Journal of the History of Ideas

Introduction

It is sometimes claimed that Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski more or less single-handedly created modern anthropology. This may have seemed to be the case at midcentury, when Boasian American anthropology had diverged out into many specialized strands and Marcel Mauss's students had not yet made their mark in French anthropology. British kinship studies seemed, in contrast, to rest securely on a method invented by Malinowski and a theory developed by Radcliffe-Brown, as an established "science of society." As Eriksen and Nielsen put it, major changes took place in anthropology during the 1950s and 1960s, economics and politics were reconceptualized and new theories of symbolic meaning transformed the discipline.¹ Developments in North America and Britain differed, although the problems raised were similar, yet the single most important theorist was French.

If already in the first postwar years, Claude Lévi-Strauss will emerge as an exemplary thinker, the most important figure in the history of anthropology and the "ecumenical," "paradigmatic anthropologist" of the second half of the twentieth century, this implies a good deal about the intellectual milieu of our time and of anthropology in particular.² In the 1950s and 1960s, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is Lévi-Strauss's astute promotion [End Page 633] of his discipline,³ anthropology becomes one of the essential reference points of intellectual discourse in France, taking part of the mainstream of ideas defined as structuralism, which had the ambition to provide social sciences a rigor and power comparable to those of natural sciences.

Moreover, the "unparalleled" intellectual and international prominence and audience Lévi-Strauss has acquired in anthropology has been immensely influential, not only in anthropology, but in the disciplines interested in mankind and human products, from history and psychoanalysis to philosophy and literary studies. "The bearing of that work on the notion of culture, on our understanding of language and mental processes, on our interpretation of history is so direct and novel that, George Steiner claimed, an awareness of Lévi-Strauss's thought is a part of current literacy."⁴ His work has brought about an epistemological break with previous methods of analysis, so as one can refer to a real anthropological revolution.

What is often ignored is the extent to which Lévi-Strauss's original formulation of structural method was embedded in problems specific to the position of anthropology, not simply problems of anthropological theory, but more generally problems of definition of the nature and scope of anthropology and its relationship with the other human sciences. It seems that Lévi-Strauss is always concerned with asserting something more general about the nature of the discipline he is practicing, its field of reference and its claims to scientific and humanistic interest, in an essentially "corporatist" way of thinking.⁵ He is not content simply to speak on his own account and from his own local perspective, but is also prepared to speak collectively, in the name of anthropology, in defence of what he believes to be its special contribution to contemporary knowledge, to the extent that the advent of his contribution has done "more to alter anthropology's sense of itself than its sense of its subject."⁶ His capacity for synthesis, for overview, for reflexive statement on what one's discipline is about and also what it should be about, could be seen as an essential trait of Lévi-Strauss, who is not simply a producer of ideas and theories, but equally and inseparably, an influential thinker, maître à penser.

Lévi-Strauss developed anthropology into a scientific project with far more sophisticated intellectual purchase for understanding humanity than is generally acknowledged or than the discipline had previously achieved. His contribution represented the reabsorption of the discipline into the mainstream [End Page 634] of Western ideas, since he reestablished anthropology as an intellectual undertaking, a profession of the intelligentsia, rather than a specialized vocation with its own peculiar language, corpus of data, techniques, methods, and theory. The rise of structuralism itself is historically inseparable from the prestige of anthropology. Structuralism became an alternative...