The Savage Mind (Nature of Human Society)

Rating:
Summary: Ado About Much
Review: Academic scholarship does not generally lend itself to masterpieces. One tends to balance detail and complexity against efficiency, to narrow one's audience while deepening argumentation. Thus the truly great books of a particular discipline are often incomprehensible outside it, while the wonderfully accessible books rarely do more than describe what others have done.

The Savage Mind is one of a small number of exceptions to this rule. In a book that requires no prior knowledge of anthropology, Lévi-Strauss succeeds in leveling a major challenge to his discipline and simultaneously to every reader. In elegant, graceful prose, he meticulously dissects his objects, formulates his arguments, and stretches the range of theoretical speculation to cover an extraordinary range of material from all over the world-including the modern.

In the nearly fifty years since this book first appeared, however, much has changed. Structuralism, for which The Savage Mind served as something of a manifesto, has collapsed beneath the weight of its own logical formation and the critical assaults of various respondents-not all of them well-informed. But even that most scathing critic of structuralism, Jacques Derrida, has noted repeatedly that we can never really go back: structuralism is part of our thinking now, and the only way out is through. To put it simply, if you never read this book, you will never gain the right to criticize structuralism as a method for studying culture.

Another thing that has changed is basic education. Lévi-Strauss takes it for granted that we all know quite a bit about European literature, music, and art; that we know who the painter Clouet was, and the difference between Mannerism and Impressionism. He doesn't assume expertise, but a kind of general cultural education no longer usual. This can make some of his analyses opaque, where they are intended to be illustrative. Just as you can skim these arguments, which are often problematic anyway, you don't actually need to know much about totemic practices to understand; he summarizes what's important, and so long as you don't intend to challenge through data, you need no background.

Lévi-Strauss's arguments proceed methodically and exceedingly rapidly. Their weight lies in their logic, not their particulars; that is, it really doesn't matter whether his interpretation of any one myth or ritual is correct, but rather whether the means of going about it makes rigorous sense. He is not expert on everything, and he often inserts such phrases as, "Without presuming to decide this issue...." This is not mere qualification: he distinguishes between illustration of method and rigorous analysis of particular material. If you want him to analyze material, go read The Raw and the Cooked; if you want to know how he does it, read The Savage Mind.

To put this differently, to pick on trivia here is to miss the point. Perhaps you do name your pets differently than he does. Perhaps the Murngin creation-myth has a step he forgets to mention. Perhaps the interpretation of Clouet doesn't really quite make sense if you know much about Clouet. So what? These are illustrations, not proofs. The same happens with the famous essay "The Structural Study of Myth": Lévi-Strauss proposes a reading of Oedipus which, though wildly suggestive and interesting, really doesn't make a lot of sense for Oedipus, and leads to a stunningly silly conclusion. No matter: the point is to demonstrate how the method works. Again, if you want to see him analyze something, you don't read his pure theory books; you read The Raw and the Cooked, or Totemism, or (especially) The Elementary Structures of Kinship. So long as you can work out how the method functions, Lévi-Strauss thinks you should go test it yourself, on material you know. Then, if it doesn't work, you can come back and criticize.

As we read The Savage Mind, we are constantly forced to slow down. Lévi-Strauss has a tendency to condense an enormous argument into a paragraph, then move on; unlike his best American and English counterparts, who make their analyses as explicit as possible, Lévi-Strauss takes the classically French approach of hitting the highlights in the topic and concluding sentences of a paragraph, then putting all the illustrative detail of logic and material into the middle. This is a matter of style, a choice and not a vice. So if you really want to understand the book, you actually have to work through his examples very slowly and carefully. Otherwise one has a tendency to lose the thread and simply become bewildered.

Unfortunately, this translation is, as Clifford Geertz and everyone else has noticed, execrable. Some sentences are not even acceptable English grammar, to say nothing of their failures to render Lévi-Strauss's beautiful, dense French. Mercifully, the various translators involved all recognized their failures and refused to sign their names. Some day, a really good translation will come along, I suppose, but in the meantime at least this one is hyper-literalist-far better than simply wandering off course. If you read French perfectly, read La pensée sauvage; it's genius!

The Savage Mind is an endlessly fascinating, stimulating, brilliant book, a true masterpiece of the human sciences. It happens that Lévi-Strauss is quite often wrong, but the fact remains that this is a landmark of scholarship and a book everyone seriously interested in culture needs to read. Durkheim, Weber, Freud, and Marx are all wrong too. So are Eliade, Geertz, and Turner, for that matter. Does this mean we shouldn't read them? To think we can simply jump to the most recent people and skip what came before is to submit to ignorance and laziness. Lévi-Strauss is perhaps the last of the great French intellectuals, and his work will stand for a long time as a challenge and a landmark; you must take up his challenge, read him, and thoroughly master his thought. Only then can you move on.

Read now, and see a (slightly misguided) genius at work.

Rating:
Summary: Ado About Much
Review: Academic scholarship does not generally lend itself to masterpieces. One tends to balance detail and complexity against efficiency, to narrow one's audience while deepening argumentation. Thus the truly great books of a particular discipline are often incomprehensible outside it, while the wonderfully accessible books rarely do more than describe what others have done.

The Savage Mind is one of a small number of exceptions to this rule. In a book that requires no prior knowledge of anthropology, Lévi-Strauss succeeds in leveling a major challenge to his discipline and simultaneously to every reader. In elegant, graceful prose, he meticulously dissects his objects, formulates his arguments, and stretches the range of theoretical speculation to cover an extraordinary range of material from all over the world-including the modern.

In the nearly fifty years since this book first appeared, however, much has changed. Structuralism, for which The Savage Mind served as something of a manifesto, has collapsed beneath the weight of its own logical formation and the critical assaults of various respondents-not all of them well-informed. But even that most scathing critic of structuralism, Jacques Derrida, has noted repeatedly that we can never really go back: structuralism is part of our thinking now, and the only way out is through. To put it simply, if you never read this book, you will never gain the right to criticize structuralism as a method for studying culture.

Another thing that has changed is basic education. Lévi-Strauss takes it for granted that we all know quite a bit about European literature, music, and art; that we know who the painter Clouet was, and the difference between Mannerism and Impressionism. He doesn't assume expertise, but a kind of general cultural education no longer usual. This can make some of his analyses opaque, where they are intended to be illustrative. Just as you can skim these arguments, which are often problematic anyway, you don't actually need to know much about totemic practices to understand; he summarizes what's important, and so long as you don't intend to challenge through data, you need no background.

Lévi-Strauss's arguments proceed methodically and exceedingly rapidly. Their weight lies in their logic, not their particulars; that is, it really doesn't matter whether his interpretation of any one myth or ritual is correct, but rather whether the means of going about it makes rigorous sense. He is not expert on everything, and he often inserts such phrases as, "Without presuming to decide this issue...." This is not mere qualification: he distinguishes between illustration of method and rigorous analysis of particular material. If you want him to analyze material, go read The Raw and the Cooked; if you want to know how he does it, read The Savage Mind.

To put this differently, to pick on trivia here is to miss the point. Perhaps you do name your pets differently than he does. Perhaps the Murngin creation-myth has a step he forgets to mention. Perhaps the interpretation of Clouet doesn't really quite make sense if you know much about Clouet. So what? These are illustrations, not proofs. The same happens with the famous essay "The Structural Study of Myth": Lévi-Strauss proposes a reading of Oedipus which, though wildly suggestive and interesting, really doesn't make a lot of sense for Oedipus, and leads to a stunningly silly conclusion. No matter: the point is to demonstrate how the method works. Again, if you want to see him analyze something, you don't read his pure theory books; you read The Raw and the Cooked, or Totemism, or (especially) The Elementary Structures of Kinship. So long as you can work out how the method functions, Lévi-Strauss thinks you should go test it yourself, on material you know. Then, if it doesn't work, you can come back and criticize.

As we read The Savage Mind, we are constantly forced to slow down. Lévi-Strauss has a tendency to condense an enormous argument into a paragraph, then move on; unlike his best American and English counterparts, who make their analyses as explicit as possible, Lévi-Strauss takes the classically French approach of hitting the highlights in the topic and concluding sentences of a paragraph, then putting all the illustrative detail of logic and material into the middle. This is a matter of style, a choice and not a vice. So if you really want to understand the book, you actually have to work through his examples very slowly and carefully. Otherwise one has a tendency to lose the thread and simply become bewildered.

Unfortunately, this translation is, as Clifford Geertz and everyone else has noticed, execrable. Some sentences are not even acceptable English grammar, to say nothing of their failures to render Lévi-Strauss's beautiful, dense French. Mercifully, the various translators involved all recognized their failures and refused to sign their names. Some day, a really good translation will come along, I suppose, but in the meantime at least this one is hyper-literalist-far better than simply wandering off course. If you read French perfectly, read La pensée sauvage; it's genius!

The Savage Mind is an endlessly fascinating, stimulating, brilliant book, a true masterpiece of the human sciences. It happens that Lévi-Strauss is quite often wrong, but the fact remains that this is a landmark of scholarship and a book everyone seriously interested in culture needs to read. Durkheim, Weber, Freud, and Marx are all wrong too. So are Eliade, Geertz, and Turner, for that matter. Does this mean we shouldn't read them? To think we can simply jump to the most recent people and skip what came before is to submit to ignorance and laziness. Lévi-Strauss is perhaps the last of the great French intellectuals, and his work will stand for a long time as a challenge and a landmark; you must take up his challenge, read him, and thoroughly master his thought. Only then can you move on.

Read now, and see a (slightly misguided) genius at work.

Rating:
Summary: Much Ado
Review: Claude Levi - Strauss' The Savage Mind (1962) is a densely - composed book that winds a circuitous path through several important thematic areas of the anthropological minefield. As multiple passages attest, Levi - Strauss was capable of writing and thinking clearly. Quoted passages - many of admirable simplicity - reveal that Levi - Strauss also appreciated straightforward writing, thinking, and scholarship in others.

Nonetheless, much of the book's content is bogged down in miasmic discussions concerning simplistic points of fact or interpretation that are obvious in many cases ("the principle underlying a classification can never be postulated in advance," or the unsurprising fact that Indian tribes from opposite regions of North America regarded the crow in entirely different lights), thus further obscuring his already ambiguous theses. Levi - Strauss conjures up extended metaphors which he manipulates haphazardly (the most prominent being the comparison of the myth - making process to the 'bricoleur'), and makes outright, seemingly willful mistakes of logic, such as the passage in which he refers to an eagle hunter cleverly hidden within a self - devised trap as "both the hunter and the hunted" merely because the man has situated himself on the inside of the trapping mechanism: within the trap he may be, but hunted by the eagle, or by anything else, he is not. That the hunter remains in firm control over the successful capture of the eagle is a fact Levi - Strauss slyly chooses to look away from.

Elsewhere, Levi - Strauss makes laughably incorrect suppositions when attempting to correct the broad generalizations of others, stating, for instance, after tacitly acknowledging the existence of such dietary cravings, that "there is no evidence that pregnant women the world over have cravings." Moving from literal to figurative meaning and jumping from objective fact to subjective interpretation without restraint ("Nature is not in itself contradictory. It can become so only in terms of some specific human activity which takes part in it; and the characteristics of the environment take on a different meaning according to the particular historical and technical form assumed in it by this or that type of activity"), the author's sentences intertwine recklessly together until the reader can reasonably conclude that entire passages are dazzlingly free of definite, cohesive content of any kind. Though he has literally hundreds of objective facts at his fingertips, Levi - Strauss' confidence in his ability to build them into a sustained, persuasive presentation seems illusory at best.

Readers who have thus far found the book almost impossible to absorb will find their judgment richly rewarded when Levi - Strauss discusses the role of domesticated animals in Western civilization - a subject most readers have had some degree of everyday familiarity with - in Chapter Seven, "The Individual As A Species." Beginning with the absurd statement that "birds are given human christian [sic] names in accordance with the species to which they belong more easily than any other zoological classes, because they can be permitted to resemble men for the very reason that they are so different," and continuing "consequently everything objective conspires to make us think of the bird world as a metaphorical human society: is it not after all literally parallel to it on another level?", the author's discussion of what he believes constitutes the underlying processes in naming dogs, cows, and horses in the West is so transparently ludicrous that it exposes everything that has come before as the intellectual hokum that it is.

The main supporting audience for The Savage Mind has been masochistic American academics who bow reflexively to European theorists, particularly French theorists, as if on command, building author cults small and large in the process, and thus entering suicidally into intellectual perdition. For such academics, the more obtuse a work, the better; most esteemed is a book completely beyond comprehension. The Savage Mind, a work of anti - knowledge, warrants that level of criticism: it completely fails to succinctly outline its ideas, or prove, finally, that its incommunicable "theories" have any appreciable merit whatsoever.

Rating:
Summary: The Manifesto of Structuralism
Review: hmmmm..... I can't see why this book has got such humble and unskilled review till now. This book is the easiest material to understand the tenet of structuralism. Personally I don't like the disposition of structuralism at all and I suspect whether in 50 years, anybody remember that kind of school existed at all except writers of history of philosophy.
Anyway, this book made structuralism floating on the vogue with its ease to understand and constructed the intellectual fashion of structuralsim which dominated the whether of discourse in human science in the 1960s and 1970s. Yep. now nobody read Levi-Strauss, even anthropolgists don't read his books. But if you want to understand structuralism, post-structuralsim and postmodernism, you'd better begin with this book for it's the easiest and fun to read.

Rating:
Summary: a mind provoking anthropology book
Review: This is the first anthropology book I read. It may be considered difficult to read this book. A scholarly and heavy description however very rewarding in my opinion. Spanning a real wide scope.