Claude Le Vi-Strauss

CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS
Nelson, B.K., ‘Susanne K. Langer’s Conception of ‘‘Symbol’’: Making

Connections Through Ambiguity’, in Cecile T. Tougas and Sara Ebenreck
(eds) Presenting Women Philosophers, Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
2000.
DONALD DRYDEN
CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS (1908–)

FRENCH ANTHROPOLOGIST
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s works, predominantly known for their anthro-

pological content, nevertheless contain many studies of individual
works of art as well as theoretical developments that address some of
the fundamental aesthetic problems, such as the nature of aesthetic
emotion or the sources of creativity.
The first chapter of La Pensée sauvage (1962; The Savage Mind, 1966)
– a book about the nature and function of classificatory systems in so-
called primitive societies – concludes with a digression prompted by
the contemplation of a detail in a portrait of Elizabeth of Austria (a
lace ruff) painted by the seventeenth-century French miniaturist
François Clouet. Similarly, his four-volume study of Amerindian
mythology, Mythologiques (1964–71; Introduction to a Science of
Mythology, 1970–81), starts not with an introduction but an ‘Overture’
in which Lévi-Strauss is as much concerned with the problem of the
Copyright © 2002. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.
relationship between different art forms (in particular, myth, music

and painting) as he is with expounding his method for interpreting
myths.
In the past, aesthetics was concerned with understanding beauty
in itself, as an ideal. It was thought that beauty was explicable in
terms of universal and timeless values. Anthropology, by contrast, has
shown the relativity of aesthetic values and that art and aesthetic
perception are determined by many non-aesthetic factors, including
economic, political and moral ones. Without doing away with
aesthetics and the question of beauty altogether – as the anthro-
pology of art has tended to do by offering a sociological
interpretation of art – but without, either, resorting to metaphysical
ideas about Beauty in the absolute, Lévi-Strauss has sought to
integrate aesthetic and anthropological understanding, thus addres-
sing some of the fundamental questions raised by philosophical
aesthetics from the ‘decentred’ vantage point afforded by an
ethnographic understanding of distant cultures.
Key Writers on Art: the Twentieth Century, edited by Chris Murray, Taylor
186 & Francis Group, 2002. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ifmg-ebooks/detail.action?docID=240427.
Created from ifmg-ebooks on 2020-05-26 13:58:19.
The problem with which Lévi-Strauss is preoccupied in his

digression about Clouet’s lace ruff – reproduced thread by thread in a
magnificent trompe-l’oeil – is why its contemplation is a source of
aesthetic emotion. By way of an explanation, Lévi-Strauss offers his
theory of the work of art as a modèle réduit or scale model.
Lévi-Strauss proposes that all works of art partake of the nature of
miniatures or scale models, like a model airplane or a ship in a bottle.
A work of art is a universe in miniature – in William Blake’s words, ‘a
world in a grain of sand’. Even Michelangelo’s paintings on the ceiling
of the Sistine chapel, despite their size, are ‘reductions’ because they
put the infinite in the finite. And it is from this transposition that
aesthetic emotion derives.
Whatever the size of the work, Lévi-Strauss argues, when an artist
transforms his/her model into an aesthetic object, he/she must
necessarily forgo certain dimensions of the real object. Painting leaves
out volume. And both painting and sculpture, in comparison to
literature and music, leave out the dimension of time. And it is in this
sense that works of art are always ‘reductions’ of the objects that they
represent.
Why is this process of aesthetic reduction significant? It modifies
the way in which we take in the object. Ordinarily, we identify the
objects that we perceive by constructing a picture of the whole object
from what we perceive of its parts. The work of art reverses this
process. As a ‘miniature’, it offers less resistance to sense perception. As
Lévi-Strauss puts it, because it is quantitatively reduced, it appears to
be qualitatively simplified. And as a result we perceive, or think we

perceive, the whole before the parts. The work of art is taken in at once as
a totality.
This reversal, according to Lévi-Strauss, is one of the keys to
aesthetic emotion. It creates an illusion of increased power over the
represented object. Through the aesthetic object, the model ‘may be
grasped, weighed up in the hand, taken in at a single glance’ (Savage
Mind).
Furthermore, because the object that is reproduced in the work of
art is sensorially simplified, the missing sensory dimensions are
supplemented by the consumer of the work of art. The loss of sensory
dimensions is thus compensated for by the acquisition of dimensions
that are intellectually graspable. In this way, the work of art comes to
fulfil the essential cognitive function that Lévi-Strauss attributes to it,
adding to human understanding and knowledge.
The ideas about aesthetic emotion that Lévi-Strauss develops in The
Savage Mind are best understood in the context of his anthropological
ideas about classification. Lévi-Strauss paints a portrait of primitive

man absorbed in the task of trying to understand the natural world
around him, which he does through acts of classification. What
aesthetic creation and these acts of classification have in common is
that they both satisfy the same fundamental human need to create
order. And both art and primitive science in its classificatory function
proceed in similar ways: through a process of mental bricolage
(something like intellectual DIY) whereby seemingly disparate
elements – essentially, percepts transformed into signs – are integrated
into organized systems. Both art and classification fulfil the same
totalizing ambition: to construct a global and systematic explanation of
the world.
Much of Lévi-Strauss’s work as an anthropologist has been devoted
to the study of Amerindian mythology, and it is through his studies of
mythical thought that he has arrived at some of his major aesthetic
insights.
It was his theory about how primitive myths are created that
provided him with one of the key concepts of his aesthetic thought,
the concept of ‘transformation’.
The basic hypothesis underlying the Mythologiques is that myths
come into being by a process of transformation of one myth into
another. For Lévi-Strauss, myths do not have any meaning in
themselves but only in relation to each other and therefore have to be
studied in the course of their transformation from one into another for
their meaning to be understood.
For example, in The Raw and the Cooked (volume one of

Mythologiques), Lévi-Strauss shows that a Bororo myth (the Bororo
are an indigenous population of Central Brazil) about the origin of
rain (the ‘reference myth’, M1) is related by transformation to another
group of myths (M7–12) told by a neighbouring population, the Gé,
which tell the story of how man obtained, from a jaguar, the fire with
which he now cooks. The Bororo myth, Lévi-Strauss argues, is a myth
about the origin of fire metamorphosed – through a process of
inversion – into a myth about the origin of water (the myth treats
rainwater as a kind of anti-fire).
Lévi-Strauss’s aim in the Mythologiques is to bring to light the formal
rules of transformation that account for the conversion of one myth
into another. These are of different kinds: logical, mathematical,
rhetorical and even musical. For Lévi-Strauss discovers, in the course
of his analysis of Amerindian myths, that the patterns according to
which some myths transform correspond to known musical forms,
such as the fugue, the sonata or the rondo (Lévi-Strauss used manuals
on musical composition to understand how certain systems of

interrelated myths were structured).
The primacy that Lévi-Strauss grants, in the act of creation, to the
logical operations of the unconscious mind (as opposed to emotion,
intuition or instinct) gives his aesthetic theories their distinctive
colour. Whatever kind of artefact we create – whether a myth, a
symphony or a painting – the basic modus operandi of the brain remains
the same. Its elementary function is the endless combinatorial
rearrangement of elements that come from elsewhere.
Myths taught Lévi-Strauss that human artefacts – whether
‘primitive’ myths or sophisticated works of art – are but elements in
multi-dimensional systems of combinatorial transformations, most of
which occur at an unconscious level. And the unravelling of the logic
according to which mythical transformations occur provided Lévi-
Strauss with a paradigm for understanding similar transformations in
other kinds of creations and the hence structural relations that link one
work to another.
In his latest work to date, Regarder, écouter, lire (1993; Look, listen,
read, 1997), Lévi-Strauss offers a new interpretation of one of Poussin’s
most famous paintings: The Arcadian Shepherds. It shows that the
painting came into being through a series of transformations similar to
those which occur in primitive myths. Poussin produced two paintings
on the theme of the Arcadian Shepherds, the first around 1630 and the
second five or six years later. The earlier of the two versions drew its
inspiration directly from a painting by Guercino on the same theme,
which was painted at the beginning of the 1620s. Lévi-Strauss argues

that the three paintings correspond to three stages in a sequence of
transformations in the course of which Guercino’s original composi-
tion is gradually assimilated by Poussin and reorganized, only to be re-
born as Poussin’s Arcadian Shepherds.
The title of all three paintings is the Latin formula ‘Et in Arcadia
ego’. This formula is normally translated as ‘I, too, have lived in
Arcadia’. The Guercino painting represents two shepherds absorbed in
the observation of a skull (which occupies a prominent position in the
foreground of the painting) placed on a rock. The painting may be
interpreted as follows: it is the skull who is speaking, and who is
saying: ‘I too exist, even in Arcadia’. In the happiest of places man
cannot escape his mortal destiny.
In Poussin’s 1630 version of the Arcadian Shepherds, a first set of
transformations has occurred. First, Guercino’s rock has been replaced
by a sarcophagus, and it is on the sarcophagus that the Latin formula
‘Et in Arcadia ego’ is engraved. But, more significantly still, the skull
has been much reduced in size, and from its prominent position in the
foreground of the Guercino painting it has been moved to the
background in the Poussin painting. Simultaneously, a shepherdess
(absent from Guercino’s version) appears in the background of
Poussin’s early painting. The significance of these transformations is
borne out when one views them in the light of Poussin’s second
version of the Arcadian Shepherds. The skull has now entirely
disappeared, as has the shepherdess, but the foreground of the painting
is dominated by a mysterious female figure draped in Ancient Greek
robes. As one passes from one version of the painting to another, Lévi-
Strauss suggests, the skull gradually disappears, only to be replaced by
the female figure who, in the final version, comes to occupy its
position. Thus, according to Lévi-Strauss, in Poussin’s second version,
the female figure in the foreground is an embodiment of death, and it
is she, therefore, who is speaking the words ‘Et in Arcadia ego’. It is
this figuration of death as a maiden which, according to Lévi-Strauss,
explains the great appeal that this painting has always had.
Lévi-Strauss has also provided valuable theories for understanding
the nature of the aesthetic sign. In his conversations with Charbonnier,
Lévi-Strauss differentiates between two paths open to the artist, that of
‘imitating’ reality and that of ‘signifying’ it. Much Western art aims to
create the illusion of the represented object. It is fundamentally
mimetic in orientation. By contrast, the primitive artist creates objects
that are signs of the things that they represent, rather than their mirror
image. This characteristic of primitive art is partly explicable in terms
of the material constraints that limit the primitive artist. But it is also
due to the fact that the natural world in which primitive cultures live is
one that is steeped in the supernatural and which, therefore, by
definition escapes naturalistic representation. As Lévi-Strauss points
out, the primitive artist does not aim to copy nature, because for him
the ‘model will always exceed its representation’.
This conception of the work of art as a system of signs is not
something that Lévi-Strauss sees as a particularity of the art of
primitive cultures alone but as an intermittently recurring feature of
other artistic traditions, including the Western tradition. The style of
early Greek sculpture which flourished until the fifth century bc,
Lévi-Strauss argues, is an art of the signifier, whereas the style that
replaced it – typified by the famous ‘Discobolus’ (Discus Thrower) of
Myron – aimed to be more figurative or representational (the
‘Discobolus’ is also a stylized transposition of the human form, but it
aims to reduce, as much as possible, the distance between the model
and its representation). Italian painting until the quattrocento, that is, up
to and including the Siennese school, also emphasized the sign-value

of the images it created. In terms of modern art, Impressionism
belongs on the side of representation, whereas Cubism is on that of
signification and is therefore close in spirit to the kind of art produced
by primitive cultures.
It is curious, therefore, that Lévi-Strauss was so critical of Cubism.
If art is to be construed as a system of signs, in other words as a kind of
language, like every language its existence depends on the existence of
a social group that shares and understands its codes and conventions.
The problem for Lévi-Strauss is that in large-scale societies artists no
longer create art for the group as a whole, but for a specialized public
made up of art-lovers. This is what Lévi-Strauss calls ‘the
individualization of artistic output’ and its result is that art ceases to
function as an effective system of communication within the social
group. This was the failure of Cubism in Lévi-Strauss’s eyes. It wasn’t a
collectively meaningful aesthetic language – it remained an idiolect or
private language.
Biography
Claude Lévi-Strauss Born Brussels 28 November 1908. Lévi-Strauss

studied law and philosophy at the University of Paris (1927–32),
turning to anthropology in the 1930s. He was professor of sociology at
the University of São Paulo, Brazil (1934–7); conducted his first field
research in 1935 among the Caduveo and Bororo Indians and later, in
1938, with the Nambikwara (Mato Grosso, Brazil). In 1941 he fled

occupied France for New York, where he became visiting professor at
the New School for Social Research in New York City (1941–5), and
where he met the structural linguist Roman Jakobson. Lévi-Strauss’s
first major work was The Elementary Structures of Kinship, published in
1949, followed by Totemism in 1963. He was appointed to the Chair of
Anthropology at the Collège de France in 1959, and in 1973 was
elected to the Académie française. He also taught at the École Pratique
des Hautes Études.
Bibliography
Main texts
The Savage Mind (La Pensée sauvage, 1962), London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1966.
Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss (Entretiens avec Claude Lévi-Strauss, with G.

Claude Le Vi-Strauss

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CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS

Nelson, B.K., ‘Susanne K. Langer’s Conception of ‘‘Symbol’’: Making

CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS (1908–)

Claude Lévi-Strauss’s works, predominantly known for their anthro-

relationship between different art forms (in particular, myth, music

The problem with which Lévi-Strauss is preoccupied in his

be qualitatively simplified. And as a result we perceive, or think we

ideas about classification. Lévi-Strauss paints a portrait of primitive

For example, in The Raw and the Cooked (volume one of

on musical composition to understand how certain systems of

which was painted at the beginning of the 1620s. Lévi-Strauss argues

to and including the Siennese school, also emphasized the sign-value

Claude Lévi-Strauss Born Brussels 28 November 1908. Lévi-Strauss

1938, with the Nambikwara (Mato Grosso, Brazil). In 1941 he fled

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