What are some Claude Lévi-Strauss quotes?

"It is only through difference that progress can be made. What threatens us right now is probably what we may call over-communication--that is, the tendency to know exactly in one point of the world what is going on in all other parts of the world. In order for a culture to be really itself and to produce something, the culture and its members must be convinced of their originality and even, to some extent, of their superiority over the others; it is only under conditions of under-communication that it can produce anything. We are now threatened with the prospect of our being only consumers, able to consume anything from any point in the world and from any culture, but of losing all originality." "I am the place in which something has occurred." "Our students wanted to know everything: but only the newest theory seemed to them worth bothering with. Knowing nothing of the intellectual achievements of the past, they kept fresh and intact their enthusiasm for 'the latest thing'. Fashion dominated their interest: they valued ideas not for themselves but for the prestige that they could wring from them." - Claude Lévi-Strauss

What are some short Claude Lévi-Strauss quotes?

"Not all poisonous juices are burning or bitter nor is everything which is burning and bitter poisonous." "Il ne peut y avoir une civilisation mondiale puisque la civilisation implique la coexistence de cultures offrant entre elles le maximum de diversité." "The wise man is not he who gives the right answers; he is the one who asks the right questions." - Claude Lévi-Strauss

How many quotes did Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote?

The author Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote around 28 of quotes.

58 Claude Lévi-Strauss Quotes on Questions, Fashionable ideas and Human nature

Q: What is the best Claude Lévi-Strauss quote?

"The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions." - Claude Lévi-Strauss

All the essentials of humanity’s artistic treasures can be found in New York.

Our students wanted to know everything: but only the newest theory seemed to them worth bothering with. Knowing nothing of the intellectual achievements of the past, they kept fresh and intact their enthusiasm for ‘the latest thing’. Fashion dominated their interest: they valued ideas not for themselves but for the prestige that they could wring from them.

Natural man did not precede society, nor is he outside it.

I can’t help thinking that science would be more appealing if it had no practical use.

Teaching and research are not to be confused with training for a profession. Their greatness and their misfortune is that they are a refuge or a mission.

How can my old photographs fail to create in me a feeling of emptiness and sorrow? They make me acutely aware that this second deprivation will be final this time...

The image a society evolves of the relationship between the living and the dead is, in the final analysis, an attempt, on the level of religious thought, to conceal, embellish or justify the actual relationships which prevail among the living.

No contact with savage Indian tribes has ever daunted me more than the morning I spent with an old lady swathed in woolies who compared herself to a rotten herring encased in a block of ice.

Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor anyone in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe.

I think that a society cannot live without a certain number of irrational beliefs. They are protected from criticism and analysis because they are irrational.

The dogma of cultural relativism is challenged by the very people for whose moral benefit the anthropologists established it in the first place. The complaint the underdeveloped countries advance is not that they are being westernized, but that the westernization is proceeding too slowly.

These facts make the creator of music a being like the gods, and make music itself the supreme mystery of human knowledge.

Nor must we forget that in science there are no final truths.

Animals are good to think with.

The police are not entrusted with a mission which differentiates them from those they serve. Being unconcerned with ultimate purposes, they are inseparable from the persons and interests of their masters, and shine with their reflected glory.

In the case of European towns, the passing of centuries provides an enhancement; in the case of American towns, the passing of years brings degeneration. It is not simply that they have been newly built; they were built so as to be renewable as quickly as they were put up, that is, badly.

Anthropology found its Galileo in Rivers, its Newton in Mauss.

With all its technical sophistication, the photographic camera remains a coarse device compared to the human hand and brain.

There is one fact that can be established. The only phenomenon which, always and in all parts of the world, seems to be linked with the appearance of writing.

There is today a frightful disappearance of living species, be they plants or animals. And it’s clear that the density of human beings has become so great, if I can say so, that they have begun to poison themselves. And the world in which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world that I like.

Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as an adult, in order to deny him consolation.

Understanding arises from reducing one type of reality into another.

The anthropologist respects history, but he does not accord it a special value. He conceives it as a study complementary to his own: one of them unfurls the range of human societies in time, the other in space.

I have never known so much naive conviction allied to greater intellectual poverty.

Objects are what matter. Only they carry the evidence that throughout the centuries something really happened among human beings.

The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him.

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

Since music is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man.

I hate travelling and explorers.

The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he’s one who asks the right questions.

Alas, it is an illusion to suppose that the invasion of one element disencumbers another.

Tristes Tropiques Quotes

The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.

Answers Quotes Anthropology Quotes Questions Quotes Scientific mind Quotes The Raw and the Cooked Quotes

...either I can be like some traveler of the olden days, who was faced with a stupendous spectacle, all, or almost all, of which eluded him, or worse still, filled him with scorn and disgust; or I can be a modern traveler, chasing after the vestiges of a vanished reality....A few hundred years hence, in this same place another traveler, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see.

mastering

Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World Quotes

Les tentatives faites pour connaître la richesse et l'originalité des cultures humaines, et pour les réduire à l'état de répliques inégalement arriérées de la civilisation occidentale, se heurtent à une autre difficulté, qui est beaucoup plus profonde : en gros (et exception faite de l'Amérique, sur laquelle nous allons revenir), toutes les sociétés humaines ont derrière elles un passé qui est approximativement du même ordre de grandeur. Pour traiter certaines sociétés comme des "étapes" du développement de certaines autres, il faudrait admettre qu'alors que, pour ces dernières, il se passait quelque chose, pour celles-là il ne se passait rien - ou fort peu de choses. Et en effet, on parle volontiers des "peuples sans histoire" (pour dire parfois que ce sont les plus heureux). Cette formule elliptique signifie seulement que leur histoire est et restera inconnue, mais non qu'elle n'existe pas. Pendant des dizaines et même des centaines de millénaires, là-bas aussi, il y a eu des hommes qui ont aimé, haï, souffert, inventé, combattu. En vérité, il n'existe pas de peuples enfants ; tous sont adultes, même ceux qui n'ont pas tenu le journal de leur enfance et de leur adolescence. (p. 24-25)

Race et histoire Quotes

Comment des sociétés contemporaines, restées ignorantes de l'électricité et de la machine à vapeur, n'évoqueraient-elles pas la phase correspondante du développement de la civilisation occidentale ? Comment ne pas comparer les tribus indigènes, sans écriture et sans métallurgie, mais traçant des figures sur les parois rocheuses et fabriquant des outils de pierre, avec les formes archaïques de cette même civilisation, dont les vestiges trouvés dans les grottes de France et d'Espagne attestent la similarité ? C'est là surtout que le faux évolutionnisme s'est donné libre cours. Et pourtant ce jeu séduisant, auquel nous nous abandonnons presque irrésistiblement chaque fois que nous en avons l'occasion (le voyageur occidental ne se complaît-il pas à retrouver le "moyen âge" en Orient, le "siècle de Louis XIV" dans le Pékin d'avant la Première Guerre mondiale, l'"âge de la pierre" parmi les indigènes d'Australie ou de la Nouvelle-Guinée ?), est extraordinairement pernicieux. Des civilisations disparues, nous ne connaissons que certains aspects, et ceux-ci sont d'autant moins nombreux que la civilisation considérée est plus ancienne, puisque les aspects connus sont ceux-là seuls qui ont pu survivre aux destructions du temps. Le procédé consiste donc à prendre la partie pour le tout, à conclure, du fait que certains aspects de deux civilisations (l'une actuelle, l'autre disparue) offrent des ressemblances, à l'analogie de tous les aspects. Or non seulement cette façon de raisonner est logiquement insoutenable, mais dans bon nombre de cas elle est démentie par les faits.

Race et histoire Quotes

Antérieur à l'évolutionnisme biologique, théorie scientifique, l'évolutionnisme social n'est, trop souvent, que le maquillage faussement scientifique d'un vieux problème philosophique dont il n'est nullement certain que l'observation et l'induction puissent un jour fournir la clef. (p.20)

Race et histoire Quotes

[A propos du faux évolutionnisme] Il s'agit d'une tentative pour supprimer la diversité des cultures tout en feignant de la reconnaître pleinement. Car, si l'on traite les différents états où se trouvent les sociétés humaines, tant anciennes que lointaines, comme des stades ou des étapes d'un développement unique qui, partant du même point, doit les faire converger vers le même but, on voit bien que la diversité n'est plus qu'apparente. L'humanité devient une et identique à elle-même ; seulement, cette unité et cette identité ne peuvent se réaliser que progressivement et la variété des cultures illustre les moments d'un processus qui dissimule une réalité plus profonde ou en retarde la manifestation.

Race et histoire Quotes

L'attitude la plus ancienne, et qui repose sans doute sur des fondements psychologiques solides puisqu'elle tend à réapparaître chez chacun de nous quand nous sommes placés dans une situation inattendue, consiste à répudier purement et simplement les formes culturelles : morales, religieuses, sociales, esthétiques, qui sont les plus éloignées de celles auxquelles nous nous identifions. "Habitudes de sauvages", "cela n'est pas de chez nous", "on ne devrait pas permettre cela", etc., autant de réactions grossières qui traduisent ce même frisson, cette même répulsion, en présence de manières de vivre, de croire ou de penser qui nous sont étrangères.

Cea mai primitivă cultură este întotdeauna o cultură adultă şi, prin însuşi acest lucru, incompatibilă cu manifestările infantile care pot fi observate în cea mai înaltă civilizaţie.

while I complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment, since I have not reached the stage of development at which I would be capable of perceiving it.

Tristes Tropiques Quotes

So I can understand the mad passion for travel books and their deceptiveness. They create the illusion of something which no longer exists but still should exist, if we were to have any hope of avoiding the overwhelming conclusion that the history of the past twenty thousand years is irrevocable.

Tristes Tropiques Quotes

Scientific knowledge advances haltingly and is stimulated by contention and doubt.

Doubt Quotes Knowledge Quotes / Anthropology Quotes Contention Quotes Scepticism Quotes Scientific knowledge Quotes Skepticism Quotes The Raw and the Cooked Quotes