Maurice Olender
Claude Lévi-Strauss composed the pages collected in this volume at the request of La Repubblica, a major Italian daily newspaper. The result: a set of sixteen original texts written in French between 1989 and 2000.
In each case Lévi-Strauss, taking a current event as his starting point, tackles some of the major debates of the time. Whether he is discussing the mad cow disease epidemic, different forms of cannibalism (alimentary or therapeutic), or racial prejudice linked to ritual practices such as female excision and male circumcision, the ethnologist helps us understand the social phenomena unfolding before our eyes. In doing so, he evokes Montaigne’s writings, one of the founding monuments of Western modernity: “Everyone gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country” (1.31, Charles Cotton translation).
Lévi-Strauss points out that any practice, any belief or custom, “however bizarre, shocking, or even revolting it may appear,” can be explained only within its own context. On the occasion of the four hundredth anniversary of Montaigne’s death in 1992, the anthropologist revived a philosophical debate that is still current: “On the one hand, the philosophy of the Enlightenment subjects all historical societies to its criticism and cherishes the utopian dream of a rational society. On the other, relativism rejects any absolute criterion by which a culture could allow itself to judge different cultures. Since Montaigne, and following his example, we have never stopped looking for a way out of that contradiction.”
Like all Claude Lévi-Strauss’s writings, this volume, whose title is taken from one of its chapters, emphasizes the inextricable link between “mythic thought and scientific thought” but without reducing one to the other. He recalls that between so-called complex societies and those wrongly designated “primitive or archaic,” there is not the great distance long imagined to exist. That observation arises from a mode of proceeding—in other words, from a method—that also aspires to be an intelligible approach to the everyday: “The faraway illuminates the near, but the near can also illuminate the faraway.”
That sort of observation, that practice of the gaze in which the near and the faraway illuminate each other, was already in place in 1952, in “Santa Claus Burned as a Heretic,” originally written for Les Temps modernes and reprinted as part 1 of this volume. In this article about a recent ritual that had emerged in the West, Lévi-Strauss writes: “It is not every day that the ethnologist finds the occasion to observe in his own society the sudden growth of a rite and even of a cult.” He is cautious, however, immediately adding that it is both easier and more difficult to understand our own societies: “Easier, because the continuity of experience is maintained in all its moments and in each of its nuances; more difficult as well, because it is on such occasions, only too rare, that one realizes the extreme complexity of even the most tenuous social transformations.”
In these newspaper columns, which bear the stamp of the last years of the twentieth century, we again find the lucidity and tonic pessimism of the great anthropologist. Translated into some thirty languages, his work now marks the beginning of our twenty-first century.