Camille Paglia Bashes Claude Levi-Strauss

In her Salon column this week Camille Paglia spared a few column inches to consider and then completely trash the entire career of Claude Levi-Strauss:

"Continuing on the theme of overrated male writers, I was appalled at the sentimental rubbish filling the air about Claude Lévi-Strauss after his death was announced last week. The New York Times, for example, first posted an alert calling him "the father of modern anthropology" (a claim demonstrating breathtaking obliviousness to the roots of anthropology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) and then published a lengthy, laudatory obituary that was a string of misleading, inaccurate or incomplete statements. It is ludicrous to claim that Lévi-Strauss single-handedly transformed our ideas about the "primitive" or that before him there had been no concern with universals or abstract ideas in anthropology.

Beyond that, Lévi-Strauss' binary formulations (like "the raw and the cooked") were a simplistic cookie-cutter device borrowed from the dated linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, the granddaddy of now mercifully moribund post-structuralism, which destroyed American humanities departments in the 1980s. Lévi-Strauss' work was as much a fanciful, showy mishmash as that of Joseph Campbell, who at least had the erudite and intuitive Carl Jung behind him. When as a Yale graduate student I ransacked that great temple, Sterling Library, in search of paradigms for reintegrating literary criticism with history, I found literally nothing in Lévi-Strauss that I felt had scholarly solidity.

In contrast, the 12 volumes of Sir James George Frazer's "The Golden Bough" (1890-1915), interweaving European antiquity with tribal societies, was a model of intriguing specificity wed to speculative imagination. Though many details in Frazer have been contradicted or superseded, the work of his Cambridge school of classical anthropology (another of whose ornaments was the great Jane Harrison) will remain inspirational for enterprising students seeking escape from today's sterile academic climate."

Now you know I couldn't let that go unanswered! I posted the following comment:

Bashing Levi-Strauss? Really?

As someone who made your academic bones explicating ad nauseum the opposition between Apollonian and Dionysian, I am surprised that you so blithely dismiss Claude Levi-Strauss. To reduce his massive career to a few-sentence caricature implies that you haven't read him carefully or completely.

Even if its granted that his structural armature was a bit overwrought; even if you discount his visionary explication of Amerindian mythology; even if you deduct from his oeuvre all writings from the 1960’s onwards, at least you can grant him some props for the sense and sensibility of his Tristes Tropiques and let him rest in peace. Just sayin’.

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Claude Lévi-Strauss and Media Ecology

I recommend two excellent obituaries about Claude Lévi-Strauss, the father of Structural Anthrology, who died this past weekend. The New York Times does a good job summarizing his life and times.

The Guardian does a better job explaining the roots of Levi-Strauss' Structural Anthropology and I believe, underscoring its importance to Media Ecology. In particular, Maurice Bloch of The Guardian writes:

The basis of the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss is the idea that the human brain systematically processes organised, that is to say structured, units of information that combine and recombine to create models that sometimes explain the world we live in, sometimes suggest imaginary alternatives, and sometimes give tools with which to operate in it. The task of the anthropologist, for Lévi-Strauss, is not to account for why a culture takes a particular form, but to understand and illustrate the principles of organisation that underlie the onward process of transformation that occurs as carriers of the culture solve problems that are either practical or purely intellectual.

It seems to me that there is an unspoken assumption in Media Ecology that there are no differences in the intellectual capabilities of peoples of different ages or technological achievement. By this I don't mean differences in sensory balances, which may be determined by the particular technologies or media of communication available, but rather differences in the basic structure and capacity of the human mind.

When we use the terms, "oral" or "literate" or "post literate" in lieu of "primitive" or "modern", we are not referring to intellectual complexity or intelligence, but rather the modes of thought, the uses of systems of symbols and the religious, social and psychology outlooks encouraged or discouraged by a media environment. In refusing to see the people of cultures without writing (as he called them) as "primitive" or somehow inferior to Western white races, Lévi-Strauss provided the philosophical foundation for McLuhan, Postman and Ong. In a letter to the journal Technology and Culture in 1975, McLuhan acknowledged his debt to Lévi-Strauss' structural methodology for his own Laws of the Media.

If it is possible to distinguish a "primitive" mind from our own then how could we apply Marshall McLuhan's Laws of the Media universally across all cultures and time periods? We can talk about the sensory impact of different types of communication media in different eras only if we accept that the basic mental equipment and the capacity for intellectual activity we are born with has been the same throughout all human history and everywhere in the world. In his exhaustive analysis of Amerindian mythology, Levi-Strauss put the study of human culture on a scientific basis and his work belongs in our Media Ecology foundational canon along with Lewis Mumford, John Dewey and Edmund Carpenter.

Lévi-Strauss wrote:

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact.

Isn't this what we Media Ecologists claim in our own studies of how symbol systems and technologies affect human beliefs and activities? Lévi-Strauss discovered and demonstrated connections between seemingly disparate mythic stories, and offered explanations for seemingly random elements of those stories. His methodology can be used as model for ways to interpret the products of our contemporary culture, which, while seeming to be unrelated, actually constitute our system (or systems) of symbolic meanings.

Rest in peace Professor Lévi-Strauss, and thank you for your life and your work.