Encounters

Levi-Strauss and Buddhist thought

A few days ago, the eminent French anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss passed away at the ripe old age of 100 years. He was probably the most well-known anthropologist of the twentieth century and a towering French intellectual. He revolutionized anthropology with his brand of structuralism. He was looking for underlying patterns of thought in the diversity of human activities; he was after the invariant structures that mirror the nature of human intelligence.

He conducted his fieldwork in the rainforests of Brazil. As his work progressed, it became evident to him that the conceptual mental structures of 'primitive' people may be of a different order from those of 'civilized' peoples; but they are just as complex, rich and sophisticated. It was his conviction that written literature as well as myths, modern science as well as magic, reveal the invariant mental structures. In that sense, Parisian left bank intellectuals and denizens of the Amazon jungles display the same mental capacities. In his famous debate with Jean-Paul Sartre, he vehemently denied the validity of the historically-based commonplace distinction between civilized and primitive societies.

Levi-Strauss revolutionized the study of myths. Unlike other investigators into myths, he showed no interest in the content of the myth; his focus was on deciphering its structure, and identifying the relational system that determines it. The antithesis between nature and culture was supremely important to him, and he saw this as the pervasive theme of myths. He once remarked that,'My interest in myths stem from a deep emotion which I cannot explain. What is a beautiful object? What does aesthetic emotion consist of? Maybe, in the end, without being fully aware of it, this is what I have been trying to understand through my study of myths'.

Levi-Strauss technical writings on such topics as myths, kinship, marriage, taboos etc. are extremely recondite. The dense body of data, the theoretical reflections, the methodological guidelines. The unparalleled erudition, conspire to make his technical works such as 'The Scientific Study of Myths', 'The Savage Mind' , 'The Raw and the Cooked, 'The Way of the Masks' extremely difficult to read; they present formidable and challenging difficulties to the lay reader. At times, the argument races at a breakneck speed inducing in the readers a sense of intellectual dizziness. On the other hand his 'TristesTropiques' (in some instances translated as 'A World on the Wane') is extremely readable. It is regarded as one of the most admired books produced in the twentieth century.

This book, which is travel, reflections on anthropology, philosophical speculations, poetic descriptions combined in equal measure has won the highest praise from discerning readers. The well-known anthropologist Clifford Geertz called it, 'surely one of the finest books ever written by an anthropologist.'

The celebrated writer and cultural critic, Susan Sontag referred to it as 'one of the great books of our century.' As another commentator claimed, 'it is a magical masterpiece of anthropology, of literature, of human thought.' For those of us interested in arts and letters, the work of Levi-Strauss is interesting in many ways. He grew up in a family that valued music and painting. He loved music deeply, and wanted to be a musician, realizing that he did not have the adequate skills for that, he switched to philosophy and from there to anthropology.

However, music was one of his lifelong passions. He saw remarkable similarity between music and myths. He once observed that music and myth are languages which ...transcend the level of articulate speech.'.

Moreover his book 'The Raw and the Cooked' is structured along a metaphorical axis which draws on music. His chapter headings such as overture, theme and variation, Bororo song, the 'Good Manners' sonata, a short symphony etc. attests to this fact.

Levi-Strauss was also deeply interested in art; he was fascinated by primitive art which he saw both as document and aesthetic object. He valued art not as forms of representation but as significations in the way language does. For example in discussing the masks and costumes of Indians in British Columbia he focused on art as a system of signs. For someone who believed that culture was a system of communication, such an approach makes great sense.

Levi-Straus, though his structuralist analyses, exercised a great impact on literature and cinema studies. Structuralist studies in literature were popular in the 1960s and 1970s, and ushered in a fertile period in the study of forms of narrative and structures of literary works. He and Roman Jakobson wrote a wonderful structuarlist analysis of Baudelaire's poem 'The Cats' that had an indubitable impact on literary studies.

I found the passages dealing with Buddhist art and Buddhist world views in 'Tristes Tropiques' fascinating. At one point, he says, 'Between the Marxist critique, which frees man from his initial bondage - by teaching him that the apparent meaning of his condition evaporates as soon as he agrees to see things in a wider context - and the Buddhist critique which completes his liberation, there is neither opposition nor contradiction' clearly, he was influenced by Marx, Freud, Durkheim, Saussure and Jakobson. However, as the Nobel Prize -winning Mexican poet and critic Octavio Paz has, in a book on Levi-Strauss has asserted, there is an affinity of interest between Buddhist thinking and that of Levi-Strauss. As Paz remarks, 'The similarity between Buddhism and Levi-Strauss thought is not accidental; it is one more proof that the west, by its own means, and by the very logic of its history, is now arriving at conclusions fundamentally identical to those Buddha and his disciples had arrived at.'

I am particularly interested in the approach to signs and communication that mark Buddhist thought and that of Levi-Strauss.