A primitive people is not a backward or retarded people; indeed it may possess a genius for invention or action that leaves the achievements of civilized peoples far behind.
—Claude Lévi-Strauss
IF that hypothesis is true, then civilization has nothing much to brag about. Modern man does not constitute an end product, an exponential improvement of the aboriginal dowry, an evolutionary intellectual advance. He is merely another mode of human society, coexisting and coequal with the most primitive tribes that have somehow survived, despite seemingly naive and archaic customs, into the space age. The marvelous fruits of contemporary Western culture—technology, medicine, literature, TV, the H-bomb—show an exercise of the mind no more commendable or admirable than the savage's totems and bone beads. Today's philosophies reflect no more brilliant a light than mankind's earliest brainstorms in the dim dawntime of thought.
These convictions are held by a highly civilized Frenchman named Claude Lévi-Strauss, who has devoted his professional career and seven books to the proposition that, in their potential, all men are intellectually equal. They have probably been equal for something like 1,000,000 years—a bridge of time that carries the world back to the Pleistocene Age and the rude beginnings of social life. It was then that ancient ancestors of modern man equipped themselves with the first language and the first culture and, in so doing, set a pattern that has been followed ever since.
Lévi-Strauss occupies the chair of social anthropology at Paris' College de France. He also occupies a place of increasing importance in the world of ideas. At 58, he can scarcely be called a newcomer. Yet for many who are just discovering him, he is the newest and most challenging prophet on the scene. In France and elsewhere, he has deposed Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre as the most notable—and fashionable—intellectual figure.
Civilization's Dropouts
The formidable and frequently forbidding scholarship of his books has not prevented them from being widely read, or at least talked about. From France, the interest in Lévi-Strauss and his "structuralism" has spread far afield. Cambridge now offers a course in his anthropological theory, a recognition seldom bestowed by any university until after the subject's death. The Germans have established a school called Strukturforschung (research of life structure), which adapts structural theory to the study of art. In the U.S., the amplifying academic debate commands the ear and the curiosity of non-academicians. Of his books, Structural Anthropology, Totemism, The Savage Mind and Tristes Tropiques are now available in English translation. Two more will arrive in the fall: Kinship Systems and The Raw and the Cooked. Wherever it occurs, the argument about Lévi-Strauss takes fire from his provocative approach to the study of man—which has implications far beyond anthropology.