Mind 91mind itself, was Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss’s followers in the English-speak-
ing world were led by Edmund Leach, who for many years was professor of anthro-
pology at the University of Cambridge. Their views became an orthodoxy. No
ritual or myth, no piece of social life or sacred text was safe from a grid of interpre-
tive dichotomies. This ‘structure’ was set out as if it were an explanatory reduction
of social and intellectual life, a scheme that laid bare some primary meaning.
When I first read Lévi-Strauss in 1967, I was impressed by the originality and
apparent insight of his way of writing about both tribal and European cultures.^18
In Tristes Tropiques and The Savage Mind, and then in his ever-burgeoning Struc-
tural Anthropology, Lévi-Strauss carried a generation of intellectuals on a wave of
ideas that began with Cartesian philosophy and proceeded to overtake all branches
of sociology and philosophy. This was work that addressed central questions about
reason and mind, while taking the reader to tribe after tribe. Lévi-Strauss’s descrip-
tion of the Nambikwara, hunter-gatherers of the Amazon, was both compelling
and poignant. Here were people whose material simplicity was matched by extraor-
dinary cultural beauty, and yet they were disappearing from the world. His account
of the myth of Asdiwal, collated from Nisga’a stories set in the Nass Valley, with its
hero figure moving up and down the river and between the earth and the sky, was
analysed into binary pairs as if it were underlain by a kind of mathematics of
human consciousness.^19 To read this work was to experience a sense of intellectual
wonder, to feel that one was being led on a journey of remarkable discovery. Yet the
journey was oddly frustrating, as if it passed through fabulous landscapes but never
reached a destination. The ideas floated high above reality, circling; and many of
us circled up there with them, not sure where we were or where we were going, in
awe of the height, feeling uneasy, but not quite daring to land. Over the years, the
magic of the journey faded; a sense of dissatisfaction remained.
In retrospect, the trouble with the intellectual claims of structuralism is not
hard to discern. To say that a tribal myth contains opposing elements, and that its
structure is demonstrated by laying these out in a formal manner, revealing at the
same time dichotomies that are otherwise obscure, is to explain nothing. The anal-
ysis may well claim that a reduction of these pairs shows them all to be expressions
of the fundamental opposition of culture to nature. But what is the explanation
being made of the myth? The myth expresses the core issue of all societies: to estab-
lish how human life seeks to separate itself from natural life. Or the myth expresses
the deep nature of human mind, the structure of mind itself, where dichotomies
lie at the heart of us all. But these are not explanations of anything. To say that a
myth expresses the core of society and the nature of mind is to say very little.
Myths and ritual are the products of language and society; it would be strange
indeed if they did not give expression to them.
Structuralism in anthropology is an elaborate and at times fascinating game. It
looks scientific, for it has a direct link with scientific linguistic theory and follows
scientific methods of exposition, deducing an underlying reality from social, verbal
and textual surfaces. But there is no explanatory achievement that goes beyond an
a priori assertion about the structure of mind and a somewhat tautological process