Claude Lévi-Strauss Quotes

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I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of progress are in danger of failing to recognize — because they set so little store by them — the immense riches accumulated by the human race on either side of the narrow furrow on which they keep their eyes fixed; by underrating the achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accomplished.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Logically, the "infantilization" of the culprit implied by the notion of punishment demands that he should have a corresponding right to a reward, in the absence of which the initial procedure will prove ineffective and may even lead to results contrary to those that were hoped for. Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as an adult, in order to deny him consolation; and we believe we have made great spiritual progress because, instead of eating a few of our fellow-men, we subject them to physical and moral mutilation.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor anyone in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
[Serialism] is like a sailless ship, driven out to sea by its captain, who has grown tired of its being used only as a pontoon, and who is privately convinced that by subjecting life aboard to the rules of an elaborate protocol, he will prevent the crew from thinking nostalgically either of their home port or of their ultimate destination.…

Claude Lévi-Strauss
The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of a complexity as yet unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious mass of noxious by-products which now contaminate the globe. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
The purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is real).

Claude Lévi-Strauss
The image a society evolves of the relationship between the living and the dead is, in the final analysis, an attempt, on the level of religious thought, to conceal, embellish or justify the actual relationships which prevail among the living.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
The idea behind structuralism is that there are things we may not know but we can learn how they are related to each other. This has been used by science since it existed and can be extended to a few other studies — linguistics and mythology — but certainly not to everything.
The great speculative structures are made to be broken. There is not one of them that can hope to last more than a few decades, or at most a century or two.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
The truths which we seek so far afield only become valid when we have separated them from this dross.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
One must be very naïve or dishonest to imagine that men choose their beliefs independently of their situation.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Anthropology found its Galileo in Rivers, its Newton in Mauss.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
These facts make the creator of music a being like the gods, and make music itself the supreme mystery of human knowledge.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
No contact with savage Indian tribes has ever daunted me more than the morning I spent with an old lady swathed in woolies who compared herself to a rotten herring encased in a block of ice.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
For everything is history: What was said yesterday is history, what was said a minute ago is history. But, above all, one is led to misjudge the present, because only the study of historical development permits the weighing and evaluation of the interrelationships among the components of the present-day society.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
With all its technical sophistication, the photographic camera remains a coarse device compared to the human hand and brain.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining....

Claude Lévi-Strauss
The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Teaching and research are not to be confused with training for a profession. Their greatness and their misfortune is that they are a refuge or a mission.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
While I complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment, since I have not reached the stage of development at which I would be capable of perceiving it. A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveller, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
We can understand, too, that natural species are chosen not because they are "good to eat" but because they are "good to think."

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Civilization has ceased to be that delicate flower which was preserved and painstakingly cultivated in one or two sheltered areas of a soil rich in wild species... Mankind has opted for monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as beetroot is grown in the mass. Henceforth, man's daily bill of fare will consist only of this one item.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Nor must we forget that in science there are no final truths.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
The world began without the human race and it will end without it.... Man has never—save only when he reproduces himself—done other than cheerfully dismantle million upon million of structures and reduce their elements to a state in which they can no longer be reintegrated.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
In the case of European towns, the passing of centuries provides an enhancement; in the case of American towns, the passing of years brings degeneration. It is not simply that they have been newly built; they were built so as to be renewable as quickly as they were put up, that is, badly.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
The work of the painter, the poet or the musician, like the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental and the only one really common to us all; scientific thought is merely the sharp point — more penetrating because it has been whetted on the stone of fact, but at the cost of some loss of substance — and its effectiveness is to be explained by its power to pierce sufficiently deeply for the main body of the tool to follow the head.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Not only does a journey transport us over enormous distances, it also causes us to move a few degrees up or down in the social scale. It displaces us physically and also — for better or for worse — takes us out of our class context, so that the colour and flavour of certain places cannot be dissociated from the always unexpected social level on which we find ourselves in experiencing them.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Adventure has no place in the anthropologists profession; it is merely one of those unavoidable drawbacks, which detract from his effective work through the incidental loss of weeks or month.

Claude Lévi-Strauss