 Cover of the first edition | |
| Author | Claude Lévi-Strauss |
|---|---|
| Original title | La Pensée sauvage |
| Translator | Anonymous |
| Language | French |
| Subjects | Anthropology Structuralism |
| Publisher | Librairie Plon (Paris) |
Publication date | 1962 |
| Publication place | France |
Published in English | 1966 |
| Media type | |
The Savage Mind (French : La Pensée sauvage), also translated as Wild Thought, is a 1962 work of structural anthropology by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Lévi-Strauss makes clear that "la pensée sauvage" refers not to the discrete mind of any particular type of human, but rather to 'untamed' human thought: "In this book it is neither the mind of savages nor that of primitive or archaic humanity, but rather mind in its untamed state as distinct from mind cultivated or domesticated for the purpose of yielding a return." [1]
Savage thought, Lévi-Strauss argues, continually gathers and applies structures wherever they can be used. If scientific thought is represented by the engineer who asks a question and tries to design an optimal or complete solution, savage thought resembles the bricoleur, who constructs things using whatever materials are at hand.
One of Lévi-Strauss's many examples is the relationship between two Australian groups, the Aranda and the Arabanna. The Aranda have a complex system for intermarriages that divides all people into two groups and then four stages within each group. The system specifies where the children will live and how they will marry. The Arabanna use a different system for marriages, but somehow use the Aranda's marriage system for determining the sex and affiliation of reincarnated spirits. The structure has been borrowed and transposed, appropriated because of its ability to generate a certain economy independently of its substrate.
Lévi-Strauss (continuing the argument from Totemism, his previous work) criticizes the concept of totemism for arbitrarily prioritizing a particular structural relation. He admits the reality of totemism, in which, within a larger group, smaller groups distinguish themselves through identification with a plant or animal. He denies, however, that totemic societies differ fundamentally from societies that divide people on the basis of caste. Totems, he argues, are just another way to create necessary distinctions within a larger group. These distinctions may have greater or lesser practical significance, but ultimately: [2]
In other words, the operation of identifying with a totem is secondary to the underlying process of re-appropriating structure (for example, observed differences between animals) for the purposes of society.
The English translation of The Savage Mind appeared in 1966. However, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz called the translation "execrable" and insisted on using his own translations from the French edition. [3] A new translation by Jeffrey Mehlman and John Leavitt was published under the title Wild Thought in 2021. [4]
The Savage Mind was one of the earliest works of structural anthropology and had a large influence on the field of anthropology.
The book also played a role within the larger currents of structuralism and post-structuralism. The application of bricolage to social structure provided the inspiration for the philosopher Jacques Derrida's essay "Structure, Sign and Play". [5] The idea that social structures can be transposed and recontextualized also plays a large role in the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia . [6]
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to critical theory:
Ethnology is an academic field and discipline that compares and analyzes the characteristics of different scenarios peoples and the relationships between them.
Structuralism is an intellectual current and methodological approach, primarily in the social sciences, that interprets elements of human culture by way of their relationship to a broader system. It works to uncover the structural patterns that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel.
In the arts, bricolage is the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work constructed using mixed media.
In structuralism-influenced studies of mythology, a mytheme is a fundamental generic unit of narrative structure from which myths are thought to be constructed—a minimal unit that is always found shared with other, related mythemes and reassembled in various ways ("bundled") or linked in more complicated relationships. For example, the myths of Greek Adonis and Egyptian Osiris share several elements, leading some scholars to conclude that they share a source, i.e. images passed down in cultures or from one to another, being ascribed new interpretations of the action depicted, as well as new names in various readings of icons.
Structural anthropology is a school of sociocultural anthropology based on Claude Lévi-Strauss' 1949 idea that immutable deep structures exist in all cultures, and consequently, that all cultural practices have homologous counterparts in other cultures, essentially that all cultures are equatable.
Symbolic anthropology or, more broadly, symbolic and interpretive anthropology, is the study of cultural symbols and how those symbols can be used to gain a better understanding of a particular society. According to Clifford Geertz, "[b]elieving, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning". In theory, symbolic anthropology assumes that culture lies within the basis of the individuals’ interpretation of their surrounding environment, and that it does not in fact exist beyond the individuals themselves. Furthermore, the meaning assigned to people's behavior is molded by their culturally established symbols. Symbolic anthropology aims to thoroughly understand the way meanings are assigned by individuals to certain things, leading then to a cultural expression. There are two majorly recognized approaches to the interpretation of symbolic anthropology, the interpretive approach, and the symbolic approach. Both approaches are products of different figures, Clifford Geertz (interpretive) and Victor Turner (symbolic). There is also another key figure in symbolic anthropology, David M. Schneider, who does not particularly fall into either of the schools of thought. Symbolic anthropology follows a literary basis instead of an empirical one meaning there is less of a concern with objects of science such as mathematics or logic, instead of focusing on tools like psychology and literature. That is not to say fieldwork is not done in symbolic anthropology, but the research interpretation is assessed in a more ideological basis.
Pierre Clastres was a French anthropologist, ethnographer, and ethnologist. He is best known for his contributions to the field of political anthropology, with his fieldwork among the Guayaki in Paraguay and his theory of stateless societies. He mostly researched Indigenous peoples of the Americas in which the power was not considered coercive and chieftains were powerless.
Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, or Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, is a 1913 book by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, in which the author applies his work to the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and the study of religion. It is a collection of four essays inspired by the work of Wilhelm Wundt and Carl Jung and first published in the journal Imago (1912–13): "The Horror of Incest", "Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence", "Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts", and "The Return of Totemism in Childhood".
"Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" was a lecture presented at Johns Hopkins University on 21 October 1966 by philosopher Jacques Derrida. The lecture was then published in 1967 as chapter ten of Writing and Difference.
Difference is a key concept of philosophy, denoting the process or set of properties by which one entity is distinguished from another within a relational field or a given conceptual system. In the Western philosophical system, difference is traditionally viewed as being opposed to identity, following the Principles of Leibniz, and in particular, his Law of the identity of indiscernibles. In structuralist and poststructuralist accounts, however, difference is understood to be constitutive of both meaning and identity. In other words, because identity is viewed in non-essentialist terms as a construct, and because constructs only produce meaning through the interplay of differences, it is the case that for both structuralism and poststructuralism, identity cannot be said to exist without difference.
Anthropology of art is a sub-field in social anthropology dedicated to the study of art in different cultural contexts. Traditionally the anthropology of art has focused on historical, economic and aesthetic dimensions in non-Western art forms, including what is known as 'tribal art'. It has now broadened to include all art.
Sir Edmund Ronald Leach FRAI FBA was a British social anthropologist and academic. He served as provost of King's College, Cambridge from 1966 to 1979. He was also president of the Royal Anthropological Institute from 1971 to 1975.
Of Grammatology is a 1967 book by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. The book, originating the idea of deconstruction, proposes that throughout continental philosophy, especially as philosophers engaged with linguistic and semiotic ideas, writing has been erroneously considered as derivative from speech, making it a "fall" from the real "full presence" of speech and the independent act of writing.
In structural anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss, a French anthropologist, makes the claim that "myth is language". Through analysing mythology as language, Lévi-Strauss suggests that it can be approached the same way as language can be approached by the same structuralist methods used to address language. Thus, Lévi-Strauss offers a structuralist theory of mythology; he clarifies, "Myth is language, functioning on an especially high level where meaning succeeds practically at 'taking off' from the linguistic ground on which it keeps rolling."
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology. He held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France between 1959 and 1982, was elected a member of the Académie française in 1973 and was a member of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He received numerous honors from universities and institutions throughout the world.
Systems theory in anthropology is an interdisciplinary, non-representative, non-referential, and non-Cartesian approach that brings together natural and social sciences to understand society in its complexity. The basic idea of a system theory in social science is to solve the classical problem of duality; mind-body, subject-object, form-content, signifier-signified, and structure-agency. Systems theory suggests that instead of creating closed categories into binaries (subject-object), the system should stay open so as to allow free flow of process and interactions. In this way the binaries are dissolved.
Michel Cartry (1931–2008) was a French Africanist and anthropologist of religion.
This bibliography of anthropology lists some notable publications in the field of anthropology, including its various subfields. It is not comprehensive and continues to be developed. It also includes a number of works that are not by anthropologists but are relevant to the field, such as literary theory, sociology, psychology, and philosophical anthropology.
Sybil Wolfram was an English philosopher and writer, of Austrian Jewish origin. She studied at Somerville College, Oxford and was a Fellow and Tutor in philosophy at Lady Margaret Hall at University of Oxford from 1964 to 1993.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
