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Levi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics. By Boris Wiseman. (Ideas in Context 85),

Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 2007. xi + 243pp. ISBN 978-0-521-87529-5

This superbly produced book has two main aims. The first is to show that ‘Levi-
Strauss’s thought is not something added to his anthropology, but an integral part of
it’ (p. 217), and that read in this way it can be given fresh illumination. The second
constitutes a rather more wide reaching ambition -- to chart a new middle ground
between the anthropology of art and philosophical aesthetics, by making the case for
‘ethno-aesthetics, i.e. a decentered aesthetics informed by anthropology’ (p.11). This
second ambition is of considerable interest because of a recurrent question. How
should the artefacts of non-Western cultures, now regularly exhibited in art museums,
be understood? Is this an overdue acknowledgement that ‘primitive’ cultures can
produce art no less significant than the West; or is it the imposition of an alien
category – Art – on cultures that have no place for such a thing?

Wiseman may well succeed with respect to the first of these ambitions for those who
are deeply interested and expert in Levi-Strauss can expect to find intriguing and
unusual lines of interpretation. To someone less expert, however, his constant attempt
to bring the aesthetic to the fore seems strained at times, and his important contention
in the long introduction that ‘Levi-Strauss’s theory of shamanism leads to a
sociological theory of the artist as outsider’ (p.22) appears to set the discussion off in
quite the opposite direction to that which he proposes. With respect to his second
ambition the book fails almost entirely, in my judgment.

The broad idea seems to be this: hitherto, a distinction has been drawn between the
unselfconscious artefacts produced by exotic cultures of the kind made famous by
anthropologists and the selfconsciously produced paintings, sculptures and so on that
have formed the subject matter of philosophical aesthetics since Kant. However, it is
mistake to regard these two categories as exclusive. We can view exotic artefacts
aesthetically, just as we can see the artist (like the shaman) playing a crucial role in
the maintenance of the ‘combination of symbolic systems’ (p.21) that Levi-Strauss
thought all cultures to be.
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The problem is this. Both approaches are possible no doubt, but we are given no clear
account of how the one illuminates the other, and does not merely alternate with it.
This is partly because we are never really told precisely what Wiseman has in mind
when he talks of art and the aesthetic, a matter made even less clear by the frequency
with which ‘aesthetic’ in put in scare quotes. There is reason to think, however, that
what he does have in mind bears relatively little relation to what philosophers discuss
when using these terms. For instance, he tells us that a question ‘central to aesthetics’
is that of the relation of language to body (p.12. But one would be hard pressed to find
a book on contemporary philosophical aesthetics much attention to this topic, still less
made it central. When Wiseman takes issue with Levi-Strauss for criticising
modernist painting (p.125) then real issues in contemporary aesthetics do indeed arise,
only to be passed over rapidly. Moreover, anthropological assumptions are simply
invoked to warrant setting them aside (and discounting Levi-Strauss’s strictures).

It is evident that there is great expertise in these pages, and even for the non-
anthropologist, much material whose interest it would be hard to deny. Yet I cannot
see that philosophers of art will have occasion to engage with it, not least because
from a philosophical point of view its argumentative style is unhappily reminiscent of
the method once attributed to Freud – vertiginous leaps of hypothesis represented as
strict deductions.

Gordon Graham
Princeton Theological Seminary