At The Excerpt Mill I quote Musa W. Dube, here is a short excerpt from my quote:

For the most part biblical texts are read in isolation from other secular works of literature. Whether this is intended or not, this approach maintains and perpetuates the imperialistic power of the West over non-Western and non-Christian places, peoples and cultures.

I therefore hold that the Johannine approach to exalting Jesus to divine status, above all Jewish figures and above all other cultural figures of the world, is a colonizing ideology that is not so different from the ideology of the Aeneid and Heart of Darkness. More importantly, John’s colonizing ideology calls upon academic readers to go beyond just expounding and explaining the construction of John’s text.

Lévi-Strauss in Brazil in the 1930s (Apic/Getty Images).

I found out in yesterdays New York Times that influential anthropologist and structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss passed away at the ripe old age of 100.  Considering how I am greatly influenced by such (post)structuralist philosophers such as Althusser, Foucault, and Barthes I am indeed in his debt.

The Times article reported:

His son Laurent said Mr. Lévi-Strauss died of cardiac arrest Friday at his home in Paris. His death was announced Tuesday, the same day he was buried in the village of Lignerolles, in the Côte-d’Or region southeast of Paris, where he had a country home.

As an anthropologist:

he found among ["primitive" societies] a dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins, a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths, and an implicit sense of order and design, even among tribes who practiced ruthless warfare.

…

Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s ideas shook his field. But his critics were plentiful. They attacked him for ignoring history and geography, using myths from one place and time to help illuminate myths from another, without demonstrating any direct connection or influence.

More on his theory and input into the field of philosophy Constance Holden blogs:

Lévi-Strauss introduced “structuralism” to anthropology–the concept that all societies follow certain universal patterns of thought and behavior, as exemplified in their myths. Anthropologists say his way of looking at human culture did away with conceptions of indigenous groups as having “savage” or “primitive” minds–as well as the corollary view that Western civilization is uniquely advanced. Lévi-Strauss’s way of re-conceptualizing anthropology–informed by what he called the “three mistresses” of geology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism–helped shape trends in social sciences and literary theory, and influenced intellectuals such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

On history Lévi-Strauss, who was influenced by Marx (which in turn influenced his structuralism, along with, as stated above, psychoanalysis), stated:

Anthropology cannot remain indifferent to historical process and to the most highly conscious expressions of social phenomena…His goal is to grasp, beyond the conscious and always shifting images which men hold, the complete range of unconscious possibilities.  These are not unlimited, and the relationships of compatibility or incompatibility which each maintains with all the others provide a logical framework for historical developments, which, while perhaps unpredictable, are never arbitrary.  In this sense, the famous statement by Marx, “Men make their own history, but they do not know they are making it,” justifies, first, history and, second, anthropology (Topolski, 193)

Jerzy Topolski, in an article on Marx and Lévi-Strauss, wrote that Lévi-Strauss had a very fatalistic view of history (which I cannot critique as I have not read enough of his theories to substantiate this) and that:

All behavior, according to Lévi-Strauss-writes Susan Sontag-is a language, a vocabulary and grammar of order; anthropology proves nothing about human nature except the need for order itself.  There is no universal truth about the relation between, say, religion and social structure.  There are only models showing the variability of one in relation to others…

Lévi-Strauss claims that among the universal laws of the human mind the basic one is the capability of grasping reality in binary oppositions.  Under conditions of societal existence the distinctive pairs have cultural significance.  The most important for social life is the process of communication which takes place through the medium of a broadly understood “exchange” of words, persons, and things governed by the same formal rules (Topolski, 196).

While Lévi-Strauss has much to admire he was, as the Times obituary stated, much disliked by many anthropologists because of his mix of structural philosophy within his anthropology.  Hugo G. Nutini, an an article for American Anthropologist, wrote all the way back in 1971:

One of the main reasons why Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism has elicited such resistance, and sometimes outright antagonism, from the Anglo American anthropological world is the fact that almost invariable he writes in his dual capacity as scientist and ideologists.  Had he confined himself to expounding his theory and methods in strictly anthropological terms, his ideas would by now be much more acceptable to and better understood by his colleagues (Nutini, 537)

…

Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism cannot, from the anthropological standpoint, be viewed profitably as a kind of philosophy…I believe that empiricist anthropologists, instinctively realizing the differences in the scientific foundations of the empiricist approach and of structuralism…have viewed structuralism as just another philosophy in disguise…Structuralism should not be regarded as another approach to the handling of empirical social facts in conceptual contexts that do not involve the bifurcation of the socio-cultural universe, not in the light of the other, scientific, side of structuralism.  It will not do, then, to examine a structuralist construction in strictly empirical terms, as empiricist anthropologists are fond of doing when they assert that Lévi-Strauss’s generalizations cannot stand the test of particular ethnographic situations (543)

It is true that there is much to critisize in Lévi-Strauss’ work (as there is in any work of a philosopher or anthropologist) and as David G. Mandelbaum points out, “The writings of Lévi-Strauss have left a broad wake of effervescent admirers and roiled specialists.  Not many have attempted to check the evidence he advances in support of a thesis or have tried to verify his findings.  Those who have closely examined specific writings have generally found them deficient in both respects” (Mandelbaum, 32).

But what Lévi-Strauss has given us, in structural thought, is quite the gift indeed.  He has made many of us to reflect on the structural objects of our societies and the way that history and cultural can limit our choices and can harm certain populations for the benefit of other populations (such as the structural system of capitalistic white supremacy in North America).  He also provided a counter-point to many Western anthropologists who simply overlooked the knowledge of so called “primitive” cultures by pointing out how their fables and myths were as complex as Western philosophical discourse.

Sources

Mandelbaum, David G.  1987.  “Myths and Myth Maker: Some Anthropological Appraisals of the Mythological Studies of Lévi-Strauss.”  Ethnology 26, no. 1 (1987): 31-36.

Nutini, Hugo G.  1971.  “The Ideological Bases of Lévi-Strauss’s Structuralism.”  American Anthropologist 73, no. 3 (1971): 537-544.

Topolski, Jerzy.  “Lévi-Strauss and Marx on History.”  History and Theory 12, no. 2 (1973): 192-207.

An excerpt from my other blog about race relations and white evangelicals:

The racially important cultural tools in the white evangelical tool kit are “accountable freewill individualism,” “relationism” (attaching central importance to interpersonal relationships), and antistructuralism (inability to perceive or unwillingness to accept social structural influences).

…

Absent from their accounts is the idea that poor relationships might be shaped by social structures, such as laws, the ways institutions operate, or forms of segregation. Again, understanding evangelicals’ cultural tools illuminates why this element is missing. White evangelicals not only interpret race issues by using accountable freewill individualism and relationalism, but they often find structural explanations irrelevant or even wrongheaded…Evangelicals are thus also antistructural because they believe that invoking social structures shifts guild away from the root source—the accountable individual. However, evangelicals are selectively aware of social institutions—they see those both impact them in their own social location and tend to undermine accountable freewill individualism. For instance, they are aware of affirmative action because such programs can impact them in their social location, and they tend to oppose such programs because they go against evangelical understanding of accountable freewill individualism.

"Revolt" by Gaber (click on pic for larger image)

Artwork by Gaber.

At The Excerpt Mill I quote  John Maynard Keynes:

In particular, it is an outstanding characteristic of the economic system in which we live that, whilst it is subject to severe fluctuations in respect of output and employment, it is not violently unstable. Indeed it seems capable of remaining in a chronic condition of sub-normal activity for a considerable period without any marked tendency either towards recovery or complete collapse. Moreover, the evidence indicates that full, or even approximately full, employment is of rare and short-lived occurrence. Fluctuations may start briskly but seem to wear themselves out before they have proceeded to great extremes, and an intermediate situation which is neither desperate nor satisfactory is our normal lot.

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Antonio Gramsci:

A short excerpt from a post from my blog The Excerpt Mill:

In Bourdieu’s early work with Jean-Claude Passeron, we find the term “the cultural arbitrary” used in a way which seems quite similar to Gramsci’s concept of normative grammar: “In any given social formation the cultural arbitrary which the power relations between the groups or classes making up that social formation put into the dominant position within the system of cultural arbitraries is the one which most fully, though always indirectly, expresses the objective interests (material and symbolic) of the dominant groups or classes.” In developing this concept, Bourdieu draws upon William Labov’s early work which showed that “members of a speech community can share allegiance to the same standard, despite differences in the (nonstandard) varieties they themselves speak.”

Gramsci’s historical method serves to highlight the cross-class alliances that stabilize in any given “historical bloc”-a phrase that refers to the “complex, contradictory and discordant ensemble of the superstructures” and corresponding “relations of production.” The hegemonic ideology of any given bloc does not simply reflect the interests of only the ruling elite, but also those of the other classes with whom they have entered into alliances and even the very process by which that alliance took shape.  While Bourdieu may tacitly acknowledge the importance of such processes, his theory of the “cultural arbitrary” retains its structuralist roots.

• Jody Sokolower, "Gathering Rage Revisited"
  "Despite the unpopularity of both terms, she defines herself as a socialist and a feminist. The central tenet of her book is contained in its subtitle: she believes that the fatal flaw of the development of revolutionary theory and practice has been its male supremacy. She defines this not only in women's participation or the responsiveness of movements to women's immediate needs, but in an understanding of power, which she calls "perhaps the central feminist issue." Her perspective was shaped by the voices of Sandinista women in Nicaragua in the period after the electoral defeat of 1990."
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• The Education of Black People by W.E.B. Du Bois ed. by Herbert Aptheker
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