.jpg)
Claude
Lévi-Strauss, 1973 (Wikicommons)
The
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss died six years ago, leaving behind a
treasure trove of correspondence and unpublished writings. We can now trace
where his ideas came from and how they evolved.
I
admired Lévi-Strauss during my time as an anthropology student because he asked
questions that Marxist anthropologists would never ask. That's why I preferred
to call myself a Marxisant, and not a
full-blown Marxist. I especially admired him for addressing the issue of nature
versus nurture, which had once been a leading issue in anthropology but was now
studiously ignored. Only he, it seemed, could defy this omertà and not suffer
any ill effects, perhaps because of his age and status.
In
his best known tome, The Elementary
Structures of Kinship, this issue dominated the first chapter:
Man
is both a biological being and a social individual. Among his responses to
external or internal stimuli, some are wholly dependent upon his nature, others
upon his social environment.
Lévi-Strauss
admitted that the two were not always easy to separate:
Culture
is not merely juxtaposed to [biological] life nor superimposed upon it, but in
one way serves as a substitute for life, and in the other, uses and transforms
it, to bring about the synthesis of a new order.
He
reviewed the different ways of disentangling one from the other:
The
simplest method would be to isolate a new-born child and to observe its
reactions to various stimuli during the first hours or days after birth.
Responses made under such conditions could then be supposed to be of a
psycho-biological origin, and to be independent of ulterior cultural syntheses.
[Nonetheless,]
the question always remains open whether a certain reaction is absent because
its origin is cultural, or because, with the earliness of the observation, the
physiological mechanisms governing its appearances are not yet developed.
Because a very young child does not walk, it cannot be concluded that training
is necessary, since it is known that a child spontaneously begins to walk as
soon as it is organically capable of doing so.
His
interest in the interactions between culture and biology went further. The gene
pool of a population will influence its culture, which in turn will alter the
gene pool:
The
selection pressure of culture—the fact that it favors certain types of
individuals rather than others through its forms of organization, its ideas of
morality, and its aesthetic values—can do infinitely more to alter a gene pool
than the gene pool can do to shape a culture, all the more so because a
culture's rate of change can certainly be much faster than the phenomena of
genetic drift. (Lévi-Strauss, 1979, p. 24-25)
This
is of course gene-culture co-evolution. He may have given the idea to L.L. Cavalli-Sforza,
who first began to propound it while teaching a cultural evolution class in
1978-1979. Two of his students, Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, went on to
popularize the idea in their book Culture
and the Evolutionary Process (1985) (Stone and Lurquin 2005, p. 108).
Lévi-Strauss had in fact mentioned the same idea long before in a UNESCO
lecture:
When
cultures specialize, they consolidate and favor other traits, like resistance
to cold or heat for societies that have willingly or unwillingly had to adapt
to extreme climates, like dispositions to aggressiveness or contemplation, like
technical ingenuity, and so on. In the form these traits appear to us on the
cultural level, none can be clearly linked to a genetic basis, but we cannot
exclude that they are sometimes linked partially and distantly via intermediate
linkages. In this case, it would be true to say that each culture selects for
genetic aptitudes that, via a feedback loop, influence the culture that had
initially helped to strengthen them. (Lévi-Strauss, 1971)
In
the same lecture, he made another point:
[Humanity]
will have to relearn that all true creation implies some deafness to the call
of other values, which may go so far as to reject or even negate them. One
cannot at the same time melt away in the enjoyment of the Other, identify
oneself with the Other, and keep oneself different. If fully successful,
complete communication with the Other will doom its creative originality and my
own in more or less short time. The great creative ages were those when
communication had increased to the point that distant partners stimulated each
other but not so often and rapidly that the indispensable obstacles between
individuals, and likewise between groups, dwindled to the point that
excessively easy exchanges would equalize and blend away their diversity. (Lévi-Strauss, 1971)
His
audience was taken aback, according to fellow anthropologist Wiktor
Stoczkowski:
These
words shocked the listeners. One can easily imagine how disconcerted UNESCO
employees were, who, meeting Lévi-Strauss in the corridor after the lecture,
expressed their disappointment at hearing the institutional articles of faith
to which they thought they had the merit of adhering called into question. René
Maheu, the Director General of UNESCO, who had invited Lévi-Strauss to give
this lecture, seemed upset. (Stoczkowski, 2008; Frost, 2014)
Where his ideas
came from
Since
his death in 2009, we have gained a clearer picture of his intellectual
evolution. His published writings had already provided an answer:
When
I was about sixteen, I was introduced to Marxism by a young Belgian socialist,
whom I had got to know on holiday, and who is now one of his country's
ambassadors abroad. I was all the more delighted by Marx in that the reading of
the works of the great thinker brought me into contact for the first time with
the line of philosophical development running from Kant to Hegel; a whole new
world was opened up to me. Since then, my admiration for Marx has remained
constant [...] (Lévi-Strauss, 2012 [1973])
Looking
through Lévi-Strauss' published and unpublished writings, Wiktor Stoczkowski
tried to learn more about this episode but found nothing:
It
suffices however to look closely at the milieus that Lévi-Strauss frequented in
the 1920s and 1930s, or to reread the articles he published during that period
to realize that his references to Marx were at that time astonishingly rare, in
flagrant contradiction with his declarations […] In contrast, another name
often came up during that time in the writings of the young Lévi-Strauss: that
of Henri De Man. And that name, curiously, Lévi-Strauss would never mention
after the war. (Stoczkowski, 2013)
As
a young leftist disenchanted with Marxism, Lévi-Strauss was especially
fascinated by De Man's book Au-delà du
marxisme (Beyond Marxism), published in 1927. One of his friends invited De
Man to Paris to present his ideas to French socialists. Lévi-Strauss was given
the job of organizing the lecture and wrote to De Man about the difficulties
encountered:
We
have run into many difficulties, which we scarcely suspected and which have
sadly shed light on the conservative and sectarian spirit of a good part of
French socialism [...]. We thought that the best means to give this [lecture]
all of the desirable magnitude would be to make it public [...] [but] to obtain
the key support of the Socialist Students, we have agreed to make your lecture
non-public, and to reserve admission to members of socialist organizations.
Thus, we have learned that Marxism is a sacrosanct doctrine in our party, and
that to study theories that stray from it, we have to shut ourselves in very
strongly, so that no one on the outside will know (Stoczkowski, 2013)
The
lecture was held the next year. Stoczkowski describes the letter that Lévi-Strauss
wrote to the invitee afterwards:
"Thanks
to you," he wrote, "socialist doctrines have finally emerged from
their long sleep; the Party is undergoing, thanks to you, a revival of
intellectual activity ...." But there is more. Speaking on his behalf and
on behalf of his young comrades, Lévi-Strauss informed De Man that his book Au-delà du marxisme had been for them
"a genuine revelation..." Speaking personally, Lévi-Strauss added that
he was "profoundly grateful" to De Man's teachings for having
"helped me get out of an impasse I believed to have no way out."
(Stoczkowski, 2013)
Nothing
indicates that Lévi-Strauss had ever been a Marxist in his youth. Both he and
his friends saw it as a pseudo-religion that stunted the development of
socialism.
But who was Henri
De Man?
He
was a Belgian Marxist who had lived in Leipzig, Germany, where he became the
editor of a radical socialist journal, Leipziger
Volkszeitung, that ran contributions by Rosa Luxembourg, Pannekoek, Radek,
Trotsky, Karl Liebknecht, and others. In 1907, he helped found the Socialist
Youth International. He later returned to Belgium and enrolled when war broke
out, seeing the Allied side as a progressive alternative to German
authoritarianism.
His
views changed during the 1920s, while teaching at the University of Frankfurt. He
came to feel that Marxists erred in seeing themselves as an antithesis to the
current system; such a perspective made them oppose all traditional values,
particularly Christianity and national identity. He now argued that laws,
morality, and religion are not bourgeois prejudices, but rather things that are
necessary to make any society work. Marxists also erred, he felt, in their
narrow focus on economic determinism and their disregard for psychology and the
will to act. Although De Man acknowledged the self-destructive tendencies of capitalism,
these tendencies do not inevitably lead to revolution. Rather, revolution will
happen only when enough people realize that current conditions are neither
tolerable nor inevitable. Above all, revolution cannot happen unless it respects
existing cultural, religious, and national traditions:
If
one sees in socialism something other than and more than an antithesis to
modern capitalism, and if one relates it to its moral and intellectual roots,
one will find that these roots are the same as those of our entire Western
civilization. Christianity, democracy, and socialism are now, even
historically, merely three forms of one idea.
De
Man returned to Belgium during the 1930s, becoming vice-president and then
president of the Belgian Labour Party. In 1935, with the formation of a
government of national unity to fight the Great Depression, he was made
minister of public works and job creation. In this role, he pushed for State
planning and looked to Germany and Italy as examples to be followed. He became
increasingly disillusioned with parliamentary democracy and began to call for
an “authoritarian democracy” where decisions would be made primarily through
the legislature and referendums, rather than through the executive and party
politics (Tremblay, 2006).
When
Germany overran Belgium in 1940, De Man issued a manifesto to Labour Party
members and advised them to collaborate: "For the working classes and for
socialism, this collapse of a decrepit world, far from being a disaster, is a
deliverance" (Wikipedia, 2015). Over the next year, he served as de facto
prime minister before falling into disfavor with the German authorities. He
spent the rest of the war in Paris and then fled to Switzerland where he lived his
final years. Meanwhile, a Belgian court convicted him in absentia of treason.
Conclusion
Like
many people after the war, Claude Lévi-Strauss had to invent a new past. It
didn't matter that he had admired Henri de Man at a time when the Belgian
socialist was not yet a fascist or a collaborator. As Stoczkowski notes, guilt
by association would have been enough to ruin his academic career. Ironically,
if he had really been a loyal Marxist during the late 1920s and early 1930s, he
would also have denied back then the crimes being committed in the name of
Marxism: the Ukrainian famine, Stalin's purges ... Yet, for that, he never
faced any criticism.
References
De
Man. (1927). Au-delà
du marxisme, Brussels, L'Églantine.
Frost, P. (2014). Negotiating the gap. Four academics and the dilemma of human biodiversity, Open Behavioral Genetics, June 20.
http://openpsych.net/OBG/2014/06/negotiating-the-gap/
Lévis-Strauss, C. (1969 [1949]). The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Beacon Press.
http://openpsych.net/OBG/2014/06/negotiating-the-gap/
Lévis-Strauss, C. (1969 [1949]). The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Beacon Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1971). Race et culture, conférence de
Lévi-Strauss à L'UNESCO le 22 mars 1971
Lévi-Strauss, C. (2012[1973]).
Tristes Tropiques, New York: Penguin
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1985). Claude Lévi-Strauss à l'université Laval,
Québec (septembre 1979), prepared by Yvan Simonis, Documents de recherche
no. 4, Laboratoire de recherches anthropologiques, Département d'anthropologie,
Faculté des Sciences sociales, Université Laval.
Stoczkowski,
W. (2008). Claude Lévi-Strauss and UNESCO, The
UNESCO Courrier, no. 5, pp. 5-8.
Stoczkowski, W. (2013). Un étrange socialisme de Claude-Lévi-Strauss / A weird socialism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Europe, 91, n° 1005-1006, 37-53.
Stone,
L. and P.F. Lurquin. (2005). A Genetic
and Cultural Odyssey. The Life and Work of L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Tremblay, J-M. (2006). Henri
de Man, 1885-1953, Les classiques des sciences sociales, UQAC
Wikipedia. (2015). Henri de Man
.jpg?uselang=en-ca){kind=link}
2 comments:
His originality was to interpret myth and custom not so much as the distinct creation of a particular culture, but as different expressions of images universally innate to homo sapiens. In elucidating these common mental structures he relied less on meticulous observation in the field than upon a series of imaginative insights which were often greeted with scepticism in the pragmatic Anglo-Saxon world.
Dion, for almost all of human history people believed in myths. There is no reason to believe that if a population's society-wide explicit acceptance of the pragmatic Anglo-Saxon scientific truth (Darwinism) would actually lead to Darwinian success for its members .
Once you remove the myths that humans co-evolved with, what will motivate them? Obviously there can be myths that are bad, such as the one Levi-Strauss tried to refute (once obstacles between groups dwindle and diversity is blended away the world will function more efficiently). But living with the scientific truth about reproductive success seems to be the one thing that reduces reproductive success.
If you want to provide something that will sustain a population you have to offer imaginative insights--alternative myths.
Post a Comment