Claude Lévi-Strauss
Photo credit: sagabardon (Flickr)
28th November sees the 100th birthday of one of the 20th century’s most influential anthropologists, Claude Levi Strauss. An ethnologist who studied Brazilian tribes in the 1930s , he wrote a series of papers and books, among them“Tristes Tropiques” and “Le Pensee Sauvage”. Central to his writing is an emphasis on relationships and the primacy of classification and binary opposition in effecting relationships. Levi Strauss was one of the main proponents of structuralism, an approach to anthropology and sociology radically different from that of the British functionalist school. Stucturalism became an article of faith in many universities in the 70s and 80s, in subjects as diverse as English Literatature and Archaeology. At best, one could regard structuralism as an important analytical tool, a means of describing and interpreting deep structures within a system. Leonard Bernstein attempts a kind of structural analysis of key works of music in his seminal book, “The Unanswered Question”, a reproduction of six talks he gave at Harvard. Structuralism dominated archaeology, notably through the discourses of the Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG), where the relationships of artefacts and monuments, comparative ethnology and human landscape gave ample scope for intellectual conjectire. However, many articles written by structuralist are otiose and verbose. They confuse and confound. Language is contorted and inflated by stock, barren phrases and hideous jargon. Nouns are hijacked for verbs; clauses are spliced and sampled and edited like a late Beatles tape. Perhaps they are played backwards. In short, many structuralist texts are indecipherable. They have no structure but their own weight. For some, Structuralism has become another “-ism”, a by word for pseudo intellectual postering and pretentiousness, and , along with other movements, it has been deliciously sent up by the remarkable “Post Modern essay generator” website.To quote,
Each and every time you visit the site it will prepare for you a syntactically correct and entirely unique paper written in the style of a postmodernist intellectual… for example, a 3000 word paper entitled ‘Narratives of Stasis: The deconstructive paradigm of expression and capitalist nihilism’.
See here for further examples of this kind of marvellously plausable litertaure, the first of which was submitted and printed in a reputable academic journal. No doubt peer reviewed.
I am not sure Levi Strauss would approve…
