Editor’s introduction

In the decade since his death, the legacy of Claude Lévi-Strauss has been debated and parsed. Some have argued explicitly that he is no longer an important figure to reckon with (e.g., Launay 2013), while others have held that he continues to cast a shadow on anthropology and letters (Harkin 2019). Some have tried to reshape his legacy in light of his later writings, viewing him more as a humanist and aesthetician¹ than a rigorous scientist (Ohnuki-Tierney 2014). His legacy has certainly been a victim of the generational and cultural changes happening within the academy, where he can be seen as another “dead white male,” perhaps epitomisingly so, as in his later life he seemed to cast the familiar figure of an aristocratic, conservative pillar of the establishment. Albert Doja, in a combative and passionate piece, lays out an argument for considering his legacy to be eminently relevant to the contemporary world of ecological, cultural and now viral crisis.

In many ways, Lévi-Strauss was a man for our times. His famous pessimism matches our mood in these dark days; his warnings about overpopulation, environmental degradation, and loss of cultural diversity date to his writings in the 1950s, specifically Tristes Tropiques and Race et Histoire: a decade or so ahead of Rachel Carson and Paul Erlich. And one could argue that he was unique in his approach to cultural homogenization—again, well ahead of writers such as Thomas Friedman—because of his understanding of the way that difference constitutes identity. As a French man and member of the Academie Française, it was natural that he would be resistant to the onslaught of American culture in the postwar period, but his insight went far deeper than that. He understood fundamentally that an identity—in this case national, but the same mechanism applies at different scales—was a function of its opposition to others. While this aspect of human nature had a dark side in prejudice and racism, it also could lead to the “overvaluing,” to borrow a word of his, of some cultures, in his case that of Japan. His nuanced understanding of these issues led to his work at UNESCO in the early 1950s, in an attempt to help shape the postwar world order in a humane form. However, his disappointment with the people and institutions shaping that world order led him to withdraw into the world of Mythologiques, his major life work (Debaene 2010). However cynical and world-weary he may have become, he nonetheless returned to these themes periodically, as in his second book for UNESCO, Race and Culture, written in 1971, and in the many public interviews and lectures he gave in the 1980s and 90 s.

No longer the socialist firebrand of his youth, he nonetheless maintained a concerned interest in the state of humanity late in life, although he became more pessimistic and detached, practicing a form of renunciation in his 90 s. However, I would argue that many of the theoretical methods and concepts he left us are of use today, and well beyond anthropology or the academy as a whole. We, too, are in a position to fashion a new world order, the very essence of which will be bricolage.

***

Radoslav Hlúšek has given us a survey of Spanish language literature on sacred landscapes in Mexico. Mountains, of course, are a focal point for the sacredness of landscape, constituting what I have called a topeme—a unit of meaning analogous to Lévi-Strauss’s mytheme. It is universal or nearly so for humans to employ verticality as a fundamental axis in their classification systems. Mountains are the only route to achieve closeness to heaven. Moreover, in many societies they are iconic of, or even isomorphic to, social hierarchy. Among the Inca, for instance, mountains were employed to represent the political order (Toohey 2013). Indeed, the current review could be fruitfully read alongside Toohey’s in these pages. Although the situation among these different cultures in Mesoamerica and Andean South America certainly differs—for instance the prevalence of volcanoes among the mountains considered sacred in the Valley of Mexico, leading to a somewhat more ambivalent attitude toward them—nonetheless the similarities are greater. Indeed, some degree of ambivalence toward mountains, especially high ones, is nearly universal. The dangers of falling, hypoxia, and encounters with wild animals are seen in many cultures’ representation of mountains. In British Columbia among the northern Wakashan-speaking peoples, mountains were a source of power and wealth, but also the place where one could meet Baxbakwalanusiwae, the ‘Cannibal-at-the-North-End-of-the-World” in Boas’s translation, the spirit of the hamatsa, or Cannibal Dance. In European folklore, mountains are a source of wealth, but wealth that is guarded by dragons: dragons being in some sense a personification of the mountain, and of the ultimately futile struggle of humans to secure a livelihood, or life itself, from nature. In the end it is the dragon alone who can kill Beowulf.

Mountains are viewed now, naively, as purely beautiful or, to use the term that first popularized such landscapes in the West, sublime. As Hlúšek discusses, mountains in Mexico have now become tourist destinations, as they have done in many places. It is a jarring reality of modern life that the very places considered serene and spiritually powerful are swarmed with tourists who view them as items to be consumed. I visited the sacred Yellow Mountain (Huang Shan), where many of the scenes of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon were filmed, and which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Literally thousands of tourists, mostly students on guided tours whose leaders wielded loudspeakers massed on the paths, forcing a military-paced march through the fog-shrouded landscape.

Notes

1 I believe Lévi-Strauss, a man who loved word-play, would appreciate my use of a word that in North American English refers to a hairdresser.