Lévi-Strauss's heroic anthropology facing contemporary problems of the modern world

Abstract

Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of the structural revolution in anthropology, passed in October 2009. In the decade after his death, we are presented with a significant number of successive publications that celebrate both his work and life and the ever-lasting public engagement of his heroic anthropology with problems of the modern world. This extended review article is focused to deal with these works in relation to contemporary issues, which is not already so well known for Lévi-Strauss and which can make a point to restore him to a central position of importance not merely in the history of anthropology but also in the public engagement of current anthropology.

Keywords:

• Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009)
• public anthropology
• structural legacy in anthropology
• current issues in anthropology
• social ontology
• biopolitics
• morphodynamics

Notes

1 See also his Lecture at the Japan Productivity Centre in 1983 (Lévi-Strauss 2001b).

2 Incidentally, all days along the Paris COP21 of December 2015 on global climate agreements, I witnessed in the French TV media the constant broadcast of a short sequence of images cut from an innovative pedagogical project and ambitious experiment staged by Bruno Latour and his students to address climate change as part of Paris COP21 negotiations (one variant can be watched in Bornstein 2015, min.03:35–04:15). Without acknowledgment, the cut out images showed the intended creation of a ritual and symbolic atmosphere for healthy negotiations that reproduced with a striking similarity Lévi-Strauss’s insights formulated in his first Japanese Lecture, showing the importance that some societies attach to ritual and symbolism in preparing the ground for negotiations, agreements, and decisions (Lévi-Strauss 2001b).

3 The English translation “technique of making strange” (p. 31) is oddly inadequate.

4 Maurice Blanchot, “L’homme au point zéro”, L’Amitié, Paris: Gallimard (1971, 87). (English translation: Stanford University Press 1997, 74).

5 See also his last address at Unesco (Lévi-Strauss 2007).

6 According to Pierre Maranda in an essay discussing the impact of structural analysis presented at the University of British Columbia. Quoted in: Marie Mauzé, Michael Harkin, and Sergei Kan, eds. Coming to shore: Northwest Coast ethnology, traditions, and visions (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), p. 90.

7 Reported answer by the Harvard sociocultural anthropology coordinator in Fall 2017. Personal communication on November 8, 2017, from Gary Urton, the then Chair of Anthropology Department at Harvard University, also confirmed in personal communication a few days later by Michael Herzfeld, another senior anthropologist at Harvard.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Albert Doja

ALBERT DOJA is University Professor of Anthropology at the University of Lille, France, and Member of the National Academy of Sciences, Albania. He hold a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the Paris School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) and a Professorial accreditation (Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches) from Paris Descartes University, Sorbonne. A former Visiting Research Scholar at Harvard University and Honorary Fellow of the Department of Anthropology at University College London, he has held several academic positions in France, USA, Britain, Ireland, and Albania, lectured in social anthropology and conducted extensive fieldwork research in many other countries. (https://pro.univ-lille.fr/en/albert-doja/)