In Our Time - Lévi-Strauss

Episode Date: May 23, 2013

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. One of twentieth-century France's most celebrated intellectuals, Lévi-Strauss attempted to show in his work that thought processes were a feature universal to humans, whether they lived in tribal rainforest societies or in the rich intellectual life of Paris. During the 1930s he studied native Brazilian tribes in the Amazonian jungle, but for most of his long career he preferred the study to the field. He was the leading exponent of structuralism, a school of thought which was influential for decades, and was involved in a famous debate with his friend Jean-Paul Sartre, who resisted many of his ideas. His books about the nature of myth, human thought and kinship are now seen as some of the most important anthropological texts written in the twentieth century.With:Adam Kuper Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Boston University Christina Howells Professor of French at Oxford University Vincent Debaene Associate Professor of French Literature at Columbia UniversityProducer: Thomas Morris.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. A celebrated travel memoir published in 1955 begins with an unusual confession from its author. I hate travelling and explorers, he declared, before launching into a vivid account of his adventures in the jungles of Brazil. The book is Trest Tropique by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, a work described by Susan Sontag as one of the great books of the century. Unusually for an anthropologist,

Leverestrouse hated fieldwork. Why not admit it, he once told an interviewer, I was fairly quick to discover that I was more a man for the study than for the field. And from his study in Paris, he produced a series of groundbreaking works which have been hugely influential.

His studies of traditional societies and their mythologies attempted to show that human thought was the same everywhere. That is the mental processes of a 20th century French intellectual were no different to those of a tribesman in a remote Amazon village. When he died in 2009 at the age of 100,

Leverestrhus was hailed as one of the fathers of modern anthropology. With me to discuss, Claudia Lovstrais are Adam Cooper, visiting professor of anthropology at Boston University, Christina Howells, Professor of French at Oxford University, and Vance von de Barn, Associate Professor of French Literature at Columbia University. Adam Cooper, can you give us some background about Levis Strauss' early life? Well, he was born in 1908. His father was an artist.

His mother was the daughter of a rabbi, but they were very secular, part of this very Parisian kind of bourgeois bohemians, what the French now called Bobos. And he was brought up in this artistic, intellectual, secular milieu, He said that Jews who abandon their religion make a cult of culture, and that he said was the case of his family. As a young, as a teenager, he thought really that he was going to be a musician, and he also experimented with creative writing.

but his intellectual direction was more in philosophy, which he studied at university. He was also like a lot of young French intellectuals just after World War I, a socialist, and he was very active in the student socialist movement. He was a leading figure in the student socialist movement at the time. And he studied philosophy, and how did he come to anthropology then in this late 20s?

You've studied philosophy at a rich period. A lot of young wonderful intellectuals were studying it in Paris at about the same time, weren't they? Sartre de Beauvoir de Beauvoir. Yes, well. Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir were classmates of his. But the fate of the young philosopher in those days

was to teach what would be the equivalent of A-level in England, in philosophy, in the provinces. hated it, terribly bored. He said the disaster was when he discovered he had to repeat the same course of the next year. He hadn't occurred to him, really? Why, he couldn't bear the thought. And so, but he maintained these connections

in the small academic world in Paris, and an opening came up at the new university in Sao Paulo, in Brazil, to teach sociology, which was hardly his subject, but he was invited to do this, and he grabbed the opportunity. And the reason he grabbed the opportunity was for a very philosophical reason

because of his passion for Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And he had this idea that Rousseau's notion of the original natural person would actually be somebody you could find in the field somewhere in the remote part of Brazil and that he says is what really affected him into Brazil.

There's no background in anthropology at all. Yeah. The time when everyone was, equal. Everybody was equal, everybody was free. That's right. Christina Howells, what were the main intellectual influences on Levis Stras as a young man in the area that Adam has been outlining? Well, Levi-Strauss himself handily tells us what he thinks the main influences are, and one of them is rather surprising. He says they were Marxism, psychoanalysis, and geology. And at first sight, that might seem a bit heteroclite. But in fact, what they

had in common and what Levy Stowe's found so interesting in them. And indeed, certainly, whether this was a retrospective idea of the influences, I'm not sure, or whether they were the genuine influences, but they probably were. They had in common that they looked for the deep structures or the deep meanings beneath the surface. So with geology, you have the surface of the earth and layers of rock. Marxism as well, you have the ideal. You have the ideal and the biological superstructures and the economic base. And then psychoanalysis, of course, you have the conscious and the unconscious. And he said that they were what were really formative for him.

Did they seem formative to him? Can you see it in his early work? Well, I wouldn't say I could see geology. But I suppose that struck... I think that Marxism and psychoanalysis probably were formative on all the thinkers at the time. And so I would say not Levi-Strauss more than others, It was not Levy's Jost more than Sartre. But nonetheless, I think in the air at the time,

that must have been what everybody was interested in because they were such dominant thought patterns. Adam Cooper alluded to one or two of the people that he met on his way through the philosophy schools in Paris. Can you outline the dominant schools of French thought at that time? Well, I think they must be existentialism and phenomenology, both of which

Lévi-Strauth opposed quite vehemently. On what grounds? Similar grounds. Similar grounds. Existentialism, of course, was a philosophy which focused on the individual, on consciousness,

and on freedom, and believed that one constructed oneself by one's choices and actions as one went through life. Kind of strong notion of agency. And phenomenology looked for the structures of consciousness, and also, unlike Levi-Strauss, was in charge, argued really that what appears to consciousness is the true reality, whereas Levy Strasse thinks what appears to consciousness is not the true reality, and you have to go

deeper. So he was opposed to both those, and indeed I expect we'll talk more about this later in the programme. But I think that that opposition, particularly with existentialism, is something which in some ways, well, turned out to be one of his weaknesses in many people's minds. Well, let's talk about his strengths at first.

So, was this, did he express disagreement with these ideas at the time with people? Did he take on Sartre at the time in his 20s on the subject of existentialism and Mila Ponte on the subject of phenomenon. Well, that's something I don't know.

I think this really crystallises after the war. These big philosophical debates. He's still quite a young man when he goes to Brazil and is caught up in other things. I mean, they hadn't published at that point. So what their private conversations were. I mean, maybe this is much. We'd like to think of my ideas swirling around the left bank

and these young men engaging in overthrowing this and instituting that. Is that what was happening? Well, I think they were more friendly. In cafes, drinking coffee and smoking. of the time. I think it's afterwards when they started publishing and conceptualising. What they also shared at the time was socialism.

Yes. And pacifism. And pacifism. This is just after all. Marcel de Man, he's often thought of as a pioneer of structuralism then. So, do we talk about socialism? How strong was his socialism? He was part of the Socialist Party at university and he was chairman of it or something, wasn't it?

Yeah, he was working for a French socialist deputy at some point. And he several times expressed, disappointment for not being called after, you know, when he was in Brazil in the 30s, at that time in France, you had a socialist government, the Front Popularer. And he thought he would be called back by his former friends from the socialist youth

and was disappointed not to be, and stayed in Brazil, more or less, with this feeling of disappointment. He expressed several times his disappointment towards politics and as a sort of losing, his naivete towards politics and choosing anthropology against politics. Did you lose his interest in politics

because he wasn't pushed forward in it or because he fell out with the ideas therein? It's hard to tell. It's hard to tell. He tried. When he was back from Brazil, he tried to enter a campaign for the socialist party.

But he failed. And he always said that finally he realized at the end of the 30s that politics was not for him. Can you tell us how he got to structuralism, which was his guiding notion for most, well, for all his intellectually active life? He got to structuralism through his meeting

with, I guess, Jacobson in New York in the 40s. So he went back from Brazil in 1939 and then quickly he had to flee away from France to flee from Vichy government and Nazism. So he was part of a rescue program for European intellectuals and was offered a position in New York where at the Ecole Libre de Odz-Etitude, which was a French-speaking school, and that's where he met Roman Jacobson, who himself was Russian and who was a linguist. And through his conversations with Jacobson, he discovered at once, at some point he said it was a revelation.

he discovered the idea of structure. So it's a legacy from sociolinguistic and passed to Jacobson through phonology. So the idea is that it's hard to summarize structuralism in a couple of words, but the idea is that the meaning of something is not in itself, but can only be extracted through comparison.

so that was true at the phonematic level when you study your language and then Levisroff sort of applied not strictly applied but took inspiration in this and to study kinship systems he was preparing his PhD but before we get to kinship systems

can't we just explain as clearly as we can it's very clear but just develop a little with this idea of structuralisms because this is going to be the most important thing so we might as well nail it a bit more. Do you want to say more, Christina, would you like to come into that? Well, Levi-Strauss's structuralism is quite radical, I would say, because he hasn't, I don't think he allows for a kind of dialectical structuralism

where we make structures, human beings make structures, and then structures in turn make us. He rejects that idea. In his view, when he writes, he talks, he talks. as though structures such as myths or language or kinship systems actually are self-creating. He says at one point that they think themselves through themselves. It's exclusive of the human. So he's got a very radical kind of structure.

I would think with so sure with linguistics, the idea that language is made up of binary oppositions, so whether long and parole, language and speech, or different phonemes. I don't believe that in Sosur this is seen as something which is self-creating or self-generating. I think it's something we create language and then language is structured in this way,

whereas Levi-Straith has a very radical view that structures actually are self-generating. But the basic idea is, in a way, it's very simple. It's like, you are, as an anthropologist, he is confronted with apparently irrational behaviors or curious,

let's say curious behaviors, curious tales, curious kinship patterns. And the basic hypothesis is that there are rules behind these kinship patterns, behind these customs, behind these stable manners. And that's first, that's where come the analogy with linguistics, is that in the same way that we applied grammatic and syntactic rules when we speak, without being aware of it, there might be some hidden. rules which we apply when we choose our partners, when we tell mythical stories, when we have certain types of rituals. And the structuralist will try to extract this sort of hidden grammar of apparently very diverse behaviors.

and the main challenge is to combine the idea of universal forms of the human mind, as you said in your opening remarks, the human mental processes of a 20th century French philosopher and the mental processes of an Amazonian Indian are the same. So how do you combine that with the variety and the diversity of cultural usage? So I think there's some sort of background pattern there. Enough to get going on his work now. Adam Cooper, his first important book was, as has been referred to,

of Enso de elementary structures of kinship, that was published in 1949. Now, what was the central argument of that work, and what if anything made it significant? It's an immensely ambitious work. For somebody who has no background in anthropology, he said that all he learned of anthropology was in the New York Public Library during his exile in New York, and of course he was associated with Franz Boas and Robert Loewy and the American anthropologist at the time

so he was learning from them and he undertook as his first project this absolutely extraordinary attempt to make sense of the underlying similarities of all the kinship systems in the world and he says well just a lot then was it right it was a lot it was a big project

And the fundamental idea that he starts with is that in the transition from nature to culture, from the animal state to the human state, what changed? And he says that one of the first things that changed, perhaps the crucial thing that changed, was the institution of an incest taboo. And the result of the incest taboo is that you can't have sex freely with anybody in your your area and certainly not with close relatives. And therefore, you have to enter into arrangements with other men for the exchange of women as wives.

And this creates society, he says. So this is the original, the origin of all human societies. So you have to go out of your own family. They have to, and that begins. Now, how do you then make these exchanges? Just to say, before you go, sorry, this is absolutely fascinating. What proofs did he bring to me? bear that this was the big thing?

This was the big chain. Well, in fact, it turns out that most other primates also do not engage in incestuous sex except in captivity. So it turns out this wasn't this big bridge divide between animals and human beings

or at least other primates and humans. However, in any case. And he then argues. Okay, so the early humans and most of our human history, we are engaged in this exchange of women between men in marriage as a result of the incest taboo. Now, how is this done?

And in his model, there are two possibilities. The one is a market system, which is our modern human system, and the other is a pre-market system, which is based on barter and gift exchange. And if you're working in a system of barter and gift exchange, there have to be certain rules of reciprocity. And so he says that the marriage rules of most human societies

are based on the expectation of getting back, more or less the equivalent of what you give. And here he draws on Marcel Moser's famous essay on the gift. Once you have this exchange, what are the possibilities? And he says there are only three sets of possibilities. There are three algorithms which you can choose to follow. You can't follow more than one. Age human society before the market stage is based on one of these algorithms. And he then does a series of case studies from all over the world

to show that they fall into one of these three patterns of possible exchange forms. It's an extraordinary, masterly, brilliant, flawed book, which had an enormous impact, although slowly because it's only gradually assimilated by anthropology. And this is the one book of his which only influenced anthropologists, didn't go beyond. Although Simone de Beauvoir read the proofs, and she was terribly upset because she said,

oh, this shows that women have been oppressed throughout history. Because the woman was traded. The woman was traded. And you got a woman back. Exactly. That's right. I mean, that's very crude, but that was the sort of basis of it. That's the key.

Christina, howl, so we have that. which establishes him in intellectual circles as a serious contender. But then he couldn't get fired or hired. I mean, he didn't get much employment. He sat down to write Tris Tropic, which is a sort of travel book and a sort of intellectual journey. And it came out in 1995, and it had a tremendous success. Can you tell us a little about it, but why you think it was so successful?

It established his name in a way that nothing had until then. In some ways, I would say that these two books are as far apart as they could be, because Tis Tropic is such a literary text. It's an absolutely wonderful, lyrical exploration and description of his travels, mixed in with a lot of intellectual reflection, imaginative writing, rather melancholic for civilisation, for the role civilisation has, as he sees it, in corrupting primitive societies? You mean industrial civilisation, corrupting?

Because he would say they were civilised too. Anyway, never mind. I think he... I don't know if that's right, actually, Melville. Does he say they're civilised? He does. He believes that they think as powerfully as we do. Yeah, so I would call that civilised.

Well, so would I. So would I call it civilised. But given that he's got a book called La Ponce Sauvage, really badly translated. Come back to Tristropica. I shouldn't interrupt you. Let's go back. My fault.

Spoole it back and on we go. Like, right. Okay, fine. It's a wonderful account. It's a very melancholic account of the way that so-called primitive peoples have been,

had their societies spoiled by civilization. And it's very beautifully written. And I think that the ideas in it, there's such a lot of of ideas in it which are very, they were appealing at the time and they've become more and more appealing in a way. So that when he talks about, for example, he talks about religion very, very strongly towards the end, he talks about the way in which, in his view, there's been a decline

or a degeneration from Buddhism to Christianity through to Islam, which something would be difficult to say nowadays, but was sayable at that point. He thinks that there's been a general impoverishment of the human, I think, through civilization, as well, obviously, as progress. And the text has a lot of appeal for post-colonial thinkers, for thinkers who want to, who are predisposed, as we all are nowadays, to criticise the way that colonisation took place. I think that, in fact, it might be true to say that it was annexed by post-colonial thinkers because I think that more perhaps has been made of that than Levi-Strauss initially intended. Was I de Ban, perhaps another book, I think you consider it to be his most important book,

as seven years later, La Ponce Sauvage, the title is often translated to English as the savage mind or the untamed mind. it's a book about systems of thought but we're back on to his outlining his principal argument. Could you put it to us? Well, I would say that there's a, the original drive, the original desire is very similar

to that at the origin of the elementary structures of kinship. It's a need for order. So there's this idea that as he was working in the New York Public Library he was confronted with a huge amount of data of kinship systems,

but also of classifications and systems of thought. And he was trying to make sense of this or to find some sort of order in this colossal variety of systems of thought. So the idea is, and the basic fact that the origin is very simple. It's like, it's, it's, Le Vistros sometimes said that during 99% of its history and on 99% of the surface of the earth, mankind as thought through myth, myth and classification of some sort.

The Western science is a very tiny part of the history of mankind. So rather than dismiss this 99% as just primitive, irrational or pre-scientific, we need to find out what is the secret logic behind all those classification systems and rituals.

That's the most exciting thing about you, thought I think. Yeah. And so the idea of the savage mind I mean, so the savage mind as Christian just said is a very poor translation. I mean, it's untranslatable, obviously, La Ponce Sauvage,

but it's more something like the untamed thought would be, it would be more faithful to the French meaning. And the idea is that untamed thought is everywhere, even in the Western mind. So it's rather the amount of untame thought, which would vary. And the main, I mean, the main result of this book is to, that's why I guess it was also annexed in a way by post-colonial thought on good grounds, is that it's to show that even the apparently most primitive,

people are intellectual, are fulfilling intellectual needs through specific systems. Adam Cooper, we're moving quickly, but it's really fascinating and I hope for me, I hope for everybody who's listening. It's been mentioned by Vincent, his engagement with myth. Can you develop that? He wrote four volumes

on mythologies, so there isn't time. But you're noticing. for your brilliant succinctness. Okay. In New York, he's mingling with this group of anthropologists and Baas

is famous among other things, but perhaps above all, for his studies of Native American myths. He makes these enormous wonderful collections of North American, Indian mythologies, which he treats as a kind of a key to historical relationships among the peoples

that he's studying. Levy Strauss becomes intrigued by this body of myths, and of course the study of myths and folklore has a long history in European thought, but he becomes involved in these, I think, above all, and I think this is the key to a lot of his thought, as a philosopher. Levy Stros sees myths as the way other people think about themselves, about the world, about destiny, about life and death, about morality, all these questions or questions which are explored through stories, through myths. And the point about the myth is not simply to resolve an argument or to produce a simple moral in the,

La Fontaine sort of model. The myth is an argument which is immediately countered by another myth, which presents a variant of the argument and comes to a different conclusion, which provokes the dialogue with yet another. So the series of myths in any society are like a hall of mirrors reflecting each other and playing and changing. And all of them, Levy Strauss says, are dictated by the same. same kind of logic, a series of structural oppositions and their rule-governed transformations. That's how they play.

And Levy Strauss says that, in fact, if you take all the mythologies of the Americas, all the native mythologies of the Americans, North and South, you can read them as a series of transformations of each other. So they're all related to each other. It's a single philosophy rendered in myth which stretches right across the whole of America and which gives us an entree to the deepest ways of thinking of these people. Beyond the deepest ways of thinking,

there is, for Lévi-Stra's, a universal, something which is not particularly the North American Indians, and that is the way of thinking, the process of thinking, the process of thought, thought, which and in La Ponce Sauvage, is a rule governed, universally human form of thought, which he says must

originally be imprinted in the human brain. Would you like to comment on that? No, I actually admire this summary. In the 3,000 pages. No, no, and there's also some, I mean, I don't want to add much, except that there's some sort of

intellectual heroism on the, there's a, at some point, Lévi-Strauss compares himself to Don Quixote and there's a in the in the attempt to master this because we are talking about thousands and thousands of myths

which he knew sort of by heart he knew what tribe was telling what story and he was going from comparing very distant sometimes very distant myth from very distant tribes and was this sort of an intellectual ambition which is typical of him meanwhile

Well, back in Paris, on the Paris front doors, we can't miss out, even if we can be brief about it, the confrontation, row, argument, philosophical, with Sartre. Can you just give us a taste of that, Christina? Yes, indeed. Well, it's good because it's been well prepared since there were two main focuses of it, and they've both already been referred to, and one was about the nature of La Ponce Sauvages,

because Levis-Strauss thought that Sartre had mentioned, misunderstood what he was saying about primitive thought. He thought that Sarch had been very dismissive of it and had indeed argued that primitive thought was not, was in inferior form. Sarge may have thought that, but what Sartre actually said was that when Lévi-Strauss was describing the drawings that had been made for him of the marriage laws,

by tribes people and Levi-Strauss talked of this as something which was analytic and Sartre said no it wasn't analytic it was synthetic and I think Levi-Strauss took from that that this was something inferior whereas for Sart's synthetic thought

incorporates analysis and it's as it were a practical demonstration rather than a conceptualised one so that was one big disagreement and the other even more important disagreement I suppose from Sartz's point of view was about the question of human freedom and agency

where they talk very different positions. Levy's Toast... It's difficult for Levy's Stoise to argue that we are free. He believes that we are made by our society, our structures, our myths and our language. In a society of philosophers and Paris,

philosophers was the great beacon, wasn't it? Philosophers and novelists and artists, did he stand a... heart and aside as an anthropologist trained in philosophy, but still he was pursuing this increasingly important, but at the start quite rare discipline. Yeah, he was sort of father figure. I mean, for all the structuralist generation, which came after him, Roland Barth, Michel Foucault, Gilles de Loz, Jacques Lacan, he was actually older than 10, 15 years older,

and he was the one who was, he was, he, He was an anthropologist, but who had all this philosophical intuitions and who had this philosophical training to. And his take on myth, on Savage Mind, was challenges for French philosophers. And that's how he became so influential. But if you look at what he actually was doing, he was not writing much beyond anthropology. He was studying myth. And in the 60s, you had all these debates and controversies about structuralism. And Levis Trost was isolated in the College of France studying his little methods from the South America

and not really being involved. And he won't be involved in the 68 movement for this reason to sort of taking this position in this ivory tower in a way, studying disappeared civilizations. The great revolt in 68 in Paris, the students, about Adam. I would go further than either of you on this because I think there's something else which happens, which is

that he finds himself increasingly out of sympathy with the leftist mood of the left bank in the 60s. He loses any belief that he might have had in the coming socialist better future. And that is

a lot of the argument with Sart. He says Sart has this image of a traditional Marxist image of history going through a series of inevitable stages and ending up with socialism. And Levi-Strauss won't have any of that at this stage. It'll complete you. And in any case, Levi-Strauss is extremely pessimistic about the future and more and more pessimistic about the future. So this becomes fundamental.

When in 1968 you have the student revolt and you have the great division in French intellectual life, Livy Strauss decisively, it is not only within his ivory tower, he decisively, rather contemptuously, rejects the student movement and what it stands for, and moves increasingly to a pessimistic conservative position. He appeared gradually as a more conservative intellectual. When he was the leading figures in the early 60s, he appeared as a more conservative figures. And in a way, it has to do with his, it's like Montaigne, in a way,

he has this very relativistic, he has this very strong awareness of the variety of cultures. and the drawback, I mean the consequence of this, is that he was, regarding his own society, he thought that the best thing would be to follow the rules. So he had this strange mix between highly relativistic thought and sort of conservative politics. Can I ask Christina, what influence did Lévi-Strauss's work have outside the world of anthropology around this time in 60-70?

Yes. Well, it did have, at least, and Levy Stroess as a major structuralist had huge influence, in fact, on literary studies because some of its methods, not all of its methods, were taken over pretty wholesale and applied, well, applied actually by Roland Bart to social phenomena, but applied more generally by Bart and others to literary texts. So Bart talks about his short story by Balzac and applies what he says is a structuralist, to it, looking at the way it operates, the way that it functions.

However, Levystose himself was extremely contemptuous of literary structuralism. He thought that it was a nonsense because it wasn't comparative. I think, as you said, that all his meth analyses, of course, are comparatists and say they draw out structures from a variety. So to apply it to one text on its own, for Levy Stroess was nonsense. Did he come in for a... Do you have any interrupt you? Adam, did he come in for a great deal of criticism?

If so, what was the thrust of it? Within anthropology. Well, the British anthropologist, among whom I was growing up at the time of his greatest influence here, they were very empiricist, and they always said, well, Levis Stras got details wrong, wherever he looked at him. He did these great comparisons.

He did the details. And he was. was not sufficiently conscious of the ways in which particular societies organize themselves and function, which was true, but so far as anybody who was really interested in what Levy Strauss had to say, you took that for granted, that was more or less besides the point. The other critique, which was formulated most powerfully by Pierre Bourdieux, the great French sociologist, was that Levi-Strauss leaves out the day-to-day realities of social life, the politics, the economics, the social action.

He's only rarely interested in the way people are thinking, which is true. But again, that's a big field to be interested in, although Levi-Strauss catedly claimed that he was broader than that, but even if he were restricted to her, that's enormous. My own criticism, I mean the criticism which I share, because I don't share either of these two, is that there is too much in his work of an idealization of a supposedly innocent, savage, primitive kind of condition, which he celebrates and which I think is his great myth, which he takes very much from Rousseau, and which I think marks his career. and which you can now visit set in stone in Paris,

in the great Museum de Quay-Bronli, the great anthropological museum, which has a great auditorium inside at the Levy Strauss Auditorium with photographs of Levy Strauss, who is one of its inspirations. And I think this is a dangerous and damaging and false idea. Has his place in French intellectual life and have his ideas fallen away over the last 25 years?

It's strange because there was a moment, let's say, between the end of this, between the 70s and the 90s, where he was only this old man appearing every once in a while on the French public TV. And so he was sort of out of favor. And he went back into the intellectual life at the end of the 90s through several events and several, you know, special issue by journals. and some aspects of his thought appeared suddenly quite relevant to nowadays's thought. There's an ecological aspect in his thought, which was there already in Tristotropic, but which was not seen or as visible,

a very wide reflection on the relationship between mankind and its environment, the size of populations and the environment, all the criticisms of what are called mechanical civilization, la civilization mechanique, sort of gained favor, you know, in a era of climate change, this became sort of relevant again. So there is that, and there's also sort of a neo-structural anthropology,

which appeared in Brazil and in France at the end of the 90s, with the same type of a very universalist ambition, a comparative desire, this kind of, you know, this kind of ambition, intellectual ambition, a theoretical ambition, inherited from Le Vistroes. Is this, and Christiana, is his idea still working through intellectual life

in this country in France and elsewhere now? I think probably he's entered history, intellectual history. That's certainly not a combative approach to Levisthroes. I think anyone who reaches the age of 100 is probably treated with a lot more respect. So even though there was a time when deconstruction and so on was quite actively engaged in disagreeing with structuralism, I think that time has probably passed.

Anam, can you give us a summary of where you think he stands in the, well, let's say just the second half of the 20th century? I mean, I'm not being silly here. What sort of figure he is? Well, he was without question the greatest anthropologist in the second half of the 20th century. There's just nobody who stands comparison, really, with his influence, with his range, with his achievement.

And he's also one of the few anthropologists, in fact, one of the few social scientists, to have had a tremendous influence in shaping the broader intellectual climate of the day. So a very great man, a very great figure. Did he, as he were drawing things from his own background, his artist's background, his philosophy background, He studied the law for a while, didn't it? He draw all these in and pile this into anthropology.

Yes, yes. I think his anthropology is a philosopher's anthropology. And I think his writing is the writing of an artist. Some of the volumes of mythologic are deliberately modeled on the structure of symphonies. Just to make it easier. One of his last books, I think perhaps it was his last book. Luke Lysen, Read. Yeah, he's about the arts.

And this was his abiding personal passion. And that's another program. But thank you so much for this one. Christina Howes, Adam Cooper, Vincent de Bar. And next week we'll be talking about the warrior queen Zenobia. Thanks for listening. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programs to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.uk.

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