Fake Maria Conchita Alonso

Tribute to Master: An Interview with Levi-Strauss

by Octavio Martí


Published by Clarin, May 22, 2005


Claude Lévi-Strauss (Brussels, 1908-2009) is not only a leading figure in the world of ethnology during the second half of the twentieth century but an extraordinary writer and a philosopher of the first magnitude, the father of the structuralist school. This interview was conducted when he was 97 years. Privilege of age, can say and do respect their anguish at human levels. It lends itself readily to the interview, an exercise that shows bright and precise, just a little impatient with the need to clarify for the umpteenth time what, if attentive readers of his work, and we should have understood it long.

When you studied, Eurocentrism permeated all languages. Today, multiculturalism and the constant praise of cultural fusion are dominant. What impression this evolution will produce someone who was interested in testing the unity of humankind from the analysis of societies like the Bororo or the caduceus?

What we call European thought, our civilization, is the result of contributions coming from other latitudes, which are the result of contact between different peoples and cultures of the continent but also of our trips. Europe has always been a mestizo continent, to use the same term. The big difference we've seen in the twentieth century is the acceleration of communication. Travel more quickly, which previously required weeks or months of boat now travels in a few hours, but it is also true that before you came out of a commercial port of an old city very active to get to another of a world under construction, but now take off and land at an airport in another almost identical. Miscegenation, the merger needs time to mature, but the extraordinary acceleration of the twentieth century leaves no time to assimilate the influences of the other.


"The famous mestizaje is always at the expense of the weaker or, to put it another way, is an ideology that masks another form of colonialism?

you who say it, but I will not deny it. Your question puts his finger on a contradiction fundamental. Not everything that is part of the long inventory of the "heritage of mankind" is by pure reason. Concern about the revenue from the tourist flow plays a major role in the behavior of states.

The prospect of giving courses in philosophy, every year the same program 70 years ago led him to go to São Paulo to teach a few subjects that had no experience as sociology and ethnology. What lessons did it matter?

I went there after a suggestion by Paul Nizan. Ethnology had not yet own and fished fishing grounds in waters considered closely related, as was the philosophy. In sociology had read the work of the school of urban sociology in Chicago that had the basic idea to treat the city as a complex object whose growth was responding to recognizable laws, what I call unchanged. São Paulo was said then that it was a dangerous city because they could give quotes in a corner did not exist when you arrive, but that was already built when he went the person you had quoted. Was the possibility of seeing a city grow before my eyes, go within a few years, months and weeks in Europe this process had taken years. In 1935 there were an English company was laying a railway line new in the State of Paraná and created a new town every 25 or 30 miles. The first was then about 2,000 people and recently invited me to their fiftieth anniversary and has a million. The second town was a few hundred inhabitants, the third three dozen and then was the last of the track, one inhabitant, a Frenchman who was looking for adventure. I made an outline of how it was foreseeable that they would grow.

And what about those students?

I proposed to do papers on the street on your neighborhood, to examine all these changes ...

His first trip to the inside, their encounter with the Bororo, is the result of an expedition in vacation time.

Yes For an anthropologist with better training than I was encountering encountering Bororos paradise. It was a society whose material culture was intact, where there was still a special pen art, as can be seen in the current exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, a company with a rich and complex social organization, or different from that found in the Nambikwara.

At what point are you in position to draw conclusions from these expeditions?

What really was or could be ethnology I learned later, in the early forties, the New York Public Library, having escaped from the France of Petain. There reading, I completed my training as an ethnologist. In between he had met Marcel Mauss and told him about the organization among the Bororo outbreeding. You know, Mauss, after a quick estimate, had told another investigator who had returned from spending 18 months in Africa, to this time field experience, he had enough material for 30 years of research. Without the war and German occupation had been my destiny another. In fact, after the armistice, I wanted to go back to Brazil but did not give me visa.

You've joked saying that he had discovered structuralism before reading ...

is my mother who had realized I was going to boulanger (baker) and boucher (butcher) that the first letters should mean bou since they were the same for the two words. More seriously, the secret of structuralism I have guessed while he was in the front, the Maginot Line, as liaison officer who hoped to serve as interpreter for the British troops. There, while waiting for a battle that did not start, I could see in detail how, behind the apparent randomness of the undulating beauty de un campo lleno de flores, estaba una organización estricta de cada una de ellas. Luego, en Nueva York, el encuentro con Roman Jakobson fue definitivo. El encuentro con Jakobson me reveló que era estructuralista sin saberlo. Lo que hasta entonces era una intuición confusa y desorganizada, coaguló, se transformó en doctrina. Cuando se estudia una sociedad se comienza por inventariar las diferencias porque los puntos comunes, al menos en un primer momento, pueden ser superficiales, quedarse en la epidermis del fenómeno. Luego, a un nivel más profundo, aparecen lo que yo llamo invariables...

... el tabú del incesto...

Sí, but the interesting thing is that this obligation outbreeding, looking for a partner outside the narrow family circle can have many different ways. In ancient Egypt was accepted marriage between cousins \u200b\u200bin other civilizations, in case of death of the wife is forced to marry his sister, in others the rule establishes other degrees of relationship. The invariable rule is in the continuing obligation of having to find a partner in another family and thus constitute society. If cultures differ is because, within the rule, there can be many variables. In nature there are laws that can be universal and constant, and if we find in culture rules that may have the same universal laws, then we can better understand the passage from nature to culture. That is the interest of the prohibition of incest.

ever blamed the May 1968 revolt in the loss of academic prestige of structuralism.


Al structuralism reproached be anti-humanist and that's partially true. We were attacked from two angles, one epistemological and one moral. Under the first, we criticized the failure to take the standpoint of the philosopher who gets rid of introspection about the own person, ie not to adopt the point of view of the subject, but that option seems to me legitimate because it has the right to choose the distance is best for each problem or research. At first glance, for example, a drop of water is just that, but the microscope can discover the organisms that inhabit it. We have chosen a magnification level that erases the notion of subject, which dissolves it, and study the mechanisms that work inside the mind. Regarding the accusation or criticism from a moral perspective it is impossible for an anthropologist not to consider the systematic destruction and monstrous that Western cultures have made different from ours since at least 1492. It is not possible to separate or isolate the condemnation of the destruction of human society from destruction of the victims today are plant and animal species, and all in the name of a humanism that has placed the man as king and lord of the world. The definition makes classical humanism of man is very close, is presented as a thinking, rather than treating it as a living, the result is that the frontier where mankind is just too close to the man himself, that this has been object thousand attacks by their peers.

On several occasions it has been held more and more akin to skepticism.

The skepticism comes with age. The spectacle of contemporary science calls it. During the twentieth century that science has progressed much more than in all previous centuries, a huge acceleration in the production of knowledge and at the same time, that rapid progress gives us more and more unfathomable depths, every discovery presents us with 10 puzzles, so that human effort is doomed to failure. But it is rightly so.

You can access the video from another interview, conducted in 1972: go to "video philosophy - modern thought."

ago your comments here.