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Claude Lévi-Strauss Quotes
1908–2009 Belgium
Claude Lévi-Strauss (28 November 1908 - 30 October 2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theory of structuralism and structural anthropology.
Belgium Academics Anthropologists Non-fiction authors Philosophers Also known as: Claude Levi Strauss, Claude Levi-Strauss, Lévi-Strauss, Lévi-Strauss, Claude
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The police are not entrusted with a mission which differentiates them from those they serve. Being unconcerned with ultimate purposes, they are inseparable from the persons and interests of their masters, and shine with their reflected glory.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
A day will come when the idea that for the sake of food the people of the past raised and massacred living beings and with complete equanimity displayed their flesh in bits and pieces in shop windows, will no doubt inspire the same revulsion that the cannibalistic meals of the Americans, Oceanians, or Africans inspired in the travelers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Our science arrived at maturity the day that Western man began to see that he would never understand himself as long as there was a single race or people on the surface of the earth that he treated as an object. Only then could anthropology declare itself in its true colours: as an enterprise reviewing and atoning for the Renaissance, in order to spread humanism to all humanity.
The Scope of Anthropology (1960)
Freedom is neither a legal invention nor a philosophical conquest, the cherished possession of civilizations more valid than others because they alone have been able to create or preserve it. It is the outcome of an objective relationship between the individual and the space he occupies, between the consumer and the resources at his disposal.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
The work of the painter, the poet or the musician, like the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental and the only one really common to us all; scientific thought is merely the sharp point — more penetrating because it has been whetted on the stone of fact, but at the cost of some loss of substance — and its effectiveness is to be explained by its power to pierce sufficiently deeply for the main body of the tool to follow the head.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
In the case of European towns, the passing of centuries provides an enhancement; in the case of American towns, the passing of years brings degeneration. It is not simply that they have been newly built; they were built so as to be renewable as quickly as they were put up, that is, badly.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
The entire village left the next day in about thirty canoes, leaving us alone with the women and children in the abandoned houses. [Le village entier partit le lendemain dans une trentaine de pirogues, nous laissant seuls avec les femmes et les enfants dans les maisons abandonnées.]
The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of a complexity as yet unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious mass of noxious by-products which now contaminate the globe. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
Never better than after the last four centuries of his history could a Western man understand that, while assuming the right to impose a radical separation of humanity and animality, while granting to one all that he denied the other, he initiated a vicious circle. The one boundary, constantly pushed back, would be used to separate men from other men and to claim—to the profit of ever smaller minorities—the privilege of a humanism, corrupted at birth by taking self-interest as its principle and its notion.
I am not far from believing that, in our own societies, history has replaced mythology and fulfils the same function, that for societies without writing and without archives the aim of mythology is to ensure that as closely as possible—complete closeness is obviously impossible—the future will remain faithful to the present and to the past.
Myth and Meaning (1978)
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