Claude Lévi-Strauss
by Edmund
Leach
Oysters, Smoked Salmon, and Stilton Cheese
Lévi-Strauss is distinguished among the intellectuals
of his own country as the leading exponent of "Structuralism," a word
which has come to be used as if it denoted a whole new philosophy of life on
the analogy of "Marxism" or "Existentialism." What is this
"Structuralism" all about?
The general argument runs
something like this. What we know about the external world we apprehend through
our senses. The phenomena we perceive have the characteristics we attribute to
them because of the way our senses operate and the way the human brain is
designed to order and interpret the stimuli which are fed into it. One very
important feature of this ordering process is that we cut up the continua of
space and time with which we are surrounded into segments, so that we are predisposed to
think of the environment as consisting of vast numbers of separate things
belonging to named classes, and to think of the passage of time as consisting
of sequences of separate events. Correspondingly, when, as men, we construct
artificial things (artifacts of all kinds), or devise ceremonials, or write
histories of the past, we imitate our apprehension of nature: the products of
our culture are segmented and ordered in the same way as we suppose the
products of nature to be segmented and ordered.
Let me give a
very simple example of what I mean. The color spectrum, which runs from violet,
through blue, to green, to yellow, to red, is a continuum. There is no natural
point at which green changes to yellow or yellow to red. Our mental recognition
of color is a response to variations in the quality of the light input, notably
to luminosity as between dark and light and to wave length as between long and
short. Wave length gets shorter as we move from infrared to ultraviolet, while
temperature, as measured on a thermometer, gets less; luminosity is zero at
either end of this spectrum and reaches a maximum in the middle - that is, in
the yellow.
[1]
It is a discrimination
of the human brain which breaks up this continuum into segments so, that we
feel that blue, green, yellow, red, etc., are quite "different"
colors. This ordering mechanism of the brain is such that anyone who is not
color blind can readily be taught to feel that green is the
"opposite" of red in the same way that black is the opposite of
white. In our own culture we have in fact been taught to make this
discrimination, and because of this we find it appropriate to use red and green
signals as if they corresponded to plus and minus. Actually we make a number of
oppositions of this kind in which red is contrasted not only with green but
also with other "colors," notably white, black, blue, and yellow.
When we make paired oppositions of this kind, red is consistently given the
same value; it is treated as a danger sign-hot taps, live electric wires, debit
entries in account books, stop signs on roads and railways. This is a pattern
which turns up in many other cultures besides our own and in these other cases
there is often a quite explicit recognition that the "danger" of red
derives from its "natural" association with blood.
Anyway, in
our case, with traffic lights on both railways and roads, green means go and
red means stop. For many situations this is sufficient. However, if we want to
devise a further signal with an intermediate meaning - about to stop / about to
go - we choose the color yellow. We do this because, in the spectrum, it lies
midway between green and red.
In this
example the ordering of the colors green-yellow-red is the same as the ordering
of the instructions go-caution-stop; the color system and the signal system
have the same "structure," the one is a transformation of the other.
But notice
how we have arrived at this transformation:
a) The
color spectrum exists in nature as a continuum
b) The
human brain interprets this continuum as if it consisted of discontinuous
segments.
c) The
human brain searches for an appropriate representation of a binary opposition
plus/minus and selects green and red as a binary pair.
d) Having
set up this polar opposition, the human brain is dissatisfied with the
resulting discontinuity and searches for an intermediate position: not plus/not
minus.
e) It
then goes back to the original natural continuum and chooses yellow as the
intermediate signal because the brain is able to perceive yellow as a
discontinuous intermediate segment lying between green and red.
f) Thus
the final cultural product - the three-color traffic signal - is a simplified
imitation of a phenomenon of nature - the color spectrum - as apprehended by
the human brain.
The essence
of this whole argument may be exhibited in a diagram (Figure i) which
represents two superimposed triangles. The corners of the first triangle are
the colors green, yellow, red, which are differentiated along two axes: (i)
short wave length/long wave length and (2) low luminosity/high
luminosity. The corners of the second triangle are three instructions
concerning movement: go - continue in a state of movement; caution - prepare to
change your state of movement; stop - continue in a state of non-movement.
These messages are again differentiated along two axes: (x) movement/no
movement and (2) change/no change. By superimposing one schema on the other the
colors become signals for the underlying instructions: the natural structure of
the color relations is the same as the logical structure relating the three
instructions.
Figure 1.
Traffic-Signal Color Triangle
This
particular example has not, so far as I am aware, ever been used by
Lévi-Strauss, but the structuralist thesis is that triangles of this kind,
implying comparable transformations of models of nature as apprehended by human
brains, have very general application, though in the general case the possibilities
are more complicated.
In my
example, the pattern was subject to two special constraints: first, it is a
"fact of nature" that the sequence of colors in the spectrum is
green-yellow-red and not yellow-green-red or green-red-yellow, and second, there
is the further fact of nature, which certainly goes back to very early
paleolithic times, that human beings have a tendency to make a direct
association between red as a color and blood as a
substance, so that, if any one of these three colors is to be selected to mean
"stop-danger," it is much more likely to be red than either
yellow or green. On this account the correlation between the members
of the two triads are, in this case, more or less predetermined. The
equivalences
(red - yellow -
green)
(STOP-CAUTION-GO)
are given and we do not need to pay
attention to alternative possibilities offered by the rest of the matrix.
STOP CAUTION GO
red yellow green -actual
sequence
red green yellow
yellow red green other
yellow green red possible
green yellow red sequences
green red yellow
But in the
general case, a structural analysis needs to start by setting out all the
possible permutations and to proceed by examination of the empirical evidence
on a comparative basis. Lévi-Strauss himself puts it this way:
The method we
adopt . . consists of the following operations: -
(i) define
the phenomenon under study as a relation between two or more terms, real or
supposed;
(ii)
construct a table of possible permutations between these terms:
(iii) take
this table as the general object of analysis which, at this level only, can
yield necessary connections, the empirical phenomenon considered at the
beginning being only one possible combination among others, the complete system
of which must be constructed beforehand. (Totemism [English
translation of Le Totémisme aujourd'hui], p. 16)
As I have
explained for the traffic-signal case, the ultimate object of the exercise is
to discover how relations which exist in nature (and are apprehended as such by
human brains) are used to generate cultural products which incorporate these
same relations. This point must not be misunderstood. Lévi-Strauss is not an
idealist in the style of Bishop Berkeley; he is not arguing that Nature has no
existence other than in its apprehension by human minds. Lévi-Strauss' Nature
is a genuine reality "out there"; it is governed by natural laws
which are accessible, at least in part, to human scientific investigation, but
our capacity to apprehend the nature of Nature is severely restricted by the
nature of the apparatus through which we do the apprehending. Lévi-Strauss'
thesis is that by noticing how we apprehend nature, by observing the qualities
of the classifications which we use and the way we manipulate the resulting
categories, we shall be able to infer crucial facts about the mechanism of
thinking.
After all,
since human brains are themselves natural objects and since they are
substantially the same throughout the species Homo sapiens, we must suppose
that when cultural products are generated in the way I have described the
process must impart to them certain universal (natural) characteristics of the
brain itself. Thus, in investigating the elementary structures of cultural
phenomena, we are also making discoveries about the nature of man - facts which
are true of you and me as well as of the naked savages of Central Brazil.
Lévi-Strauss puts it this way: "Anthropology affords me an intellectual
satisfaction: it rejoins at one extreme the history of the world and at the
other the history of myself, and it unveils the shared motivation of one and
the other at the same moment." (Tristes Tropiques, p. 62)
It is important to understand just what is being proposed. In a superficial sense the products of culture are enormously varied, and when an anthropologist sets out to compare, let us say, the culture of the Australian Aborigines with that of the Eskimos or that of the English he is first of all impressed by the differences. Yet since all cultures are the product of human brains, there must be, somewhere beneath the surface, features that are common to all.
This, in
itself, is no new idea. A much older generation of anthropologists, notably
Adolf Bastian (18261905) in Germany and Frazer in England held that because all
men belong to one species there must be psychological universals
(Elementargedanken) which should manifest themselves in the occurrence of
similar customs among peoples "who had reached the same stage of
evolutionary development" all over the world. Frazer and his contemporaries
assiduously compiled immense catalogues of "similar" customs which
were designed to exhibit this evolutionary principle. This is not what the
structuralists are up to. The recurrence of a detail of custom in two different
parts of the map is not a matter to which Lévi-Strauss attaches any particular
importance. In his view, the universals of human culture exist only at the
level of structure, never at the level of manifest fact. We may usefully
compare the patterning of the relations which links together sets of human
behaviors, but we shall not learn anything if we simply compare single cultural
items as isolates. In the traffic-signal case, it is the contrast between the
colors and the switching from one color to another that provides the information;
each color has relevance only in relation to the others.
These very
general ideas are a development of arguments originally developed by the Prague
school of structural linguists but particularly by Roman Jakobson (1896- ), who
has resided in the United States since 1942 and who was an academic colleague
of LéviStrauss at the New School for Social Research in New York at the end of
World War II. The influence on Lévi-Strauss of Jakobson's style of phonemic
analysis, which derives in turn from much earlier work of Saussure, has been
very marked. Lévi-Strauss repeatedly makes an assumption that other modes of
cultural expression, such as kinship systems and folk taxonomies, are organized
like human language. This culture/language analogy has been developed out of
Jakobson's distinctive feature theory, but Lévi-Strauss has not exploited the
additional insights which might have been derived from Chomsky's thinking about
generative grammars. Incidentally, Chomsky himself has expressly declared that
Lévi-Strauss' use of linguistic analogies is unjustified, though he agrees that
Jakobson's argument must constitute a basic part of any general linguistic
theory, including his own.
[2]
[3]
It is
interesting to see how Lévi-Strauss sets about deriving his cultural generalizations
from his linguistic base. His discussion of the "culinary triangle"
provides a case in point. This is one of the major themes which persist
throughout the four published volumes of Mythologiques, but it has also been
the subject of an independent article, which I will summarize here.
[4]
Lévi-Strauss
begins with a brief reference to Jakobson's thesis in the following terms
In all the
languages of the world the complex systems of oppositions between the phonemes
are no more than a multidirectional elaboration of a more simple system which
is common to all, namely the contrast between consonant and vowel, which
through the working of a double opposition between compact and diffuse, acute
and grave, generates on the one hand what we may call the "vocalic
triangle":
and on the
other the "consonant triangle":
Most readers
are likely to find such a pronouncement somewhat baffling, so I will give a
rather more extended version of the original doctrine.
Jakobson
claims that young children gain control of the basic vowels and consonants so
as to generate meaningful noise patterns in a standardized sequence.
[5]
The child first develops the basic vowel/consonant opposition by discriminating
a contrast in loudness:
Vowel (V) /
Consonant (C)
(high-energy
noise) / (low-energy noise)
(loud-compact)
/ (soft-diffuse)
The
undifferentiated consonant (C) is then split by discriminating pitch - a
low-frequency (grave) component ("p") and a high-frequency (acute)
component ("t"). The high-energy (compact) velar stop consonant
("k") then complements the undifferentiated high-energy (compact)
vowel ("a") while the low-energy (diffuse) consonants ("p,"
"t") are complemented by corresponding low-energy (diffuse) vowels
("u"-grave, "i"-acute).
The whole
argument may be represented by a double triangle of consonants and vowels
(Figure z) discriminated as compact/ diffuse, and grave/acute.
But let me go
back to the "culinary triangle." After his initial brief reference to
the linguistic prototype,
Figure 2.
Jakobson's Primary Vowel-Consonant Triangle
Lévi-Strauss
observes that just as there is no human society which lacks a spoken language
so also there is no human society which does not, in one way or another,
process some of its food supply by cooking. But cooked food may be thought of
as fresh raw food which has been transformed (élaboré) by cultural means,
whereas rotten food is fresh raw food which has been transformed by natural
means. Thus, just as Jakobson's vowel-consonant triangles represent the binary
oppositions compact/diffuse and grave/acute which have become internalized into
the child's computer-like mental processes, so also we can construct a culinary
triangle to represent the binary oppositions normal/ transformed and
culture/nature, which are (by implication) internalized into the eidos of human
culture everywhere.
[6]
Figure 3. The
Culinary Triangle (Primary Form)
It is not a
necessary part of Lévi-Strauss' argument that raw (unprocessed) food must lie
midway between the natural and the cultural, though it is, of course, a fact
that most unprocessed human foodstuffs fall into the category
"domesticated plants and animals," i.e., they are both cultural and
natural.
Finally
Lévi-Strauss completes his exercise in intellectual gymnastics by claiming that
the principal modes of cooking form another structured set which is the
converse of the first:
(a) Roasting is a process in
which the meat is brought into direct contact with the agent of conversion
(fire) without the mediation of any cultural apparatus or of air or of water;
the process is only partial-roast meat is only partly cooked.
(b) Boiling is a process which
reduces the raw food to a decomposed state similar to natural rotting, but it
requires the mediation of both water and a receptacle - an object of culture.
(c) Smoking is a process of slow
but complete cooking; it is accomplished without the mediation of any cultural
apparatus, but with the mediation of air.
Thus, as to means, roasting and smoking are natural processes whereas boiling is a cultural process, but, as to end-products, smoked food belongs to culture but roast and boiled food to nature.
Lévi-Strauss
summarizes his whole argument in the diagram shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4. The
Culinary Triangle (Developed Form)
In his original
article, "Le Triangle culinaire," Lévi-Strauss qualifies the
generality of this schema by noting that our own system, which distinguishes
grilling from roasting, and steaming from boiling, and adds a category frying
(which is a form of boiling in which oil is substituted for water), requires a
much more complicated model - and at this point some English-speaking readers
might begin to suspect that the whole argument was an elaborate academic joke.
But exactly the same diagram (Figure 4) appears on page 406 of Mythologiques
III (1968) accompanied by the same text, so we must try to take the matter
seriously. This is rather difficult. Lévi-Strauss has not adhered to his own
rules of procedure as specified above (page 20), and the whole operation
suggests a game of acrostics in which appropriate words have been slipped into
the vacant slots of a prearranged verbal matrix. Elsewhere Lévi-Strauss has
claimed that "behind all sense there is a non-sense"
[7]
but perhaps the best that one could claim for this fandangle is that behind the
nonsense there is a sense, even if it is not the sense of ordinary
conversation.
What
Lévi-Strauss is getting at is this. Animals just eat food, and food is anything
which is available which their instincts place in the category "edible."
But human beings, once they have been weaned from the mother's breast, have no
such instincts. It is the conventions of society which decree what is food and
what is not food and what kinds of food shall be eaten on what occasions. And
since the occasions are social occasions there must be some kind of patterned
homology between relationships between kinds of food on the one hand and
relationships between social occasions on the other.
Moreover,
when we look into the facts, the categories which are treated as significant
kinds of food become interesting in themselves. The diet of any particular
human population is dependent upon the availability of resources and, at the
level of actual items of foodstuff (bread, meat, cheese and so on), there is
very little overlap between the shopping list of an English housewife and the
inventory of comestibles available to an Amazonian Indian. But the English
housewife and the Amazonian Indian alike break up the unitary category
"food" into a number of subcategories, "food A," "food
B," "food C," etc., each of which is treated in a different way.
But, at this level, the categories A, B, C, etc., turn out to be remarkably
alike everywhere. They are, in fact, categories of the kind which appear in
Figure 4, and the significant thing about such categories is that they are
accorded very different levels of social prestige. I do not mean only that the
different components of the feast can always be fitted into our prearranged
slots - oysters (raw), smoked salmon (smoked), lobster soup (boiled), saddle of
mutton (roast), soufflé (cooked), Stilton cheese (rotted) - but rather that
foods of these different general classes bear a standardized relationship to
each other. For example, according to our conventions, whenever the menu
includes a dish of roast meat it will be accorded pride of place in the middle;
steamed and boiled foods, on the other hand, are considered especially suitable
for invalids and children. Why should this be? Why should we tend to think of
boiled fowl as a homely dish but of roast chicken as a party dish?
All sorts of rationalizations can be devised to fit any particular case - for example that boiling fowls are cheaper than roasters, or that boiled food is "more digestible" (what is the evidence for this?), but all such explanations begin to look rather thin once it is realized that other peoples, with very different cultures from our own, sort out their foodstuffs in very similar ways and apply status distinctions of comparable sort. Some foods are appropriate only to men, others only to women; some foods are forbidden to children; some can only be eaten on ceremonial occasions. The resulting pattern is not always the same, but it is certainly very far from random: Lévi-Strauss has even claimed that the high status which attaches to roasting as against boiling is a universal cultural characteristic, so that boiled food is highly regarded only in relatively democratic types of society. "Boiling provides a means of complete conservation of the meat and its juices, whereas roasting is accompanied by destruction and loss. Thus one denotes economy; the other prodigality; the latter is aristocratic, the former plebeian." ("Le Triangle culinaire," p. 23)
An odd line
of thought, certainly, yet if we accept Lévi-Strauss' unexpected frame of
reference, such comments are not nearly so arbitrary as they may appear In that
we are men, we are all a part of nature; in that we are human beings, we are
all a part of culture. Our survival as men depends on our ingestion of food
(which is a part of nature); our survival as human beings depends upon our use
of social categories which are derived from cultural classifications imposed on
elements of nature. The social use of categories of food is thus homologous
with the social use of categories of color in the traffic-signal case (page
ig). But food is an especially appropriate "mediator" because, when
we eat, we do establish, in a literal sense, a direct identity between
ourselves (culture) and our food (nature). Cooking is thus universally a means by which nature is
transformed into culture, and categories of cooking are always peculiarly
appropriate for use as symbols of social differentiation.
In another
context, in which Lévi-Strauss is concerned to debunk the anthropological
mystique that has clustered around the concept of totemism, he has criticized
the functionalist thesis that totemic species are given social value because
they are of economic value. On the contrary, says Lévi-Strauss, it is the
species themselves considered simply as categories that are socially valuable:
totemic species are "goods to think with" (bonnes à penser) rather
than "goods to eat" (bonnes à manger). The culinary triangle is the
other side of the same argument. Foodstuffs, a such, are of course "goods
to eat"; but this alone does not explain the complications which we inject
into the classification of food; food species, like totemic species, are
"goods to think with."
[8]
(Cf. pages
40-42.)
This is an
unfamiliar style of discourse, and it has to be admitted that here, as
elsewhere in Lévi-Strauss' writings, there is an element of verbal sleight of
hand which invites caution rather than enthusiasm. All the same, the reader
should not imagine that the "culinary triangle" is just an elegant
jeu d'esprit by a master of the unexpected analogy. Lévi-Strauss has by now
marshaled a great deal of evidence to show that the processes of food
preparation and the categories of food with which they are associated are
everywhere elaborately structured and that there are universal principles
underlying these structures. Moreover, the method of analysis, however bizarre
it may appear, has wide application. The culinary triangle first appeared in
print only ill 1965, but triangles of comparable type occur in many earlier
parts of the Lévi-Straussian corpus.
In the 1945
paper which is the foundation work for all his subsequent structural
anthropology. "L'Analyse structurale en linguistique et en
anthropologie,"
[9]
the corners
of the triangle are MUTUALITY, RIGHTS, OBLIGATIONS, while the binary
oppositions appear to be exchange/no exchange and receivers/ givers. In Les
Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949), the triangle becomes BILATERAL
MARRIAGE, PATRILATERAL CROSS-COUSIN MARRIAGE, MATRILATERAL CROSS-COUSIN MARRIAGE,
and the oppositions are symmetry/asymmetry, alternation/ repetition. "La
Geste d'Asdiwal" (1960) includes a highly complicated triangle which
combines geographical and food category parameters in such a way that vegetable
food is opposed to animal food, sea to land, East to West, and definition to
lack of definition.
[10]
This is not
just a game. Lévi-Strauss is endeavoring to establish the rudiments of a
semantic algebra. If cultural behavior is capable of conveying information then
the code in which cultural messages are expressed must have an algebraic
structure. It is possible that Lévi-Strauss is making larger claims for the
importance of this algebra than is justified by the evidence, but there is more
to it than a trickster's game of tic-tac-toe. Let us go back to the beginning.