Levi-Strauss broke my brain a little differently
Quick hit while midterms continue to chew up every waking moment, just wanted to jot this down before my brain goes to total sludge.
So a lot of you may know I'm doing my Mead paper (yes), and during the research phase his name came up about three different times so I decided to, for lack of a better word, read some Levi-Strauss for fun. Turns out one of the more influential dudes ever has a lot to say about myths of cultures totally divorced from one another that seems to be based on the idea that under all the surface weirdness of cultural phenomena of wildly divergent peoples there's some core human way of organizing experience. Primarily we deal with dualistic opposites (e.g.
Raw/cooked, nature/culture etc.) all over the place because "that's how minds work".
He calls it structuralism.
It’s a weird contrast with Mead (duh, already knew that) who (as you remember) went on out into the field and experienced it directly. Levi-Strauss's approach seems a lot more desk based and comparative: he looks at myths all over the globe and thinks “oh, here's the pattern repeating beneath the specific details". It’s a vastly different paradigm for an anthropologist, and to be perfectly honest I don’t have a preference yet. Mead feels much more grounded; like, more real. It feels…real person based, like someone is saying ‘this is what actually happened’. Levi-Strauss is a beautiful brain puzzle, which is satisfying, but his method definitely verges on me thinking ‘is there a way patterns show up just because Levi-Strauss is so intently searching for patterns?’
What’s interesting to me about both them is sort of how their perspectives would differ if I were to sort of analyze my own family:
Mead would take up residence at our dinner table for about a month and take down minute by minute observations of what we actually do. Levi-Strauss would most likely jump straight over our mundane life experience to my family's collection of myths, the partition story and the 1971 story in search of some underlying dualistic structural property shared by them. It's unclear who if anyone would better capture the true essence of my family. Possibly both: which isn't the clean-cut, easily definable conclusion one hopes for in the last few days before an in-class presentation on just that kind of thing
