Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss turned 100 this Friday. I am currently reading his book, "Tristes Tropiques" published in 1955. It is a global anthropological romp that is not afraid to make broad and eloquent generalizations. Although full of self-reflexive meditations, the fundamental problems arising from studying ourselves pale next to the wonder of learning about other ways of doing things. I named this blog after a phrase in The Quest for Power, a short section on travel and memory of "Tristes Tropiques". In the second passage Lévi-Strauss says,

Journeys, those magic caskets full of dreamlike promises, will never again yield up their treasures untarnished.

Like many people who leave where they are from Lévi-Strauss is mortified that the world is not as he dreamed. This is compounded by the insane speed of what we now call globalization.

Our great Western civilization, which has created the marvels we now enjoy, has only succeeded in producing them at the cost of corresponding ills. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown back into the face of mankind.

Strong stuff. Lévi-Strauss gives us two options to cope,

Either I can be like some traveller of the olden days, who was faced with a stupendous spectacle, all, or almost all of which eluded him, or worse still filled him with scorn and disgust; or I can be a modern traveller, chasing after the vestiges of a vanished reality. I lose on both counts...

It is his resolution of this dilemma that struck me,

For a long time I was paralyzed by this dilemma, but I have the feeling that the cloudy liquid is now begging to settle. Evanescent forms are becoming clearer, and confusion is being slowly dispelled.
What has happened it that time has passed.

A few years ago, I had the feeling that time was changing from a passive force into an active force. Instead of fearing its ceaseless onslaught, I welcomed it. This is age, I thought. For how else can we cope with the realities of this world and our own lives. With 6 billion of us stuck together on this shrinking planet, time is one of the few things that give us distance. Lévi-Strauss continues with another vague, comforting, and beautifully written statements;

Forgetfulness, by rolling my memories along its tide, has done more than merely wear them down or consign them to oblivion. The profound structure it has created out of the fragments allows me to achieve a more stable equilibrium, and to see a clearer pattern. One order has been replaced by another.

But it gets even better!

Between these two cliffs, which preserve the distance between my gaze and its object, time, the destroyer, has begun to pile up rubble. Sharp edges have been blunted and whole sections have collapsed: periods and places collide, are juxtaposed or are inverted, like strata displaced by the tremors on the crust of an aging planet... Time, in an unexpected way, has extended its isthmus between life and myself; twenty years of forgetfulness were required before I could establish communion with my earlier experience, which I had sought the world over without understanding its significance or appreciating its essence.

So if you are standing around in a used bookstore anytime soon, waiting for your mother, or a friend. I highly recommend picking up this book and reading this section.

The New York Times has an article here on the year long orgy of intellectualism in France that markedLévi-Strauss' b-day party.