In Beyond structuralismEmmanuel Désveaux explores the testament phase of Lévi-Strauss-his last ten years of writing-where the great anthropologist formulates his “ ultimate development “And expresses his” doubt ». The general understanding of the work is renewed.
Taking Lévi-Strauss, it seems difficult to escape the facilities of commemoration as well as the dangers, symmetrical, of demystification. In the mass of current publications, Emmanuel Désveaux’s little book takes up the challenge with some success. This collection brings together reviews published on the occasion of the publications of the master of the last ten years, as well as articles from the author’s work. If it is “ meditations », It is that the effort of reflection, beyond the fascination for the work, explores its flaws and sometimes gives off” dissident truths »(Preface). No structure, exchange of women, incest or DIY, here – the author explained elsewhere on these famous topoi -, but rather an attention paid to certain details: the insensitive alterations of the logic of mythological analysis, melancholy, pictorial representation, photo or the desire for poetry are all modest entries which open up to this monumental work of unpublished perspectives.
Latest modifications
Large reader of MythologicalDésveaux thus points to the modifications to work in the last two opus: The jealous potter And Lynx story. Lévi-Strauss continues to explore the unity of Native American mythology, concerned, in the back and forth constant between the different American ethnographic areas, to account for the multiplicity of mythical language codes. But a double influence of the overall logic occurs.
Even if this semantic modesty is accompanied by a large logico-formal effort, the Jealous focuses on the demonstration ofonly one Structure, where tetralogy followed in linearly the transformations between distinct local mythologies (we started from the Bororo myth to establish its paradigmatic value for the whole continent). Lévi-Strauss indeed completes the explanations on the conquest of fire on the celestial powers by the elucidation of the role of the Chtonian powers, but it is by this time immediately release the logic underlying a myth of which he highlights the very large spatial extension. The implicit structure is suddenly approached not through transformations but by that of balances between the codes. By this, it is a new dimension of the global mythical system which appears: “ the thickness of the myth “, Which probably refers to a phenomenon of diachronic stratification of the scheme, operating in a perpendicular way to the cycles of its transformations (a mythical scheme has a distribution all the wider and homogeneous as to its form, as it is the place of a limited semantic investment). This thickness therefore signals towards a certain diffusionism, and thus pleads in favor of a re-examination of the correlation, on the American continent, between spatial distribution of myths and history of the migrations of populations, itself inseparable from that of social organizations. This is the whole concept of culture that is redefined in a sense generic.
Lynx story focuses on the mythology of a limited region and more balances formal demonstrations and semantic lessons. Lévi-Strauss proceeds according to a nuclear type principle inside the relatively enclosed field of the northwest coast (which served as a framework for The naked man), striving “ saturate a legendary local field ». Again, mythological analysis gains in density – but in reality not enough. Désveaux criticizes Lévi-Strauss for not connecting semantic data (the myth of impossible twinness) and social organization (the principle of the difference between elder and younger, which combines with that of the sexes), as the careful examination of the kinship nomenclatures nevertheless invites.
Moreover, these two supplements at the tetralogy, far from opposing each other, are complementary: not only because the refusal of universal mythology ofLynx story joins the rehabilitation of temperate dissemination of The potterbut above all because of a melancholy tone which owes a lot to the tutelary figure of Montaigne. If the Amerindian peoples have an emotional dimension for Lévi-Strauss, it is because it is less a singular humanity than the other half of humanity. The double commutativity of the system of American myths in terms of structure and codes (astronomical, botanical, etc.) indicates great logical stability, a general transitivity of things and beings, dear to Rousseau – it compensates for the injury of separation from nature, to use the analysis of Jean Starobinski. But the irruption of history darkens on the contrary the horizon: the return to Montaigne, to ontological skepticism (“ We never have communication to be ) And rational, suddenly is carried out under the sign of melancholy.
Why Lévi-Strauss, who we know has been able to film during his fields in Brazil, has it hastened to forget these cinematographic attempts ? How to understand the importance given on the contrary to photography in his work ? Perhaps this is a sign that the photo is, like myth, on the side of the discontinuous and the cinema, like the rite, of the continuous. In fact, the rite is a movement of which the whole escapes reason – life marking the limit of the intelligible. As well the intelligible itself at the limit of death, and the photographic clichés a cemetery of the moments. In this sense, SAUDADES DO Brasillike a “ negative ” of Tristes tropicalerects a photographic tomb at the very work of the anthropologist.
The reflections on the work of Poussin and on the literature will be able to leave the reader skeptical, as the use of the transformational method out of its election (Amerindian) election arouses perplexity. On the other hand, the diagnosis on the place of Lévi-Strauss in the anthropological tradition and the rehabilitation of the Dutch scientist Jan Petrus Benjamin de Jonga de Jongs are particularly suggestive.
Synthesis operations
According to Désveaux, the Lévi-Straussian work operates a synthesis between the different anthropological traditions, in two stages: the first Lévi-Strauss, that of the Elementary kinship structuresmixes British (functionalist) and French (physiologism) traditions ; the second, that of MythologicalAmerican (geological) and German (disseminationist) traditions. The recurrence of the philosophical reference was able to give the illusion of a continuity of the work, in particular the Kantian link of rationality to morality. Indeed, in Elementary kinship structuresintervenes the moral determination of the exchange in itself-beyond the rejection of a moralist conception of the prohibition of incest. In Mythologicalthis time it is the categories of understanding (various according to cultures) that are referred to the diversity of nature (the differential distribution of the categories refers, modulo Logical transformation, to nature): rationality submits to the contours of the outside world to know it and intercept its resonances (interference of codes)-it is at the level of this cultural transcendental that freedom is located for Lévi-Strauss, and not in geographic or Behaviourist determinism for collective entities, or at the individual level. This evolution in the field of morality (sensitive in “ Race and culture ), Leads him to partially renounce the virtues of opening and on the contrary advocating a certain closure of cultural systems.
Jan Petrus Benjamin de Josselin de Jong, of the school of Leyde, may not have anticipated structuralism (even if there are transformational intuitions in him), but he was one of his first readers, and a wise critic. He immediately underlined the fundamental aporia of the Levi-Straussian theory of exchange (the prohibition of incest is essential to women as it is as much as it is neither neutral nor passive in the circulation of matrimonial partners), and detected, under the universalist abstraction (the human spirit), a transformational phenomenon specific to a given cultural area (Asia). His Americanist experience, in particular among the Natchez, seems to have diverted him from linear evolutionism (Morgan) as from diffusionism (Kroeber) – not without frustrating it, however, as the synthesis seems impossible, unlike Indonesia, which he then studies. Escaping the facilities of spems, without falling back into trivial functionalism, its “ culturalism »Leads him to postulate the existence of a« Anthropological field of study Coherent, compact, made up of four nuclei whose variations will explain the diversity of social organizations and cultural events: known Asymmetrical (generalized exchange), double descendants (unlike Lévi-Strauss, for whom these systems are purely unilinear), socio-cosmic dualism (while Lévi-Strauss thinks dualism as a sign of restricted exchange), resistance of social organizations in the face of foreign influences. If the first criterion is undoubtedly indigenous (it is a great mark of originality of extreme oriental social organizations), the second comes from the Americanist experience of the Dutch scientist (the Amerindian social organizations, in particular those of the Indians of the Plains, are rebellious with any interpretation in terms of unilaterality – it is better to speak, concerning them, elementary socials), just like the third: Indonesia, encompassing and harmonious, while she speaks in America in a apparently exploded and confusing way.
This American influence is ultimately all the more striking since, in Lévi-Straus, the American experience paradoxically has no theoretical impact on the drafting of Elementary structures (The book focuses on Asia and Australia, is mainly inspired by Mauss, and remains marked by the functionalist tradition, tinged with conjectural history). As well as the structure has the same value for the two scholars: for the Dutch anthropologist, linguist by training, the structure is unconscious as are the rules of grammar, and is a certain geographic area ; Lévi-Strauss, more Kantian, further stiffened the concept (universalizing it), even if the Mythological are a deeply cultural (American) work.