LEVI-STRAUSS - THE SEARCH

<BODY> <CENTER><FONT SIZE=5><B><FONT SIZE=6>LEVI-STRAUSS</FONT><BR> THE STRUCTURAL ANTHROPOLOGIST</B></FONT></CENTER><P> <FONT SIZE=4><B>Search for Truth</B></FONT><P> <FONT SIZE=4><B>ODYSSEY</B></FONT><BR> Lévi-Strauss describes his introduction to his chosen career as an anthropologist as follows: "Instead of notions borrowed from books and immediately changed into philosophical speculation, I was confronted with the lived experiences of native societies... Like a city dweller released in the mountains, I became intoxicated, while my dazzled eyes examined the richness and variety of the scene." Thus began the odyssey which took him to South America, and his first and only field studies of Amazon tribal societies. As with others before him, his encounter with a primitive culture raised serious questions about western civilization.<P> ("Tristes Tropiques" 64)<P> <FONT SIZE=4><B>THE MAN AND THE MYTH</B></FONT><BR> "Tristes Tropiques", Lévi-Strauss' autobiography, is seductive in both its argument and language. Its design is that of the heroic legend. The heroic quest includes the precipitate departure from ancestral shores grown familiar and stultifying; the journey into another darker world full of surprises, tests and revelations (the Brazilian world of the Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib); and the return to ordinary existence, resigned and exhausted, with the obligation to communicate what one has learned, the deepened knowledge of reality, to the less adventurous who have stayed behind. Here, Lévi-Strauss creates his own myth, whose deeper structure is more revealing of the man than history.<P> (Paraphrase of Clifford Geertz "The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude Lévi Strauss" Encounter, April 1967,p26)<P> <FONT SIZE=4><B>TRISTES TROPIQUES</B></FONT><BR> Lévi-Strauss inspired the imagination of a generation, but not through his lengthy and complex academic works. Few, other than specialist anthropologists have read them in their entirety, and even they refer to "the tortuous gymnastics of Lévi-Straussian argument" (Edmund Leach). Lévi-Strauss is best known through the autobiographical "Tristes Tropiques". This purports to be the intellectual autobiography of an anthropologist, but is equally a study of the destructive impact of modern western civilization.<P> <IMG ALIGN=Left SRC="2403a.jpg" WIDTH="145" HEIGHT="200" ALT="PYRAMID & RUBBISH"> <BLOCKQUOTE>"The first thing travel has now to show us is the filth, our filth, which we have thrown in the face of humanity."<P> ("Tristes Tropiques" 38)</BLOCKQUOTE> <BR clear=left><BR> <HR width=100%> <A HREF="http://www.creatorix.com.au"><IMG SRC="../creatorix.gif" WIDTH="85" HEIGHT="40" BORDER="0" ALT="Creatorix" align=right></A> </BODY>