Claude Lévi-Strauss is dead

Claude Lévi-Strauss is dead. I am sorry to say this but in my ignorance I thought he already was. The announcement of his death was a surprise (he was over 100) and perhaps I should consult those web sites where they can tell you if a particular famous person is alive… or perhaps not.

His importance as a thinker is hard to overestimate and despite sadness at his passing we can hope that this will open up a space for critical reflection on his legacy.

I am part of a generation who was nourished on his structural anthropology and I remember reading the The Raw and the Cooked, and From Honey to Ashes as if they were books of magic. They were not so much theory books but secret keys that could unlock the mysteries of the human condition. Difference became similarity; diversity revealed its patterns, things could be explained. As a young wannabe performance artist in the 70’s I well remember reading Frazer’s Golden Bough and Lévi-Strauss simultaneously and believing I had found the clavis universalis. I was also stupid enough to also think I was the only person who had made the discovery. Later I can still see myself and other students in a class in linguistics performing the logic of the concrete on anything that moved. We found the hidden binary oppositions in a chocolate bar, an episode of Coronation Street and the lyrics of a Dolly Parton song.

It’s hard to think of Foucault or Lacan without Lévi-Strauss. Who else could be the foil to Sartre? Bourdieu would be unimaginable. Derrida would have had no sounding board and Simone De Beauvoir would have been lonely. Could one imagine cultural studies without him. His writing is austere, haughty, exacting and magical. He was the intellectual bricoluer he described.

“Such is how I view myself: a traveler, an archeologist of space, trying in vain to restore the exotic with the use of particles and fragments”.