Anthropology and the sciences humaines: the voice of Levi-Strauss

The programme Levi-Strauss set for anthropology in the postwar years places his discipline at the centre of the human sciences in France. As a structural anthropology it aspires to the theoretical rigour of science, but it is also regarded by many as a new humanism with a wider conception of humanity. In marked contrast to the dramatized subject of existentialism, the subject of this science - like the individual Levi-Strauss - is an effaced and self-effacing one. Despite this general elision of individual voice, there emerges in Tristes tropiques a 'totemic' self constructed on the premise of a 'neolithic' affinity with the traditional societies studied by the ethnologist. The neolithic metaphor not only allows Levi-Strauss to explain the profound necessity of his vocation, it also forms part of a complex of concepts and values basic to his thought, To this extent the metaphor is an overdetermined one, objectively unacceptable but subjectively necessary for the construction of a coherent mythology of the ethnographic vocation. It is both a translation of the individual voice of Levi-Strauss and part of a more general paradigm of the prehistoric utopia.