A man who changed our understanding of ourselves

An explanation, if not an apology, is in order for straying from the intended and maybe expected parameters for this column. The death on October 30 of the “father of modern anthropology”,  Claude Lйvi-Strauss, seems to me an event that should be noted even in an industrial journal. I take my cue from The Financial Times which called him “a man who helped define modern anthropology and not only spanned but symbolised the 20th century”.

As an Indian living in Mongolia, I honour Lйvi-Strauss most as the man who transformed, as much as such almost collective unconscious can be transformed,  Western understanding of what used to be called “primitive man”, which is how most people of the world was seen by a lesser number for centuries. The accepted view saw primitive societies as intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, basing and limiting their approaches to life and religion on meeting the immediate needs for food, clothing and shelter. Lйvi-Strauss challenged this limited, and limiting, perspective. His fieldwork revealed to him that some of the forest-dwelling communities of the Amazon basin went much beyond the satisfaction of material needs; there was a dogged quest among them also to understand origins, a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths, and an implicit sense of order and design, even among those whose priority, almost pastime, was ruthless warfare. Their technological equipment might not be much to boast of, but their tattoos, their folk tales and their mythology show a richness and variety that is almost inexhaustible.

Lйvi-Strauss did  more than any other anthropologist to show that the poverty of material technology need not be an impediment to the proliferation of an exuberant symbolic life. His categorical and unequivocal assertion that “the thirst for objective knowledge is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive’ ” went a long way to elevating the status of “the savage mind”. This phrase later became the English title of one of his most forceful surveys. There is an interesting aside here. The book in which he showed these primitive people as the equals of those in the most elevated cultures of the civilized world was called “La Pensйe Sauvage”. In English, this title is translated as “The Savage Mind”, but I am told the French phrase  could as well refer to the flower called “wild forget-me-not”. Lйvi-Strauss has not always been well served by his English translators.

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