Claude Lévi-Strauss at His Centennial

Abstract

Lévi-Strauss's centennial is an opportunity to show his inextricable connections with the evolution of 20th-century thought and what these promise for 21st-century anthropology. He has mapped the philosophical parameters for a renewed ethnography which opens innovative approaches to history, agency, culture and society. The anthropological understanding of history, for instance, is enriched by methodical application of his mytho-logical analysis, in particular his claim that myths are `machines for the suppression of time'. Lévi-Strauss's thought has led to the development of new and invigorated forms of structural analysis, exemplified by the way that his concept of canonical expression has provided the foundation for the sophisticated application of transformational analysis and formalization.

Politics of mass rapes in ethnic conflict: a morphodynamics of raw madness and cooked evil

“…Yet it is possible to show that structural anthropology may innovatively account for much more than the dynamics of social systems and the praxis of competitive and strategic behaviors, including the effectiveness of mass rapes as a military strategy and instrument of ethnic cleansing. Indeed, Lévi-Strauss anticipated and called for the advent of what must be the future of a theoretical anthropology to come [3][4][5][6][7]. Contrary to the received ideas of his critics, little of recent topical, ethical, methodological or epistemological interest escaped Lévi-Strauss's notice, understanding and engagement.…”

“…Though this must claim further examination at another time, we may argue that such attempt could provide another instance in which our theoretical understanding of the world can be made to progress, in the context of a general revival of the kind of vigorous theoretical debate that tended to disappear from the field after the postmodern-poststructuralist turns in the 1980s. A thorough critique of the postmodernist rhetoric of post-structuralism [4,8,9], provided elsewhere in a broader context of the reassessment of structural legacy in anthropology [3,5,11], may be considered as a new step toward the innovative movement and reflexive project of neo-structural constructivism [6,7,12]. In particular, the theoretical project inspired by the canonical formalization in the structural analysis of myth can show that structural anthropology is intimately concerned with processes of social conflict, change, praxis and agency [13].…”

“…Virtually all of the sexual assaults documented in Kosovo were gang rapes, with the majority of the perpetrators being Serbian paramilitaries, but also including Serbian special police and Yugoslav army soldiers. 6 In addition, some women were forced to retrieve their bridal attire from their dowry chests and wear it while dancing in a circle in a courtyard, before they were raped. 7 Assuming that the male kin, who were fighting in the hills, could see what was happening but were unable to come to the women's rescue, the rape of women in their bridal dresses in Kosovo was aimed to emphasize the dynamics that controlled Albanian women's sexuality as the site of men's own sexuality and power.…”

International representations of Balkan wars: a socio-anthropological approach in international relations perspective

“…One example among others is that of the then-EU Commissioner for Enlargement who, in an address at the University of Sarajevo in 2005, advised the audience to leave blind nationalism behind and choose a European future, saying, 'I am sure you agree with me that it is high time that the Western Balkans can take a break and move from the production to the consumption of history!"' 10 The arrogance of this aphorism allows us to bring together the two aspects, the otherization of Southeast Europe and the misperception of Southeast European history, and problematize them by using Lévi-Strauss's mytho-logical thermal analysis of history (Doja 2005(Doja , 2006(Doja , 2008a(Doja , 2008b. His claim that myths are machines for the suppression of time and disorder at the level of history and social relations (Lévi-Strauss 1964, 24 [Eng.…”

“…In Lévi-Strauss's sense, both European powers and primitive peoples might have managed to work out a reasonable way to insert the irrationality of war and calamity into some kind of rationality. By means of their own ceaseless logical transformations, as outlined elsewhere (Doja 2008a), in one case or another, myths generate the appearance of stability, an illusion of timelessness that cannot be affected by changes in the world. Therefore, the peace treaties, as processes of ongoing logical transformations of the system of international relations, also serve as a cooling mystification machine for the obliteration of hot history, 'even and particularly that which might be thought to defy the system' (Lévi-Strauss 1962, 323 [Eng.…”