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The raw, the cooked and Claude Lévi-Strauss

Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Nov 04, 2009

Summary

If it weren't for the great anthropologist, who has died aged 100, I would never have learned a radical new way of looking at art history

The news that Claude Lévi-Strauss has died at the grand age of 100 brings back memories of my student days, which coincided with the intellectual dominance of this great French anthropologist.

For young would-be intellectuals in the 1980s, his books The Savage Mind and The Raw and the Cooked had a biblical status. Lévi-Strauss was the high priest of structuralism. Building on the linguistic ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure, he argued that all myth, and hence all pre-scientific thought, can be understood in terms of binary oppositions – such as, er, raw and cooked.

The strange and troubling grandeur of Lévi-Strauss lay in his insistence on the "synchronic" and contempt for the "diachronic": that is, he was interested in structures of thinking that endure over the very long term. He was apparently not interested in history, in change. Paradoxically, his ideas were of great interest to historians.

I first encountered his work thr

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