Levi-Strauss: The Savage Mind - Notes

Chapter 1: The Science of the Concrete

Language

Primitive languages
● lack “terms for expressing such a concept as ‘tree’ or ‘animal’
● seen as evidence of “supposed ineptitude of ‘primitive people’ for abstract thought’

“richness of abstract words is not a monopoly of civilized languages”

● example of Chinook: 'The bad man killed the poor child' rendered ‘the man’s badness
killed the child’s poverty’

“discourse and syntax supply indispensable means of supplementing deficiencies of vocabulary”

the fact that “general terms outweigh specific names” seen to prove the “intellectual poverty of
Savages”
● classification only of that which is useful, harmful objects referred to in general terms

“use of more or less abstract terms is a function not of greater or lesser intellectual capacity, but
of differences in the interests … of particular social groups”

Classification

primitive thirst for objective knowledge

● implies “comparable intellectual application and methods of observation”

“every civilization tends to overestimate the objective orientation of its thought”

primitive familiarity with species of animals and insects

● “intimate contact between man and his environment which the native is constantly
imposing on the ethnologist”
● “this knowledge and the linguistic means which it has at its disposal also extend to
morphology”
● “the precise definition of and the specific uses ascribed to the natural products which
Siberian peoples use for medicinal purposes illustrate the care and ingeniousness, the
attention to detail and concern with distinctions employed by theoretical and practical
workers in societies of this kind”

conclusion: “animals and plants are not known as a result of their usefulness; they are deemed
to be useful or interesting because they are first of all known”

impractical “science of this kind” meets “intellectual requirements rather than or instead of
satisfying needs
● question: “whether there is a point of view from which a woodpecker’s beak and a man’s
tooth can be seen as ‘going together’ and whether some initial order can be introduced
 into the universe by means of these groupings” or classification

aim of theoretical science: “carry to the highest possible and conscious degree the perceptual
reduction of chaos that began … with the origin of life”
● question: “whether the order so achieved is an objective characteristic of the phenomena
or is an artifact constructed by the scientist”

LS: “the thought we call primitive is founded on this demand for order”
● “it is through the properties common to all thought that we can most easily begin to
understand forms of thought which seem very strange to us”

sacred objects "contribute to the maintenance of order in the universe by occupying the places
allocated to them”
● refinements of ritual are “explicable by a concern for what one might call ‘micro-
adjustment’

‘micro-adjustment’: the concern to assign every single creature, object or feature, to a place
within a class
● ex: Hako ceremony among the Pawnee people
● Pawnee informant “we must address with song every object we meet, because Tira’wa
(the supreme spirit) is in all things, everything we come to as we travel can give us help”

Magic and Science

“magical thought, ‘that gigantic variation on the theme of the principle of causality’ (Hubert and
Mauss), can be distinguished from science not so much by any ignorance or contempt of
determinism but by a more imperious and uncompromising demand for it which can at the most
be regarded as unreasonable and precipitate from the scientific point of view”

Azande witchcraft “reveals a theory of causation”

● witchcraft is “responsible for the particular situation in which [noxious phenomena] are
brought into lethal relations with a particular man”

differences between magic and science

● “magic postulates a complete and all-embracing determinism”
● “Science, on the other hand, is based on a distinction between levels: only some of
these admit forms of determinism; on others the same forms of determinism are held not
to apply”

“rigorous precision of magical thought and ritual practices” thought of “as an expression of the
unconscious apprehension of the truth of determinism, the mode in which scientific phenomena
exist”

“operations of determinism are divined and made use of in an all-embracing fashion before
being known and properly applied, and magical rites and beliefs appear as so many expression
of an act of faith in a science yet to be born”
'anticipation-thought': "man began by applying himself to the most difficult task, that of
systematizing what is immediately presented to the senses”

“any attempt [to arrange], even one inspired by non-scientific principles, can hit on true
arrangements”

Chemistry example

● 5 elements: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sulphur, and nitrogen

● "presence and absence of the elements" and "estimates of proportions and minimum
amounts necessary for them to be perceptible" accounts for "differences which were
excluded for their secondary nature”
● “one is better able to understand why and in what conditions it should have been
possible to discover such associations solely by the systematic use of intuitive methods”
● tobacco smoke: “intersection of two groups” due to presence of particular elements in
these groups respectively
● “chemistry shows that these different families are united on another plane: they contain
sulphur"

“primitive philosopher or a poet could have effected these regroupings on the basis of
considerations foreign to chemistry or any other form of science”

Simpson: “demand for organization is a need common to art and science and that in
consequence ‘taxonomy, which is ordering par excellence, has eminent aesthetic value’ "

“aesthetic sense can by itself open the way to taxonomy and even anticipate some of its results”

“one deprives oneself of all means of understanding magical thought if one tries to reduce it to a
moment or stage in technical and scientific evolution”
● magic forms a “well articulated system” unified with science through a “purely formal
analogy”

magic and science "as two parallel modes of acquiring knowledge”

Neolithic Paradox

“centuries of active and methodical observation, of bold hypotheses tested by means of

endlessly repeated experiments”

pseudo-scientific transformations “required a genuinely scientific attitude, sustained and

watchful interest and a desire for knowledge for its own sake”

problem of “several thousand years of stagnation … intervened between the neolithic and
modern science like a level plain between ascents”

solution to paradox: “there are two distinct modes of scientific thought” - “two strategic levels at
which nature is accessible to scientific enquiry”
 ● “one roughly adapted to that of perception and the imagination”
● “the other removed from it”

“classification has its advantages even at the level of aesthetic perception”

“empirical connection” between “sensible qualities and properties”

“even a heterogeneous and arbitrary classification preserves the richness and diversity of the
collection of facts it makes”
● “facilitates the creation of a ‘memory bank’ "

“myths and rites are far from being … the product of man’s ‘myth-making faculty’
● myths and rites “preserve until the present time the remains of methods of observation
and reflection which were precisely adapted to discoveries of a certain type”
● those discoveries “which nature authorized from the starting point of a speculative
organization and exploitation of the sensible world in sensible terms”

“mythical thought is … a kind of intellectual bricolage”

“the elements of mythical thought … lie half-way between percepts and concepts”
● signs serve as intermediaries “between images and concepts”

myth reconstruction: “it is always the earlier ends which are called upon to play the part of
means: the signified changes into the signifying and vice versa”

“science as a whole is based on the distinction between the contingent and the necessary, this
being also what distinguishes event and structure”
● "significance of the notion of primary qualities”

“mythical thought … builds up structured sets, not directly with other structured sets but by using
the remains and debris of events”
● “relation between the diachronic and the synchronic is therefore in a sense reversed”

“mythical thought … builds up structures by fitting together events, or rather the remains of
events, while science ‘in operation’ simply by virtue of coming into being, creates its means and
results in the form of events”
● both approaches are equally valid

“mythical thought is imprisoned in the events and experiences which it never tires of ordering
and re-ordering in its search to find them a meaning”

The Problem of Art

“art lies half-way between scientific knowledge and mythical or magical thought”

Clouet’s portrait: “profound aesthetic emotion … aroused by the highly realistic, thread by
thread, reproduction of a lace collar”
 ● small-scale model

virtue of reduction of scale or number of properties: results “from a sort of reversal in the
process of understanding”
● “knowledge of the whole precedes the knowledge of the parts”
● “the point of the procedure is to create or sustain the illusion, which gratifies the
intelligence and gives to a sense of pleasure” (aesthetic)

Miniatures “made by hand”

● “intrinsic value of a small-scale model is that it compensates for the renunciation of
sensible dimensions by the acquisition of intelligible dimensions”

Clouet’s lace collar - elements and components

● “procedure necessary to represent it as a projection”
● “in a particular space”
● of properties of fewer and smaller “sensible dimensions” (opposite of science)
● “in accordance with its function, to produce … real lace instead of a picture of lace”

“art works on a diminished scale to produce an image homologous with the object”

science: of a “metonymical order” - replaces one thing by another thing, an effect by its cause”
art: of a “metaphorical order”

art “manages to synthesize these intrinsic properties with properties which depend on a spatial
and temporal context”

“painter is always mid-way between design and anecdote, and his genius consists in uniting
internal and external knowledge”

“the aesthetic emotion is the result of this union between structural order and the order of
events, which is brought about within a thing created by man and so also in effect by the
observer who discovers the possibility of such a union through the work of art”

Creative Process and Myth

“in the case of works of art, the starting point is a set of one or more objects and one or more
events which aesthetic creation unifies by revealing a common structure”

myths “use a structure to produce what is itself an object consisting of a set of events”

process
● “art thus proceeds from a set (object + event) to the discovery of its structure”
● “myth starts from a structure by means of which it constructs a set (object + event)

“events … are only one mode of the contingent whose integration into a structure gives rise to
the aesthetic emotion”
 Games and Myth

Games “have a disjunctive effect: they end in the establishment of a difference between
individual players or teams where originally there was no indication of inequality”

Ritual “is the exact inverse; it conjoins, for it brings about a union or in any case an organic
relation between two initially separate groups”
● “one ideally merging with the person of the officiant”
● “the other with the collectivity of the faithful”

games: “asymmetry is engendered: it follows inevitably from the contingent nature of events,
themselves due to intention, chance or talent”

ritual: “there is an asymmetry which is postulated in advance between profane and sacred,
faithful and officiating,dead and living, initiated and uninitiated and the game consists in making
all the participants pass to the winning side by means of events, the nature and ordering of
which is genuinely structural”

rites and myths “take to pieces and reconstruct sets of events and use them as so many
indestructible pieces for structural patterns in which they serve alternatively as ends or means"

Chapter 2: The Logic of Totemic Classifications

Review of Concrete Logic

logic: establishes “necessary connections”

first chapter establishes “conditions of an a posteriori necessity”

analogy: "incorporation in their form itself of a certain amount of content, which is roughly the
same for all”

two criteria for defining images of myth

● objects with use
● objects that can be used again

images of myth: "condensed expressions of necessary relations which impose constraints with
various repercussions at each stage of their employment”

formation of new entity: “consisting of patterns … in which signs assume the status of things
signified

Observation of Concrete Logic in Natives

significant beings exhibit “a certain affinity with man”

● native identification with supernatural beings
classification
● part of the body
● technique
● social class
● institution

ethnographers did not realize that “there could be such systems [of classification] in societies of
so low an economic and technical level since they made the unwarranted assumption that their
intellectual level must be equally low”

“we must therefore alter our traditional picture of this primitiveness”

corresponding system in the “plant emblem systems of the Greeks and Romans”

Canadian medicine man: “without the cooperation of the soul the mere ‘body’ of the plan can
work no cures”

taxonomy: “operates by using a term to designate the variety and adding a qualifying adjective
for each sub variety”

Mythology and taxonomy: “it is not possible to interpret myths and rites correctly, even if the
interpretation is a structural one - without an exact identification of the plants and animals which
are referred to or of such of their remains as are directly used”

North American sage-brush - “quality of sacredness” in two kinds of plants

● "feminine, lunar, nocturnal, mainly used in the treatment of dysmenorrhoea and difficult
child births”
● “male, sun, day”

eagle-hunting - “mythical point of view”

“dualism between a celestial pray and a subterranean hunter”

● evokes “contrast between high and low in the sphere of hunting”

meaning “is one of position — a function of the history and cultural context on the one hand and
of the structural system in which they are called upon to appear on the other”

assertion: “the principle underlying a classification can never be postulated in advance. It can
only be discovered a posteriori by ethnographic investigation (experience)”

seemingly irrational group classification -> difficulties

● extrinsic: “lack of knowledge of observations and the facts or principles on which
classifications are based”
● intrinsic: “polyvalent nature of logics which appeal to several, formally distinct types of
connection at the same time
totemism “is in fact only a particular case of the general problem of classification and one of the
many examples of the part which specific terms often play in the working out of a social
classification”

systems of logic work “on several axes at the same time” — “relations which they set up
between the terms are most commonly based on”:
● contiguity
● resemblance

“relations may be established, in effect, on either:”

● the sensible level
● intelligible level

two types of difficulties “characteristic of ‘totemic’ logics”

● “we do not usually know exactly which plants or animals are in question”
● “each species, variety or sub variety could suitably fill a considerable number of different
roles in symbolic systems in which only certain roles are effectively ascribed to them”

color symbolism in ritual: “simple structure of opposites recurs but the semantic loads are
reversed"

“it is only forms and not contents which can be common. If there are common contents the
reason must be sought either in the objective properties of particular nature or artificial entities
or in diffusion and borrowing, in either case, that is outside the mind”

additional difficulty: “natural complexity of concrete logics for which the existence of some
connection is more essential than the exact nature of the connections”

final difficulty: “whenever social groups are named, the conceptual system formed by these
names is, as it were, a prey to the whims of demographic change which follows its own laws but
is related to it only contingently”
● “the system is given, synchronically, while demographic changes take place
diachronically, in other words, the rte are two determinisms, each operating on its own
account and independently of the other"