CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS, STRUCTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist and ethnologist, who was born on a day like today in 1908.

Claude Lévi-Strauss (28 November 1908-30 October 2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology.

He held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France between 1959 and 1982, was elected a member of the Académie française in 1973 and was a member of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He received numerous honours from universities and institutions throughout the world.

Lévi-Strauss argued that the savage mind had the same structures as the civilized mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere. These observations culminated in his famous book Tristes Tropiques (1955) that established his position as one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought. As well as sociology, his ideas reached into many fields in the humanities, including philosophy. 

Structuralism has been defined as the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity. He won the 1986 International Nonino Prize in Italy.

Gustave Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in 1908 to French-Jewish (turned agnostic) parents who were living in Brussels at the time, where his father was working as a portrait painter.

From 1918 to 1925 he studied at Lycée Janson de Sailly high school, receiving a baccalaureate in June 1925 (age of 16). In his last year (1924), he was introduced to philosophy, including the works of Marx and Kant, and began shifting to the political left (however, unlike many other socialists, he never became communist).

From 1925, he spent the next two years at the prestigious Lycée Condorcet preparing for the entrance exam to the highly selective École normale supérieure. However, for reasons that are not entirely clear, he decided not to take the exam.

In 1926, he went to Sorbonne in Paris, studying law and philosophy, as well as engaging in socialist politics and activism.

In 1929, he opted for philosophy over law (which he found boring), and from 1930 to 1931, put politics aside to focus on preparing for the agrégation in philosophy, in order to qualify as a professor.

In 1931, he passed the agrégation, coming in 3rd place, and youngest in his class at age 22. By this time, the Great Depression had hit France, and Lévi-Strauss found himself needing to provide not only for himself, but his parents as well.

In 1935, after a few years of secondary-school teaching, he took up a last-minute offer to be part of a French cultural mission to Brazil in which he would serve as a visiting professor of sociology at the University of São Paulo while his then wife, Dina, served as a visiting professor of ethnology.

Lévi-Strauss returned to France in 1939 to take part in the war effort and was assigned as a liaison agent to the Maginot Line. After the French capitulation in 1940, he was employed at a lycée in Montpellier, but then was dismissed under the Vichy racial laws. Lévi-Strauss's family, originally from Alsace, was of Jewish ancestry. By the same laws, he was denaturalized, of his French citizenship and forced to escape persecution.

Around that time, he and his first wife separated. She stayed behind and worked in the French resistance, while he managed to escape Vichy France by boat to Martinique, from where he was finally able to continue traveling.

In 1941, he was offered a position at the New School for Social Research in New York City and granted admission to the United States. A series of voyages brought him, via South America, to Puerto Rico, where he was investigated by the FBI after German letters in his luggage aroused the suspicions of customs agents. Lévi-Strauss spent most of the war in New York City. Along with Jacques Maritain, Henri Focillon, and Roman Jakobson, he was a founding member of the École Libre des Hautes Études, a sort of university-in-exile for French academics.

He died on 30 October 2009, a few weeks before his 101st birthday. The death was announced four days later.

More information: ThoughtCo

The Elementary Structures of Kinship was published in 1949 and quickly came to be regarded as one of the most important anthropological works on kinship. It was even reviewed favorably by Simone de Beauvoir, who saw it as an important statement of the position of women in non-Western cultures.

Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lévi-Strauss continued to publish and experienced considerable professional success.

While Lévi-Strauss was well known in academic circles, in 1955 he became one of France's best-known intellectuals by publishing Tristes Tropiques in Paris that year by Plon.

Lévi-Strauss was named to a chair in social anthropology at the Collège de France in 1959. At roughly the same time he published Structural Anthropology, a collection of his essays that provided both examples and programmatic statements about structuralism.

Lévi-Strauss sought to apply the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure to anthropology. At the time, the family was traditionally considered the fundamental object of analysis but was seen primarily as a self-contained unit consisting of a husband, a wife, and their children. Nephews, cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents all were treated as secondary.

Lévi-Strauss argued that akin to Saussure's notion of linguistic value, families acquire determinate identities only through relations with one another. Thus, he inverted the classical view of anthropology, putting the secondary family members first and insisting on analyzing the relations between units instead of the units themselves.

Lévi-Strauss's theory is set forth in Structural Anthropology (1958). Briefly, he considers culture a system of symbolic communication, to be investigated with methods that others have used more narrowly in the discussion of novels, political speeches, sports, and movies. His reasoning makes best sense when contrasted against the background of an earlier generation's social theory. He wrote about this relationship for decades.

More information: The Guardian

Language is a form of human reason,
which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE, LINGUISTICS & SEMIOTICS

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Ferdinand de Saussure, the Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher, who was born on a day like today in 1857.

Ferdinand de Saussure (26 November 1857-22 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher.

His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major founders (together with Charles Sanders Peirce) of semiotics, or semiology, as Saussure called it.

One of his translators, Roy Harris, summarized Saussure's contribution to linguistics and the study of the whole range of human sciences. It is particularly marked in linguistics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology and anthropology.

Although they have undergone extension and critique over time, the dimensions of organization introduced by Saussure continue to inform contemporary approaches to the phenomenon of language. As Leonard Bloomfield stated after reviewing the Cours: he has given us the theoretical basis for a science of human speech.

Saussure was born in Geneva in 1857. His father, Henri Louis Frédéric de Saussure, was a mineralogist, entomologist, and taxonomist.

After a year of studying Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit and taking a variety of courses at the University of Geneva, he commenced graduate work at the University of Leipzig in 1876.

Ferdinand de Saussure is one of the world's most quoted linguists, which is remarkable as he himself hardly published anything during his lifetime. Even his few scientific articles are not unproblematic. Thus, for example, his publication on Lithuanian phonetics is mostly taken from studies by the Lithuanian researcher Friedrich Kurschat, with whom Saussure traveled through Lithuania in August 1880 for two weeks and whose (German) books Saussure had read.

Saussure, who had studied some basic grammar of Lithuanian in Leipzig for one semester but was unable to speak the language, was thus dependent on Kurschat.

Saussure taught at the École pratique des hautes études for eleven years during which he was named Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor). When offered a professorship in Geneva in 1892, he returned to Switzerland. Saussure lectured on Sanskrit and Indo-European at the University of Geneva for the remainder of his life. It was not until 1907 that Saussure began teaching the Course of General Linguistics, which he would offer three times, ending in the summer of 1911.

He died in 1913 in Vufflens-le-Château, Vaud, Switzerland. His brothers were the linguist and Esperantist René de Saussure, and scholar of ancient Chinese astronomy, Léopold de Saussure. His son Raymond de Saussure was a psychoanalyst.

More information: Bucks County Community College

Saussure attempted, at various times in the 1880s and 1890s, to write a book on general linguistic matters. His lectures about important principles of language description in Geneva between 1907 and 1911 were collected and published by his pupils posthumously in the famous Cours de linguistique générale in 1916.

Saussure's theoretical reconstructions of the Proto-Indo-European language vocalic system and particularly his theory of laryngeals, otherwise unattested at the time, bore fruit and found confirmation after the decipherment of Hittite in the work of later generations of linguists such as Émile Benveniste and Walter Couvreur, who both drew direct inspiration from their reading of the 1878 Mémoire.

Saussure had a major impact on the development of linguistic theory in the first half of the 20th century with his notions becoming incorporated in the central tenets of structural linguistics. His main contribution to structuralism was his theory of a two-tiered reality about language.

The first is the langue, the abstract and invisible layer, while the second, the parole, refers to the actual speech that we hear in real life. This framework was later adopted by Claude Levi-Strauss, who used the two-tiered model to determine the reality of myths. His idea was that all myths have an underlying pattern, which form the structure that makes them myths.

In Europe, the most important work after Saussure's death was done by the Prague school. Most notably, Nikolay Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson headed the efforts of the Prague School in setting the course of phonological theory in the decades from 1940. Jakobson's universalizing structural-functional theory of phonology, based on a markedness hierarchy of distinctive features, was the first successful solution of a plane of linguistic analysis according to the Saussurean hypotheses. Elsewhere, Louis Hjelmslev and the Copenhagen School proposed new interpretations of linguistics from structuralist theoretical frameworks.

In America, where the term structuralism became highly ambiguous, Saussure's ideas informed the distributionalism of Leonard Bloomfield, but his influence remained limited.

Saussure approaches theory of language from two different perspectives. On the one hand, language is a system of signs. That is, a semiotic system; or a semiological system as he himself calls it. On the other hand, a language is also a social phenomenon: a product of the language community.

Saussure's Course in General Linguistics begins and ends with a criticism of 19th century linguistics where he is especially critical of Volkgeist thinking and the evolutionary linguistics of August Schleicher and his colleagues. Saussure's ideas replaced social Darwinism in Europe as it was banished from humanities at the end of World War II.

More information: English Literature Zone

Linguistics will have to recognise laws
operating universally in language,
and in a strictly rational manner,
separating general phenomena
from those restricted to one branch
of languages or another.

Ferdinand de Saussure