This is why Saussure defines the sign as an oppositive, relative and negative entity: negative because a sign does not have in itself any direction, relative because the direction of a sign occurs only through the relationship between meaning and meant, and oppositive because the signs are between them in reports/ratios of opposition and distinction.

This definition of the sign implies a definition of the language like system. Indeed, if the sign cannot be studied compared to the phenomenon which it states, but only compared to the bonds which link it with the language, then the language must itself be approximate in the whole of the reports/ratios which constitute it, i.e. as a systemic reality. According to Saussure, a language is thus a system of differential difference between signs, and it is only starting from the totality of the reports/ratios constitutive of a language that the direction of a sign can be established.

According to Ferdinand de Saussure, this study of the language can be made, either according to a synchronic optics observing the whole of the reports/ratios constituting the language at one time given of its history, or according to a diachronic approach attentive with the transformations of the relationship between the signs, and in particular with the disorders induced by the inherent instability of the sign that Saussure explains by the intrinsically arbitrary character linking meaning it with meant. In this direction, linguistics is defined by Ferdinand de Saussure like the study of the language conceived like a whole of signs set up in system, and not like study of the word and the linguistic performance carried out by the speakers.

The theoretical framework saussurien influenced in a decisive way work of Jakobson Novel and Nikolaï Troubetskoï. However, two linguistics criticized the abstract character of it and reproached Saussure for having defended an insufficiently operative ideal model. Thus, in order to constitute linguistics in autonomous science, equipped with an object of study distinct from that from the other disciplines, and in particular from philosophy, the two linguists undertook to extend the postulates of Saussure to a new field of sciences of the language: phonology, or science of the phonemes. The phoneme is then defined as distinctive phonetic opposition of a language whose combinations with other phonetic oppositions produce the whole of the meaning sounds. Distinction thus made between the phoneme heard like sound unit, and phonology like science of the combinative relationship between these sounds become meaning by the fact of even being combined, constitutes the starting point of the structuralist linguistics developed by Roman Jakobson.

The development of the structuralist postulates in linguistics encourages to replace the sign saussurien in its role of central theoretical concept by the phoneme, unit of sound and direction. Roman Jakobson thus locates two main roads from which take place the combinations between its and direction: on the one hand, the axis that it names syntagmatic which is that of the succession of close sounds, but from which the direction is different (for example, Billard and Plunderer), and, on the other hand, the paradigmatic axis which is that of the replacement between substitutable sounds whose direction is the same one (for example, Pillard and Brigand).

In order to locate these axes, Roman Jakobson is based on two different sources: on the one hand, analysis of the poetic functions (metonymy for the syntagmatic and metaphorical axis for the paradigmatic axis) and, on the other hand, analysis of the dysfunctions of the language (for example, the case of the aphasia shows, according to him, that one can lose the knowledge of the significance of the words without to lose the capacity to associate them in grammatically correct statements). “Only linguistic unit without conceptual contents, the phoneme, deprived of clean significance, is a tool being used to distinguish the significances”.

Thus, the theoretical work of Jakobson Novel exceeds it the mode of analysis saussurien relationship between the studied signs like chains linear meaning or like whole of the relations of adjacency between the signs. Indeed, Roman Jakobson widens considerably the study of the language to the poetry which knew according to him to use all the resources of the language.

Lévi-Strauss will adapt the postulates developed by Jakobson, and will transpose the structuralist basic principles of the analysis of the language to that of the social representations, according to the assumption that the social representations, because they are expressed through the language, are also structured by differential relations of opposition (cold, dry/wet heat/, day/night, etc).

Dialog and competition with the psychoanalysis freudienne

The teaching of Jakobson leads Lévi-Strauss to specify the intuition of Boas according to which anthropology must imperatively make the study of unconscious linguistics animating any human society. The formulation of the theoretical postulates of structuralist anthropology in term of unconscious obliges Lévi-Strauss to confront its theses with the psychoanalytical designs freudiennes. Thus, the anthropologist addresses it two criticisms to the principles constitutive of the analysis freudienne of unconscious individual. On the one hand, Lévi-Strauss draws aside the idea formulated by Freud according to which the explanation of the forms of unconscious could be brought back to a historical explanation. Of other, share, it refuses to reduce the forms of expression of unconscious to those of such or such primitive biological function of man (desire, reproduction, instinct of survival, etc), such as the psychoanalysis conceives it.

In its work entitled Totem and Tabou , Freud analyzed a pathology like the obsessional neurosis in the light of the ethnographic accounts describing the interdicts attached to the objects totemic, instituted in certain primitive companies. He declared whereas these interdicts related to the totems could certainly be explained by the significance which the company allotted to them. Sigmund Freud then thought of giving direction to these interdicts constitutive of the primitive human society, by the definition of a universal concept making it possible to apprehend the behavioral structure of the individuals: the Oedipus complex.

This one is defined like a matrix governing the sexual instinct, founded on the driven back desire of ego of union with the mother and murder of the father. Thus, for Freud, the presence of the totem and prohibited affecting it would take direction through the mythical figure of the original father of the tribe. Indeed, Freud imagines that this one was the object of an assassination orchestrated by the tribe during a ceremony marking the beginning of the history. According to this assumption, the maintenance of the totem symbolizing the figure of the father could thus be explained by the remorses felt and expressed by the brothers after the murder, who, consequently, decided the construction of a totem being used to point out the murder of the original father and prohibition to renew such an act.

This explanation, although it has the merit to exceed the explanations formulated by traditional psychology by the rational interpretation which it proposes of phenomena that the psychologists regarded before as deeply irrational, however presents the disadvantage of interpreting this behavioral structure only through one only and single mode of explanation: the sexual instinct, to which Freud allots a certainly disproportionate role in the realization of historical and social facts central for the comprehension of the operation of the human society, primitives like modern. On this subject, Lévi-Strauss will say that “the traumatisant capacity of an event or an unspecified situation could not result from their intrinsic natures, but of the aptitude of certain events emerging in a context psychological, historical and social suitable, to induce an emotional crystallization which is done in the mould of a preexistent structure”.

Lévi-Strauss thus reproaches has Freud to reduce the problems of the Oedipus to the only desire of ego of union with the mother, and, consequently, to draw aside the whole of the resources, sociological, astronomical, culinary and environmental, mobilized by the socialized individual and which are, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss, constitutive of the notations symbolic of the social world. Claude Lévi-Strauss opposes to the approach freudienne, a comprehension of unconscious animated by the discoveries of the linguistics, and whose theoretical main objective is to include/understand how the cultures answer each one their way with the following question: “How the “same one” is born it from “same” or of different”.

This question can, from its formulation, to seem abstract, but it however animates the main part of the notations symbolic of the social world, the design of historical time (linear or circular), and also includes dimensions symbolic systems as vast as those which structure the sexual practices, the representations of the body, the feelings, the religious beliefs, etc

The merit that Lévi-Strauss recognizes however with the psychoanalysis is to have known to overflow the disciplinary framework of traditional psychology thanks to the formulation of explanatory assumptions of the individual behaviors underlining the bond between unconscious individual, on the one hand, and cultural and collective phenomenon, on the other hand.

Nevertheless, enfermement of the psychoanalysis to the clinical practice by definition the diversity of its empirical material limits to the only individual word and the only biographical account, and reduces automatically the diversity of its sources. Circumscribed with the collection of the word and, sometimes approximate, of the myths founders, the psychoanalysis makes, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss, an error when she proposes a historical model of reading of the phenomena based on the sexual instinct and the social methods of her repression and her repression, phenomena to which the psychoanalysis allots, according to the anthropologist, an oversize role. Moreover, this shelf leads the psychoanalysis to draw aside implicitly from other dimensions considered by Lévi-Strauss as quite as important as sexuality.

Lévi-Strauss criticizes finally the epistemological bases which animate the whole work of the doctor Viennese, and its implication in the scientific vast project undertaken as from the 20th century reproaches him which a long time animated the Western science, and whose claim consisted in seeking, in the organization of the “primitive companies”, in the memories which the adults preserve of their childhood, like in the behavioral features of the individuals suffering from psychopathologies, a state originating in humanity.

Faithful to the definition of the social facts defended by Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss can only refute in block of similar assumptions. In its work entitled the totemism today , it defends that “the social, positive and negative constraints, are explained, neither as for their origin, nor as for their persistence, by the effect of impulse or emotions which would reappear with the same characters, during the centuries and of the millenia, at different individuals. The men do not act, as a member of the group, in accordance with what each one feels like individual; each man feels according to the way in which it is allowed to him or proscribed to act”.

Indeed, for the structural anthropology, the inceste would represent only one structural possibility, itself created by a set of social constraints. Consequently, if a given company celebrates or feels reluctant the inceste, it is not for reasons of personal history, as the psychoanalysis thought it, but for the simple reason which any company puts in scene, through festivals and of ceremonies, disorder that it knew to exceed at a given time of its history. “The festivals play the social life with back, not because it formerly was such, but because it forever be, and will be never differently”, affirms Claude Lévi-Strauss in his central theoretical work, elementary structures of the relationship .

The thesis defended in this work founder of the structural anthropology, is, on the one hand, that the unconscious individual one is structured by a whole of binary oppositions symbolic systems, and, on the other hand, that this one is constituted compared to the possibility of a possible social disorder (of chaos or hell, it does not matter the name that one allots to him, because the representations of the disorder are very diversified) specific to each culture.

Defined as whole of meaning symbolic systems structured, the design lévi-straussienne of unconscious very clearly positions its author like partisan of a relativistic approach of the significances symbolic systems. Indeed, where a psychoanalytical theorist of formation as Jung would more register its analysis around precepts resulting from the philosophy of the forms symbolic systems, Lévi-Strauss takes again the diagram developed in linguistics by Jakobson to include/understand, not the significance of the symbols, but the reports/ratios which link them.

These two orientations theoretical, realistic for Jung and relativist for Lévi-Strauss, imply fundamental divergences theoretical, in particular for all that touches with the interpretation of the contents symbolic system of the signs, i.e. with the direction which one can allot to the symbols, like with the mythological accounts collected by the anthropologist by way of observation.

Thus, whereas Jung firstly seeks to approach the universal and absolute significance specific to each symbol, Lévi-Strauss, as for him, will propose to relativize the significance of each symbol taken separately, in order to include/understand the operation of the relations linking the symbols, and to seize the unit of direction of it.

The scientific project that Lévi-Strauss proposes with Anthropology thus supports very clearly on structural linguistics, and particularly on the concept of phoneme zero. He challenges the substantialism which animates the theses of Jung, and opposes to him a relativistic approach, which supports that the significance of each symbol depends, on the one hand, of the social context, on the other hand, of the content and the direction that he maintains with the other symbols, and, finally, of often approximate interpretation that the individuals have some, and of the multiplicity of the social uses who can, consequently, to be made about it.

From this observation, Lévi-Strauss concludes in an abstract way and certainly speculative, affirming that the unconscious structures which act on the individuals hold their origins of a whole of shifts between meaning and meant. Indeed, for Lévi-Strauss, the intrinsically human capacity almost indefinitely to allot direction to the objects, the signs, the dead things and the alive things, causes a situation in which the environment which surrounds the man is completely saturated with direction. However, this situation universally tested by the human society would be, according to Lévi-Strauss, able to generate the shifts between meaning and meant which are at the origin of the structures of the unconscious one.

In conclusion, to the thesis of Freud which claimed to explain the emergence of unconscious by the original murder of the father, Lévi-Strauss opposes a mode of explanation inspired by discovered structural linguistics, which explains the appearance of the “function symbolic system” by excess of meaning on meant.

Structural anthropology and renewal of the glance related to the social sciences

The scientific program established by structuralism upsets consequently the glance which one can carry on the field of social sciences and the reports/ratios linking the various disciplines which compose it. Indeed, if one recognizes the epistemological validity of the working hypotheses constitutive of the structuralist paradigm, it becomes inadequate then of speaking about anthropology like “linguistics, social science” like the science of the language, or of sociology like science of the “social facts”, and confining each discipline to an exclusive object of study.

The object which interests anthropology is thus not a hypothetical origin of the species which would give place to a “classification of the races”, such as formulated it the anthropology of XIXe, nor even the search for a genesis of the social reports/ratios to which sociology had been able to give all its attention when she studied the primitive companies in order to include/understand the stages which she supposed more complex and more advanced of the social life. Anthropology must, according to Lévi-Strauss, to devote itself to the research of the reports/ratios linking the man in the world which surrounds it.

In order to reach that point, the anthropologist must thus, initially, immerse himself in the studied culture and to describe the way in which the man speaks, dream, acts, produced, in order to foresee how is structured locally the relationship observed between the myths, the techniques, the representations of the relationship, and, in the second time, how those can bring anthropology, thanks to the insulation of certain universally observable structural invariants, to formulate general properties of the social life.

Concept of structure

The centrality is thus included/understood that Lévi-Strauss grants to the concept of structure, but also the reasons which made of it, throughout last century, one of the concepts most discussed in social sciences. Indeed, the term of structure is, since its appearance, the object of multiple interpretations and very diverse uses. The abundance of the discussions held around this term is explained by the fact why its emergence within social sciences is former to the structural anthropology, and that it conveys a whole of various theoretical representations energy of the Marxist dichotomy opposing infrastructure and superstructure, with the durkheimienne definition of social like “order of things”.

Of this sum of debates, sociology will preserve, for example, the idea that the company is organized in structured reports/ratios. For “pre-structuralist” anthropology, it indicates primarily a type of cultural configuration. Lastly, for linguistics, it is used to define the language as whole of differential differences between the signs.

Such an inventory of the made uses of the concept of structure could also continue in direction of sciences of nature which use this term to describe the organization of the living organisms. Nevertheless, the structures studied in social sciences are distinguished from those which interest the natural science by the fact that they are not the subject of no measurement, and that they could give place to unspecified predictions. Consequently, the analysis of the social structures cannot claim to provide an infallible grid of reading of the social facts, and only intends to update certain differential properties of objects. This epistemological limitation entirely assumed by Lévi-Strauss leads it to distinguish from empirical reality, the ideal model built starting from the concept of structure. “The basic principle is that the concept of structure does not refer to empirical reality, but with the models built according to this one”.

Structural anthropology and History

In conclusion, it is necessary for us to return to the reasons which resulted in opposing in a sometimes excessive way, the structural anthropology with the History. Traditionally, the opposition between the two disciplines was conceived like concerning a difference of object, the first being interested in the foreign companies in space, the second student, as for it, the remote companies in time. This distinction appears nevertheless not very relevant taking into consideration lesson professed by the structural anthropology. Indeed, although the space and geographical opposition of the companies can constitute a fundamental criterion of distinction, structuralism, because he recognizes an evolution of the companies in time, intends to exceed this cleavage.

For Lévi-Strauss, the only relevant distinction between the two disciplines lies then in the mode of extraction of empirical material. Indeed, whereas the History works primarily on documents produced by actors conscious of the historical changes, of which they are the witnesses and even sometimes the actors, anthropology will choose to draw aside this form of account of the conscious actions who takes part in façonnement of the speech of the historian, and will privilege, as for it, a study of the unconscious structures acting the companies, which it carries out starting from the empirical observation of the myths, the techniques and the representations present in the speech. In order to achieve such a goal, it will be based in particular on the analysis of the social organization and linguistics unconsciously reproduced by the company taken like object of study. Frederic Keck will say on this subject that anthropology “does not connect all its data to the linear order of the event, but seeks to establish an inventory of the unconscious oppositions through which the men make the history without knowing how they do it”.

Thus, the structural anthropology proposes it to write the history according to the logical possibilities of change present outstanding in the unconscious structures of any company, without to underestimate the unforeseeable character of the historical event. Contrary, History produced, compared to anthropology, a speech in unhooking, since it treats the history in “its conscious face”. In conclusion, one can thus think that the idea which made structuralism lévi-straussien a resolutely anti-historiciste paradigm is basically reducing, because the approaches constitutive of each of the two disciplines locate the history and the anthropology in a situation which are connected more with that of opposite, allowing the dialog and the exchange, which with that of one of confrontation.

Study of the relations of relationship

Using the structuralist method, Lévi-Strauss gave a new breath to the studies of the Parenté. It is the first to insist on the importance of the alliance within the structures of relationship, and will highlight the need for the exchange and the reciprocity rising from the Prohibition of the inceste. Accordingly, it will go until advancing the idea that any human society is founded on a minimal unit of relationship: the atom of relationship. This total theory is known more commonly under the name of Théorie of alliance .

Distinctions

  • Elected in 1973 with the armchair 29 of the French Academy. Oldest member of the Academy since the death of the professor Jean Bernard in 2006, vice-senior of election since the death of Henri Troyat in 2007.
  • foreign Member of the National Academy off Sciences of the United States of America.
  • Member of the British Academy
  • Member of the royal Academy of the Netherlands
  • Member of the Norwegian Academy of the letters and sciences
  • Preserving of honor of the Museum of the quay Branly, named in 2007

French and foreign decorations

  • Grand Cross of the Legion of honor
  • Commander of the National order of the Merit
  • Commander of the academic Palms
  • Commander of the Arts and the Letters
  • Commander about the Crown of Belgium
  • Commander about the Cross of the South of Brazil
  • Order of the Rising sun, Star of gold and money
  • Grand Cross about the scientific Merit of Brazil

Price and Medals

  • Gold medal and Price of the Viking Fund, 1966
  • Gold medal of CNRS, 1967
  • Price Erasme, 1973
  • Price of the Foundation Nonino, 1986
  • Price Aby Mr. Warburg, 1996
  • Price Meister Eckhart, 2002

Doctor honoris causa

(alphabetically)

Works

Appendices

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