The Savage Readers

Geertz vs. Lévi-Strauss

After unreasonable delays, I have finally prepared a wee précis on anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s violent reactions to Lévi-Strauss’s work — indeed to his project as we have been discussing it.  To situate Geertz in relation to CLS, although Geertz was almost twenty years younger than CLS, he was less than ten anthropology years younger.  That is, CLS had trained in law and philosophy, focusing on philosophy, then came to Brazil to teach sociology.  During his four years living in Brazil, he ventured out to study some of the “natives” in the countryside whom he describes most memorably in “Tristes Tropiques.”  Note, this episodic field research was done before he had any real training in anthropology (of course these were the wild early days of anthropology when there wasn’t much training to be had), nor had he had much contact with anthropologists, it seems.   Regardless, a regular objection posed by British and American anthropologists over the years has been to CLS’s status as an ethnographer (as contrasted with his facility as an ethnologist).  Central to the status anxiety of anthropologists has been the fieldwork ordeal as the crucible of anthropological thinking:  much as lawyers are forced to suffer through law school to train them to “think like lawyers,”  anthropologists are expected to experience/suffer through a year or more of participant observation.  As great as has been his influence, and as massive as is his data (see, for example, The Elementary Structures of Kinship or Mythologiques vols.1-4), for many anthropologists his insufficiencies as an ethnographer are elemental and permeate his writings.

Back to Geertz.  After returning to France from Brazil, then leaving France after the occupation to take up a position at the New School (with Roman Jakobson), CLS didn’t actually receive his doctorate until after the war, in 1948, and began publishing in earnest during the 1950s.  Geertz received his doctorate in 1956 from Harvard’s then-new/now-erstwhile Department of Social Relations — a department long run by sociologist Talcott Parsons (note the link back to Max Weber), but including psychologists (such as Jerome Bruner) and anthropologists in a program devoted to interdisciplinary social sciences with a culture/psychology flair.  Geertz (who had been a literature major in college) was reading psychology, and Weber’s culture/personality analyses in a program that was sending out teams of scholars to do serious cross-cultural comparative studies.  Lévi-Strauss’s fly-by data collection, and his focus on the material most abstracted from everyday and affective experience was absolutely apart from his notion of anthropology.  Examples.

Geertz’s first open attack on Lévi-Strauss was in 1967, “The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude Lévi-Strauss,”  a little over three years after Sontag’s paean to Triste Tropiques in the NYROB.  He identifies immediately CLS’s stated intent to use ethnology as a method of creating a unified theory of the human sciences — to dissolve differences.  Geertz is skeptical:  for most anthropologists ethnography has been used as a method of displaying the diversity of ways of being in the world, with a bit of a posteriori reverse engineering to try to figure out how things work (theoretical bricolage, perhaps).  A posteriori is not what CLS has in mind.  This quality of CLS, Geertz says, “[A]ccounts for the more intraprofessional suspicion that what is presented as High Science may really be an ingenious and somewhat roundabout attempt to defend a metaphysical position, advance an ideological argument, and serve a moral cause.”  He goes on:

“There is, perhaps, nothing so terribly wrong about this, but, as with Marx, it is well to keep it in mind, lest an attitude toward life be taken for a simple description of it.  Every man has a right to create his own savage for his own purposes.  Perhaps every man does.  But to demonstrate that such a constructed savage corresponds to Australian Aborigines, African Tribesmen, or Brazilian Indians is another matter altogether.”

After quickly moving through the arguments of “Savage Mind,” (many of those we have already talked about — bricolage and totemism, binary classification systems) he comes in for the kill with an argument that rang true for me while reading these first three chapters (especially chapter three on transformations).  Are all the algebraic-looking data-mined classificatory formulae just a kind of cultural numerology?  Couldn’t you make these transformations do whatever you wanted, if you were inclined to find significance in them?  Here’s Geertz’s typically elegant restatement:

“Some of these essays in ‘socio-logic’ are, like the analysis of totemism, persuasive and enlightening as far as they go.  (Inasmuch as any metaphysical content or affective aura these beliefs may have is vigorously excluded from attention, this is not really so very far.)  Others, like the attempt to show that totemism and caste are capable (“by means of a very simple transformation”) of being reduced to variant expressions of the same general underlying structure are at least intriguing if not precisely convincing.  And others, like the attempts to show that the different ways in which horses, dogs, birds, and cattle are named form a coherent three-dimensional system of complementary images cross-cut by relations of inverted symmetry, are triumphs of self-parody.  They are exercises in ‘depth interpretation’ farfetched enough to make even a psychoanalyst blush.  It is all terribly ingenious.”

Now, to Matthew’s recent post on the relationship between CLS’s theory of the “savage mind” in us all and neuroscience — Geertz sees the same tendency (and it’s not anthropology, dammit!):  “Like Rousseau, Lévi-Strauss’ search is not after all for men, whom he doesn’t much care for, but for Man, with whom he is enthralled.  It is as much in La Pensée Sauvage as in Tristes Tropiques, the jewel in the lotus he is after.  The ‘unshakable basis of human society’ is not really social at all but psychological — a rational, universal, eternal, and thus (in the great tradition of French moralism) virtuous mind.”  He rejects this universality argument — crying out for the recognition of the ineffable, the vested interests, “infantile emotions”, the “chaos of animal appetites” that years of investigations into human consciousness have shown to be powerful motivators.  “Even if there are not many ‘true savages’ out there any more, there are enough vividly peculiar human individuals around to make any doctrine of man which seems as the bearer of changeless truths of reason — an ‘original logic’ proceeding from ‘the structure of the mind’ -- seem merely quaint, an academic curiosity.”  

Whew!  Thus ends Geertz’s epistemological survey of the Lévi-Straussian project to that point.  Now, while I realize this post is getting outrageously long, let me just quickly point out Geertz’s fabulous counterpunch of thick description he gives in his essay on the Balinese Cockfight.  Several years after the Savage Mind essay, Geertz published his “Notes on a Balinese Cockfight” which has become (for you non-anthropologist readers) a stone-classic in the field — required reading in every graduate proseminar and probably during the course of most undergraduate concentrations.  It is most known for its amazing rhetorical power, the now-classic narrative technique of establishing insiderness through a dramatic event/conflict (in this case a police raid on a cockfight he and his wife are watching), and as an example of Geertz’s famous “thick description” -- by which is meant a detailed, layered description of cultural symbols, signs, cues.  Not just what’s happening, but how behaviors fit into dense cultural fields (gender, class-relations, fading traditions, modernism, all mutually-imbricated).  This is also contains one of Geertz’s most famous lines (which establishes, in passing, the Geertzian school of cultural anthropology):  “The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong.”  What I had forgotten, or maybe never realized (because I wasn’t reading him then in relation to CLS), until Matthew pointed me toward it again,  was that this essay was written as much as anything as a takedown of CLS.  After establishing his authority with his unparalleled suasive powers, Geertz spends forty pages doing dense cultural/literary analysis of the cockfight as a central symbolic field in Balinese cultural and social life.  He then sets out his analytic mode — viz, cultures are texts, we are textual interpreters — in the last few pages.  After arguing that few anthropologists have treated culture as a text, in a footnote, a FOOTNOTE, he mentions CLS thus:

“Lévi-Strauss’ ‘structuralism’ might seem an exception.  But it is only an apparent one, for, rather than taking myths, totem rites, marriage rules, or whatever as texts to interpret,  Lévi-Strauss takes them as ciphers to solve, which is very much not the same thing.  He does not seek to understand symbolic forms in terms of how they function in concrete situations to organize perceptions (meanings, emotions, concepts, attitudes); he seeks to understand them entirely in terms of their internal structure, independent de tout sujet, de tout objet, et de toute contexte.”

Finishing him off in French.  If that isn’t highbrow polymath for “in your face, Claude” I don’t know what is.  So, I’ll post again separately about what some anthropologists tried to do with structuralism to address some of these concerns, but there is the strong Geertzian objection.  It may be cool, it may be intricate, but it ain’t anthropology.  Any thoughts?  Does this really matter to you literature folks?  Perhaps this makes him even more poachable, since he’s not needed in anthropology anymore, Geertz says.

roaming the structures

Tim and I are both rather feverishly reading Stanislas Dehaene's new book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention (actually, Tim, I hope you're not febrile any longer; get better!). Dehaene's book on the neuroscience of reading seems to come along at a consilient moment, when not only neuroscientists, but nearly all of us (all of us reading this blog, anyway) are trying to understand how reading works and how to make it better. Something about Dehaene's picture of the reading brain is central to a theory of consciousness—and forges a connection to The Savage Mind that I find electrifying to contemplate.

Dehaene argues that the advent of writing and reading) is the result of the mind repurposing ancient circuits in the brain to the new work of recognizing graphic symbols and fluently translating them into language. I call it "new" because reading's advent in the human career is quite recent, having emerged a mere five thousand years ago. But reading (and a number of other cultural inventions or magisteria or memes) arise so swiftly precisely because there are robust circuits in the brain of ancient origin, which the human brain—through a property unique in the animal kingdom–is able to recycle with agency and purpose.

What we experience as consciousness is bound up in—in fact may be coextensive with—this unique property, Deheane proposes. And he identifies a set of deeply-embedded circuits that seem to give rise to other cultural magisteria: mathematics is founded upon a number of "mathematical objects ... anchored in the brain"; the arts build on circuits that perceive and analyze coherence and wholeness in coordination with more rudimentary circuits sensitive to tone intervals, human emotional states, color, motion; religion springs up to put circuits for causal inference, social intelligence, and even moral sense to more ramified use. And natural science, he argues, springs from and elaborates a deep-seated, neuronally-based drive to classify animals and plants. Starting to sound familiar?

But in this short précis I've massively simplified what Dehaene is on about, and have left the impression of a machine-like mind built of used parts—bricolage of a dehumanizing sort. That's not it at all! Because Dehaene also posits a further drive, the one on which in his view both consciousness and culture (linked inextricably here) depend. Something arose in the human brain that roams among these sets of circuits, these structures, and looks for ways to link them together. Headquartered in the frontal lobe, making use of long-axon neuronal connections unique to humans, which knit together far-flung regions of the brain, there is some roving bricoleur who browses the structures looking for places to connect them together. Animals and plants are classified for their uses and their dangers—but they also have relations uncannily like those found by other circuits monitoring social connections. The roving bricoleur (which Dehaene might call consciousness) fancies these comparisons, fawns over them—and produces mythologies out of them. Thus consciousness springs forth from a brain made of meat, shaped by evolution, to wield the endlessly inventive imaginal tools called culture. Thus nature nurtures our nurturing nature.

things fall apart

What is totemism? Why have humans nearly universally claimed kinship with animals and plants, with the elements?

The human mind classifies; humans always everywhere compare, contrast, sort and group. The brain's complexity and power in fact allows us to produce a surplus of classifications, affinizing and relating everything we encounter in ramified, overlapping, complex systems of associations. In the absence of ready tools for elaborating abstract ideas, this surfeit of association—produced spontaneously, as the means by which creatures with minds encounter the world (a process we like to call "thinking")—provides the lumber for human life's bricolage. Some of these arbitrary observations of nature's rhyming possibilities get picked up and used to fix and track important or useful information in the world. There are many more relations and combinations than can practicably be given separate names; classifications provide matrices of association, syntax, means not only of naming but of understanding. Some of them get dropped, some get modified, some ossify into mnemonics.

...the structure of the language is to some extent protected by its practical purpose, which is to ensure communication. Language is therefore sensitive to the influence of demographic evolution only up to a point and in so far as its function is not impaired. But the conceptual systems we are studying here are not, or are not primarily, means of communication. They are means of thinking, an activity which is governed by very much less stringent conditions. One either succeeds or not in making oneself understood, but one can think more or less well. Thinking admits of degrees and a way of thinking can degenerate imperceptibly into a way of remembering. This explains why the synchronic structures of so-called totemic systems should be so extremely valuable to the effects of diachrony: a mnemotechnic procedure is less trouble to operate than a speculative one which in turn is less exacting than a device for communication. Chapter 2 ("the logic of totemic classifications"), page 67

animal affiinities

At the beginning of chapter two of The Savage Mind (entitled "the Logic of Totemism"), Lévi-Strauss discusses the "primitive identification" we feel with animals as the prime example of the kind of concrete knowledge out of which culture builds structured sets of terms. After quoting a native informant describing how links between his people and the animals stretch back into deep time ("our ancestors married the animals, learned all their ways, and passed the knowledge from one generation to another," 37), Lévi-Strauss goes on to assert that this sense of idenification with animals is universal, and may even be found among zoologists whose expertise otherwise consists in reducing animals to ecological niches and adaptive vectors. He relates the testimony of a zoo director whose close encounter with a dolphin was an experience of uncanny interpersonal exchange:

Flippy was no fish, and when he looked at you with twinkling eyes from a distance of less than two feet, you had to stifle the question as to whether it was in fact an animal. So new, strange, and extremely weird was this creature that one was tempted to consider it some kind of bewitched being.

(The zoo director's witness is so charming and familiar that it's almost possible to forget how the experience he's describing is essentially the opposite of the "native" testimony—which asserts that animals are family, cousins several times removed. The zoologist's experience of identification by contrast is one of radical unfamiliarity—it's fey, bewitching, almost supernatural. Something intervenes between these two—an alienation has taken place. But ouroboros-like, the phenomenon comes full circle. What began as a set of relations that produces magic ends as a kind of magical capable of making relationships. In short, there's a history of consciousness implied here, which CLS seems content to elide. But I digress.)

Reading this description of delphine enchantment, I was reminded of a photograph I saw a couple of years ago in a magazine. The picture showed a dolphin in a marine park rising out of the water, thrusting vertical, almost in a gesture of bipedalism, borne by its powerful flukes. The dolphin intensity was clear in its taut muscles, erect posture, and focused eyes, which burned in a kind of exultance through the mask of beak and teeth and flesh the color of stone. But what I found really staggering was the image of the torso, which revealed itself as the dolphin lifted clear of the water: abdominal muscles stood in relief about a smooth, inward-sloped navel. And I stared, thinking, dolphins have bellybuttons. Dolphins have abs.

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life. 

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari charge Structuralism with erasing the numinous, charged quality of "becomings-animal"—those moments which are common to myth and the signal ingredient in shamanistic practice. In the structuralist view, they argue, "a man can never say, 'I am a bull, a wolf...' But he can say: 'I am to a woman what the bull is to a cow, I am to another man what the wolf is to the sheep.'" There is a logic revealed and made accessible in these encounters—but Lévi-Strauss risks domesticating or neutering those irreducible experiences of animal-becoming to which not only the "savage mind" but all of us are susceptible. Is the encounter magical, uniquely intimate, or matter-of-fact? And if such an experience has a particular quality, does that mark it off as, savage, anti-scientific, or decadent? I want to think there's room for animal-becoming; for empirical, observable structure; for the scientist's disruptive spirit possession; and for the shard-gathering of a broken-hearted postmodern. These things interpenetrate one another; within each what matters is perhaps not structure but texture.

who's the bricoleur?

The idea of bricolage, which is the linchpin of first chapter ("the science of the concrete"), is one of the hallmarks of Lévi-Strauss's thought. This Gallic image of the bricoleur, who is something of a handyman, something of a hobbyist, something of a gun-toting, beard-wearing, trash-picking survivalist, has proven attractive to many beyond the ghetto of anthropology. It's a handy metaphor, a brilliant example of the spirit it seeks to pinpoint, and a marvelous demonstration of Lévi-Strauss's own tendency to mythomancy. But as the first chapter ends in the games and rites bricked together out of mythic, totalizing fancy, a question remains: who is the bricoleur?

It's pretty clear who the bricoleur's opposite is. The engineer is an individual human being following the mandate of the engineer's vocation: the builder of the unforeseen, striving to go beyond the constraints imposed by time and place, interrogating nature with a gimlet eye. He is "always on the lookout for that other message which might be wrested from an interlocutor in spite of his reticence in pronouncing on questions whose answers have not been rehearsed." The engineer, that prospector of the new, is always already a person, a subject, and a master builder. And yet his number is not limited; in modernity, he is legion. "Engineering" for Lévi-Strauss is not only an epistemology but also a vocation, a way, a job description. The engineer exists in our world; he is here now. Lévi-Strauss makes this implicit through a kind of punctuational costuming convention: "bricoleur" always enters appareled in quotation marks, while engineer appears in plain dress.

However arrayed, the bricoleur is active, fully personified, a character. "The 'bricoleur'," we are told, "is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks.... the rules of his game are always to make do with 'whatever is at hand' .... He interrogates all the heterogeneous objects of which his treasury is composed.... he remains within the constraints imposed by a particular state of civilization." But here's where the mystery arises. For the bricoleur at once seems not only the constrained, but the constrainer—the force that cobbles together the stuff of culture and the wily, erstwhile jobber who works within it—the author of the myth and its singer. And while the latter, like the engineer, is locatable as an individual human being, the former would seem lost in deep time. In the midst of this science of signs, the bricoleur is a kind of intellectual Zelig, a holy ghost, a floating signifier who is also the floating signified. Where do we find him?

Myth, of course, is full of bricoleurs. They're the tricksters, the lopers and jokers at the borders—ravens and coyotes, crafty spiders and spirited hares. These characters seem capable of making structure happen because they stand outside of all structures. They steal the light and set it in the darkness; they gather bits of mud, patting together a terra firma to oppose the encircling sea. But considering mythology as a thing, these characters can't stand as the makers of myth; they're too busy being the made. Unless the bricoleur's great original trick is to hide himself in plain sight in his own bricolage.

protesting meaninglessness

Mythical thought for its part is imprisoned in the events and experiences which it never tires of ordering and re-ordering in its search to find them a meaning. But it also acts as a liberator by its protest against the idea that anything can be meaningless with which science at first resigned itself to a compromise. Savage Mind, 22

disembodied ethnopoetics (an aside)

A quick note from one who's reading ahead: a singular facet of Lévi-Strauss's engagement with art towards the close of chapter one is the inkling that art, like myth, "thinks itself" through the medium our minds. This aspect of structuralism, more fully developed throughout Savage Mind and especially in later works (in particular the late magnum opus, Mythologiques) has been the target of much criticism. But for anyone who feels something like an artistic calling, or has responded to the strange savor of making, it's not an unfamiliar feeling. The uncanny sense of serving as a conduit, as an avatar or an acolyte of the muses, still has currency; for artists and writers, it's part of the folk phenomenology. And there's a way in which Lévi-Strauss's sympathetic take on this sense of voicing, of mediumship, however many critics it has attracted in his own profession and further afield, might well ring true with artists even in a materialist age.

Almost modernist ambition

These link roundups are a great place for us to start. I hope they'll also serve as a decent archive of CLS's reception in the immediate aftermath of his death.

savage endearments

University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins is one of America's most inventive (and self-reinventive) anthropologists, and his long career has involved a steady and complicated engagement with the ideas of Lévi-Strauss. In June of this year, CLS received an award from the Smithsonian, and Sahlins observed the occasion in the form of a long post to the blog of the American Anthropological Association. It's lengthy, but worth sticking with, for it gives a thorough account of the deeply-lodged fragments of CLS's thought in the anthropological imagination. Paraphrasing Phillipe Descola, CLS's successor at the College de France, Sahlins neatly summarizes the capacious project of Lévi-Strauss's anthropology, which turned inexorably towards myth not because of some colonialist exoticism, but because "the dispositions of the mind, when represented in social relations, would be subject to all sorts of historical contingencies as well as the compromises required by the practical functioning of society. Whereas mythical thought, by its disengagement from the constraints of the real, not only afforded a certain creative liberty but the opportunity of taking mind itself as an object of contemplation. By spinning one narrative from another, producing one myth out of another, the mind reveals the structures and modes of its operations." Sahlins gives us a portrait of anthropology as a means of expressing curiosity about our fellow humans and our deep-seated desire to make and encounter meaning. This link comes via the anthro blog Savage Minds, which also offers links to little-known CLS texts (and thanks to otolythe for prompting us to head over their way).

Structuralist Man

A terrific document of late/progressive/post-structuralism, Roland Barthes's "The Structuralist Activity" lays out what he sees as the program:

The goal of all structuralist activity, whether reflexive or poetic, is to reconstruct an "object" in such a way as to manifest thereby the rules of functioning (the "functions") of this object. Structure is therefore actually a simulacrum of the object, but a directed, interested simulacrum, since the imitated object makes something appear which remained invisible, or if one prefers, unintelligible in the natural object. Structural man takes the real, decomposes it, then recomposes it; this appears to be little enough (which makes some say that the structuralist enterprise is "meaningless," "uninteresting," "useless," etc.). Yet, from another point of view, this "little enough" is decisive: for between the two objects, or the two tenses, of structuralist activity, there occurs something new, and what is new is nothing less than the generally intelligible: the simulacrum is intellect added to object, and this addition has an anthropological value, in that it is man himself, his history, his situation, his freedom and the very resistance which nature offers to his mind."

Whew! Almost a little bit of Sartre there at the end! I also like -- and this gibes with my and Sontag's sense that CLS is trying to approach the human sciences from the point of view of the avant-garde, Barthes's claim that "we might speak of structuralist activity as we once spoke of surrealist activity," including a nod towards structuralist literature.

Who are the literary structuralists? The Russian formalists, probably; Alain Robbe-Grillet, Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Calvino and all of Oulipo... Barthes suggests that Bert Brecht's proto-structuralism was more radical than his Marxism; I would point to Mallarmé and Proust (especially in Le Livre and Contre Sainte-Beuve respectively); Phillipe Sollers; Jean-Paul Godard...

But in some ways the real literary descendants of structuralism are the essayists, Barthes and Kristeva and Derrida -- and Lévi-Strauss.