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The voiced plosive “b” could replace
the unvoiced plosive “p” (“bat,” “pat”),
or they could be juxtaposed to each
other (the way an “r” sound could turn
“bat” into “brat”). Relations of substi-
tution were dubbed “paradigmatic”;
those of adjacency “syntagmatic.”
This model could be extended into
other domains. Cap, bonnet, helmet,
boater, trilby: their relation to one an-
other is paradigmatic, while their rela-
tion to your head is syntagmatic. The
same goes for brogue, sandals, clogs,
and boots, all of which are syntagmatic
with respect to your feet. Once you’ve
set this up, you could relate the two
classes of apparel to other binary op-
positions (up and down, air and soil)
and other congruences (both protect
the body from the environment). There
are inversions, as well, to be noted: in
food preparation, hairnets and toques
serve to protect the environment from
the body, just as the Cagots, a despised
minority once found in western France,
were required to wear shoes in order to
protect the soil from their feet.
Setting out to write an ambitious
work of anthropological theory, Lévi-
Strauss identified the “atom of kin-
ship,” the phoneme of the family, and
moved on from there, applying the
techniques of structural analysis to
then current anthropological fixations
on kinship and gift exchange. In fact, he
managed to unite the two, by positing
that women were the ultimate object of
exchange. Returning to France in 1947,
he submitted The Elementary Struc-
tures of Kinship as his major thesis at
the Sorbonne for the degree that would
make him eligible for an academic posi-
tion. When it was published the follow-
ing year, it was an event. Drawing from
thousands of ethnographic accounts, he
saw relationships others had not. The
real marital relationship of reciproc-
ity wasn’t between husband and wife,
he revealed, but between the groups of
men who had exchanged the woman.
(Men were to be seen as “the takers of
wives and the givers of sisters”: debtors
and creditors.) Simone de Beauvoir
gave it a rhapsodic review (“it must be
read”); some likened it to Das Kapital
in magnitude and significance. In the
church of structuralism, the catechu-
men had become pope.
In 1955 Lévi-Strauss published “The
Structural Study of Myth,” a paper
that inaugurated the major phase of
his intellectual career. Here, following
the Saussurean principle of identifying
the smallest component of an object of
study, he arrived at the “mytheme” and
explored its syntagmatic and paradig-
matic permutations. Eteocles kills his
brother Polyneices. Oedipus kills his
father, Laius. Oedipus marries Jocasta.
Antigone, flouting an edict, buries her
brother. Each was a mytheme. The first
two could be grouped vertically under
a column headed “underrating of blood
relations,” the second two under the ru-
bric “overrating of blood relations.”
A grid began to appear; many more
relations and themes were diagrammed
in this way, in a sequence of columns.
As with the staves of an orchestral
score—a metaphor of which Lévi-
Strauss was fond—mythic structures
were to be read both vertically and hor-
izontally. And along another dimen-
sion, a larger theme emerged: these
myths negotiated a conflict between a
creed that held humanity’s origins to
be autochthonous—sprung from the
earth—and the knowledge that we
are born from man and woman. In a
blunter, later formulation, he ventured
that all myth concerns the passage
from nature to culture.
At the time, he was teaching in the
sleepy religion department of the École
pratique des hautes études; although his
allies had tried to get him a chair at the
august Collège de France, their efforts
had been blocked. (He plausibly saw
anti-Semitism as a factor.) But there
was an upside: if he hadn’t written off
his chances there, he later remarked, he
never would have dared to publish Tristes
Tropiques (1955), a sort of anti-travel-
ogue travelogue cum memoir. Written
in a confessional voice he elsewhere held
back, the book became a best seller. It
included reflections on his profession, a
vivid account of his various travels, and
lamentations about the decline of cul-
tural diversity. “I wished I had lived in
the days of real journeys, when it was still
possible to see the full splendour of a
spectacle that had not yet been blighted,
polluted and spoilt,” he wrote. And yet
he recognized that he wascaught within a circle from which
there is no escape: the less human
societies were able to communi-
cate with each other and therefore
to corrupt each other through con-
tact, the less their respective em-
issaries were able to perceive the
wealth and significance of their
diversity.At the same time, he could write
about South Asia with Naipaulian
misanthropy:Filth, chaos, promiscuity, conges-
tion; ruins, huts, mud, dirt; dung,
urine, pus, humours, secretions and
running sores: all the things against
which we expect urban life to give us
organized protection, all the things
we hate and guard against at such
great cost, all these by-products of
cohabitation do not set any limita-
tion on it in India. They are more
like a natural environment which
the Indian town needs in order to
prosper. To every individual, any
street, footpath or alley affords a
home, where he can sit, sleep, and
even pick up his food straight from
the glutinous filth. Far from repel-
ling him, this filth acquires a kind
of domestic status through having
been exuded, excreted, tramped on
and handled by so many men.Islam, he said, was an ideal “barrack-
room religion”; its displays of aesthetic
finery were a “veneer” over “the big-
otry pervading Islamic moral and reli-
gious thought.” As for Western culture,
Lévi-Strauss thought it had been de-
formed by its medieval confrontation
with Islam (“the West, by taking part
in the crusades, was involved in oppos-
ing it and therefore came to resemble
it”) and was threatening to impose
monocultural uniformities on a world
whose varieties he sought to preserve.In the meantime, his analyses of myth
continued apace. When Structural
Anthropology appeared in 1958, it
seemed to revolutionize the study of
mythology—perhaps even of all narra-
tive. The idea of isolating the patterns
and primitive elements of myths had along history, which is why George Eliot
could have her drear pedant Edward
Casaubon fecklessly laboring away at
a Key to All Mythologies. Lord Raglan
had published The Hero, James Frazer
The Golden Bough, Robert Graves
The White Goddess. But nobody had
analyzed myth with such encyclopedic
range and apparent rigor. What’s strik-
ing today is Lévi-Strauss’s unabashed
scientism: Bulfinch’s Mythology fil-
tered through Principia Mathematica.
This and his subsequent tomes on the
topic were stippled with mathematics-
flavored references to transformations,
vector spaces, permutations, even
“Klein groups” (which bear on the ro-
tational symmetries of rectangles). In
what was either the acme or the reduc-
tio ad absurdum of his intellectual as-
piration, Lévi-Strauss, proceeding with
his “logico-mathematical analysis,”
presented the formula to which “every
myth (considered as the aggregate of
all its variants) corresponds,” namelyFx(a): Fy(b) 㲒 Fx(b):Fa-1(y).
The equivalence, he said, signified that
any term can be replaced by its oppo-
site, a with a-1; and that the “function
value” and the “term value” can be
inverted.
What were these “function values”
and “term values”? Maurice Gode-
lier’s Claude Lévi-Strauss: A Critical
Study of His Thought has much to say
about this and a great deal else. Gode-
lier, a professor of anthropology at the
École des hautes études en sciences
sociales, was, in the 1960s, an assistant
of Lévi-Strauss’s who, Loyer says, “was
nonetheless something of a free spiritin the Lévi-Straussian firmament,”
being a Marxist as well as structural-
ist. Godelier’s study provides an ex-
tended gloss of each of Lévi-Strauss’s
significant publications, somewhat in
the manner of a highly detailed dis-
cography. He is warmly admiring but
not always in agreement, defending
Lévi-Strauss from the criticisms of
others while pressing some of his own.
And he devotes many pages (and not
a little research) to the infamous “ca-
nonical formula,” acknowledging that
“many anthropologists have deemed
this formula incomprehensible and/or
useless.” While Godelier grants that
it is “opaque,” in part “because Lévi-
Strauss had never specifically indicated
how to use it,” he suspects that it may
contribute to a synthesis of cognitive
science and the social sciences.
A less charitable reading is that
Lévi-Strauss—who admitted he was
“hopeless” at math as a student—had
succumbed to a sort of cargo-cult fetish
of mathematical formalism. Perhaps
he thought others would too. In Tristes
Tropiques, he had written about hand-
ing out pencils and paper to a group
of nonliterate Nambikwara, where-
upon the chief asked for a proper writ-
ing pad and proceeded to draw wavy
lines, “unintelligible scribbling” that
he pretended had meaning. The chief
grasped, Lévi-Strauss said, that writ-
ing was ultimately a means “of increas-
ing the authority and prestige” of one
person over another. The canonical
formula, which Lévi-Strauss seemed at
pains not to illuminate, would appear
to be another instance of this.
An assertion of disciplinary author-
ity and prestige may also explain theRecycling is a defeat
Certainly, you can dismantle your
steel/aluminium/wood shelving
system into its component parts
for recycling. But why would you,
when you can repair it, rearrange it –
and just keep reusing it?