Adonis Diaries

What! Savages and primitive tribes? (Feb. 10, 2010)

The late famous ethnologist and anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009) said: “I gave up preserving primitive tribes; all that I am doing is recording their memory for later generations. Mankind is settling in mono-culture: Humanity is readying to producing mass civilization.”

Claude Levi-Strauss spent 5 years in the Amazon and Mato Grosso (1935-39) researching a few of their primitive tribes such as Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, Munde, and Tupi-Kawahib.

Claude Levi-Strauss agrees with the prophetic remark of the physicist Neil Bohr who said in 1939:

“The traditional differences among cultures resemble the equivalent different manners of describing physical experiments”.

Claude gathered 3,000 photos and he needed 15 years of soul searching to gather enough courage and publish his first book “Sad Tropic, 1955” on his exploration missions.

Among the other masterpieces related to ethnology and anthropology we have “Structural Anthropology, 1958”; “The savage thinking, 1962”; “Mythology of the naked man, 1964”; “Seeing, listening, and reading, 1993”; and “Saudades of Sao Paulo, 1994”.

Primitive tribes are going extinct fast.

The trend is man-made expansion and exploitation that started by European colonial adventure in the 16th century, and particularly in the 19th century.  A couple of decades ago, tribes in the Amazon Forest went extinct because Texaco polluted and  ruined the ecological make-up for its oil-well extraction processes.  Read note 2.

In “Sad tropic”, Levi-Strauss was pretty candid and wrote:

“I hate to travel and to explore. Should I recount the insipid details of a servitude to weeks and months of traveling, of hunger, fatigue, and illnesses? Should I tell of the toils for daily maintenance and upkeep as in routine military service?  The amounts of efforts expanded on ethnological research do not confer a price to the negative aspects of the job. Truth can be divulged after all the gangue are stripped off.”

In 1940, the Vichy government whisked Levi-Strauss with three other French scholars to the USA because “with such a name you are doomed in France.” Levi-Strauss said that “I have never felt Jewish even though my parents were Jews.  I did experience the difficulties and problems of being Jew in schools and universities. I do not comprehend the inventions of the Catholic Church councils relative to Trinity, trans-substantiation, or communion of the Saints.  I have no inclinations of trying to comprehend these abstract notions.  Christianity exercises aesthetic seduction on me.”

Levi-Strauss stresses that “the longer we get attached to ethnology, the more we keep our distances of current societies: the essential and dramatic characteristics of the present will not count heavily in the perspectives of several centuries later.  Individuality is more prevalent in primitive tribes than in modern civilization.  Ethnology respects history, though it does not extend to it any privileged value.  History is a complementary research that deploys human societies over time, while ethnology extends the research over space.”

Anthropology extends the impression of going to the extreme limits of what was the goal of philosophy in witnessing the totality of human experiences. A scholar does not offer real answers: his role is to formulate pertinent clear questions.

Symbols have no intrinsic or invariable significance: they have meaning only within the context. This significance is foremost of position.

Myth is started by an individual and then is taken over by the original group and fine tuned progressively.  Levi-Strauss claims that the main characteristic in myths is the beauty emanating from the imaginative stories.  There is this intelligent emotion that story of myth, painting, sculpture, or music strikes us head on and makes us feel that we comprehend the global configuration.

Levi-Strauss is known for establishing “structuralism” in the domain of human sciences.  If you read what is structuralism from non-scientific critics, you will not be more intelligent than before.

Structuralism in human sciences is a procedure of untangling the invariant characteristics of societies (for example, primitive societies) within the fundamental constraints of geography and environment on their specific structures. Studying primitive tribes is an excellent venue to extrapolate results to other societies enjoying the same restrictive localities.

(There are many statistical packages specifically designed to sort out the main characteristics or dimensions that group the cluster of categorical data.  You have discriminant analysis, cluster analysis, and factors analysis experimental designs that do not differentiate among variables, simply because the purpose is fundamentally to investigate the main factors that come into play, for later well designed experiment of cause and effects.  See note 3)

Note 1: Claude Levi-Strauss was born in Belgium and studied philosophy.  He was offered a teaching position of sociology in Sao Paulo (Brazil) in 1935.  During the period (1935-39), Claude Levi-Strauss directed several missions in the Amazon and Mato Grosso to investigate primitive tribes.  He taught at New School Social research in New York and then was appointed cultural attaché to the French Embassy in Washington DC in 1945. Levi-Strauss was nominated director of comparative religion of people with no written languages in Paris (1949).  He was appointed professor of social anthropology at the “College de France” till 1982.  He was elected to the French Academy in 1973.

Note 2:  At the current rate of modernization and deforestation  most of the aborigine tribes would disappear within a few decades. Many civilizations have vanished but a few have managed to survive precariously so far.

Currently we still have the ethnic Saamis (Norway and Finland), Inuits (Siberia, Alaska, and Canada), Ainous (Japan), Indians (USA and Canada), Zapotec (Mexico), Mosquitos (Nicaragua), Quiches (Guatemala), Cunas (Panama), Yanomamis and Guaranis (Brazil), Galibis and Akawaios (Guyana), Paez ans Guambianos (Colombia), Waoranis (Equator), Amueshas (Peru), Chimanes (Bolivia), Araucans (Chili), Touaregs and Bororos (Sahel in Northern Africa), Tigres (Ethiopia and Somalia), Dinkas (Sudan), Masais (Kenya and Tanzania), Pygmees (Zaire), Sans or Bushmen (Namibia and Botswana), Kalingas (Philippines), Kachins and Rohingas (Myanmar or Birmani), Hmongs (Laos), Santals and Gonds (India), Punans (Malaysia), Uzbeks and Tadjiks (Afghanistan), Aborigines (Australia), Maoris (New Zealand), Papous (New Guinea).

Note 3:  Dimensions or factors are sorted out and data are forced to cluster along these dimensions and then the dimensions are given names (a kind of art). Once names are extended to dimensions then it becomes hard to change their connotations.

For example, quantitative psychology, marketing, and sociology use these structural analyses to find out complexity, customs, traditions, cooking specifications, and customer preferences, qualitative notions of beauty, parenting, or associations among the cluster of data.