ICFFS-Diversity & Difference

The question of language is central to Lévi-Strauss's version of structuralism. The linguistic, or more precisely, phonological model, informs, to varying degrees, his studies of kinship, systems of classification and myth. Influenced as he is by the kind of structuralist linguistics which had evolved in the wake of Saussure, which looks at the universals of language rather than the particularities of specific languages, and also by the various strands of cognitive science that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s, Lévi-Strauss's interest in languages, in the plural, is inevitably a limited one. He has virtually nothing to say on the question of linguistic relativism, and his reference to the contemporary work of Sapir-Whorf on this subject is lateral and brief. This does seem curious given Lévi-Strauss's early interest in the question of cultural diversity, from Race and History (1952) onwards. While his theorizing of cultural difference in this essay relies on models taken from linguistics and information theory, it is presented at a level which excludes consideration of the properly linguistic dimension of intercultural contact. Later, in a short piece entitled 'The Three Humanisms' (1956), he designates anthropology as the third and most recent form of humanism, the final stage of the exposure of Western consciousness to other mentalities. And yet, while he emphasizes the importance of linguistic training as an essential means of access to classical and oriental civilization, the question of language is strangely absent from his description of what he terms the most democratic form of humanism, anthropology.

One can take Lévi-Strauss's preference of the linguistic universal to the linguistic particular to be a symptomatic feature of the intellectual bias that leads to him to his own, original formulation of structuralism. But I also show how this preference is acted out in various quasi-autobiographical features of his work, notably in his treatment of fieldwork, where his personal ambivalence towards fieldwork is generalized as he makes more universal claims regarding its epistemological status. The question of languages, and their translation, is I argue, a subliminal problematic in Lévi-Strauss's work, from the autobiographical scenes of Tristes tropiques through to the extended demonstrations of Mythologiques.




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