I want you to picture two very different worlds
for a second. First, I want you to transport
yourself back to Brussels. The year is 1908.
Close your eyes and really picture it. You know,
it's the world of gas lamps casting these flickering
shadows on cobblestone streets. Right. Horse
-drawn carriage. Exactly. It's the era of emperors
still sitting on thrones in Europe, of a world
that feels, at least to us, completely sepia
-toned. It is a different epoch entirely. It's
a world before the world wars, before the atom
bomb, before penicillin even. A completely different
mental landscape. Right. Now snap your fingers
and cut to the year 2009. A whole century later.
A whole century. We have the iPhone in our pockets.
We have the Internet connecting every corner
of the globe. We've mapped the human genome.
We are living in a hyper -accelerated, digital,
globalized future. And the gap between those
two dates, 1908 to 2009, is the lifespan of exactly
one man, Claude Levi Strauss. And that is a 100
-year span. It just blows my mind. Precisely.
He lived from the era of the carriage well into
the age of the algorithm. He witnessed the entire
trajectory in the 20th century, all of its horrors
and all of its marvels. And here's the thing
that really gets me. And this is, I think, the
core of why we are doing this deep dive today.
This man lived through the most radical technological
and social changes in human history. But he spent
that entire century arguing that human beings,
well, that we haven't actually changed at all.
It's a deeply disorienting thought, isn't it?
But that's the provocation we're dealing with.
Levi Strauss argued that if you strip away the
iPhones and the carriages and you look at the
raw operating system of the human mind. The software.
The software, exactly. He's saying that a Wall
Street banker creates meaning in the exact same
way as a hunter -gatherer in the Amazon rainforest.
So the hardware changes, the tools, the environment,
but the code is the same. Exactly. He argued
that the so -called savage mind and the civilized
mind are structurally identical. He believed
that there's a hidden grammar. a subconscious
structural logic that dictates everything we
do. Everything. From who we are allowed to marry,
to the myths we tell our children, to what we
eat for dinner. He believed these aren't just
random cultural quirks or personal choices. They
are governed by rules, just like grammar governs
how you form a sentence. See, that is the hook
for me. But it's also the scary part. The idea
that we are following rules we don't even know
exist. We think we're these free agents, you
know, making choices. But Levi Strauss is saying,
no, you're just speaking a language you didn't
write. That is the essence of structuralism.
And today. We're going to unpack exactly what
that means. It's a huge, intimidating word, but
the core idea is actually quite elegant. And
we aren't just skimming the surface. We have
a massive stack of sources today. We are diving
into his biography, which honestly reads like
an adventure novel. There's an escape from the
Nazis, an FBI investigation, Amazonian expeditions.
And we're tackling his major works, like the
beautiful and melancholic Trista's Tropic, the
bombshell that was The Savage Mind, and, of course,
his four -volume magazine. And, crucially, we're
not shying away from the controversy. Because
for all his fame, for all the accolades of being
the father of modern anthropology, he had some
fierce critics who thought his theories were
just a little too neat. A little too perfect,
yes. They accused him of ignoring the messiness
of real life to build these beautiful crystalline
structures. So, are you ready to figure out if
we're actually just puppets of a hidden grammar?
I'm ready to connect the dots. Let's do it. All
right. Let's jump into section one, the making
of a reluctant explorer. Because for a guy who
became the world's most famous anthropologist,
the guy who put the Amazon on the intellectual
map, his start was, well, it was completely unexpected.
It was certainly unconventional. As we said,
he was born in Brussels in 1908. His parents
were French Jewish, though the household was
artistic and secular. His father was a portrait
painter. OK. But the detail that always stands
out to me. the one that seems to set the stage
for his entire way of thinking, comes from his
childhood during World War I. This is when he
goes to live with his grandfather, right? Yes.
He's sent to live with his grandfather, who happened
to be the rabbi of Versailles. The rabbi of Versailles.
I mean, that sounds like a significant title.
That's not a small -town rabbi. It was. But the
way Levi Strauss describes the house itself is
so telling. He lived there from age 6 to 10.
and the house was physically attached to the
synagogue. Right. But to get from the living
quarters to the synagogue, you had to walk through
this long, cold, dark inner passage. I remember
reading this description in the notes. He called
it an impassable frontier, which is, you know,
a bit dramatic for a hallway. It is dramatic,
but think about it from a six -year -old's perspective.
On one side, you have the house. It's warm. It's
familiar, domestic, profane. On the other side,
you have the synagogue. It's sacred, mysterious,
full of strange rituals and sounds. And connecting
them is this cold, terrifying void. Exactly.
He described venturing into that passage with
a feeling of genuine anguish. It was a place
of transition between two opposite worlds. It's
almost like he was living in a binary opposition
before he even knew what that term meant. the
sacred and the profane, separated by a cold hallway.
That's a brilliant observation. He was living
the theory before he wrote it. The structure
was imprinted on him. And despite this intense
religious proximity, or maybe because of the
terror of that hallway, he became a staunch atheist
as an adult. He rejected the content of the religion
entirely. Though, and here's where it gets really
interesting, he never quite shook that prophet
vibe, did he? He later wrote about the role of
the thinker as being a prophet and martyr. He
kept the structure of the religion. He loved
the idea of a lone figure interpreting the hidden
laws of the universe for everyone else. He just
replaced the content god with science and structure.
That's a very structuralist thing to do, actually.
You keep the frame, you just change the picture.
So he's smart, clearly. He breezes through school.
Breezes is the right word. He went to the best
schools, the Lycaeans and Desailly, and later
the Sorbonne. He starts by studying law. Which
he hated. He found it excruciatingly boring.
He said it was just mental gymnastics without
any grounding in reality. It had no soul, so
he switched to philosophy. Okay, that feels like
a better fit. It was. And just to contextualize
his intellect for you, in France, there's this
exam called the aggregation. It's an incredibly
difficult, brutally competitive exam you have
to pass to become a professor. The kind of exam
where people study for years and still fail?
Exactly. People's careers are made or broken
by it. Lévi -Strauss passed it at age 22. He
was the youngest person in his class. And who
was in his class? Well, just people like Simone
de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau -Ponty. You know,
no big deal. This is a golden generation French
intellect. And he was the kid at the front of
the class. But then reality hits. The Great Depression
is in full swing. He's teaching secondary school,
probably bored out of his mind again, lecturing
teenagers on Kant. And then in 1935, the phone
rings. A literal call to adventure. It was the
director of the École Normale Supérieure. And
he says, are you still interested in ethnography?
And Levi Strauss basically said yes without knowing
what it was. So he gets offered a job. He's offered
a visiting professorship at the University of
Sao Paulo in Brazil. It was part of a French
cultural mission to bring European intellect
to South America. And he accepts. But he doesn't
accept because he has this burning passion for
Brazil. No, he accepts to escape boredom. That's
what he said. He wanted to get out of the classroom.
He wanted to see something other, something completely
different from the intellectual hothouse of Paris.
This kicks off the Brazil expedition. 1935 to
1939. And this is really the foundational myth
of Levi Strauss, right? He goes into the Mato
Grosso, into the deep Amazon rainforest. And
he didn't go alone. His first wife, Dina Dreyfus,
was with him. And it's important to note, she
was actually a trained ethnographer, unlike Claude
at the time, who was a philosopher dabbling in
a new field. So she knew what she was doing.
She did. They ventured into the interior to study
tribes like the Guaycuru, the Boro, the Nambiquara,
and the Tupicauhi. These were groups that had
had very little contact with the outside world.
Now, hold on. When we picture an anthropologist
in the Amazon, we have a specific image in our
heads, right? We picture someone living in a
hut for two years, learning the language, eating
the food, becoming one of the tribe, you know,
going native, basically. That's the... Ideal.
Yes. That's the participatory observation method
established by the greats like Branisagat -Melanowski.
You immerse yourself until you understand the
culture from the inside out. But this is where
we have to pump the brakes a bit because there
is a lot of critique about how Levi Strauss actually
did his fieldwork. There is. And it's a valid
critique. Edmund Leach, who was a very prominent
British anthropologist, later went through Levi
Strauss' own accounts with a fine -tooth comb.
And what did he find? He pointed out that if
you actually look at the timeline, he spent weeks,
sometimes only days, in any one place. Weeks?
That's barely a vacation. That's not deep immersion.
It was an expedition. They were constantly moving.
And critically, Leach pointed out that Levi Strauss
couldn't speak the languages fluently. He was
working through translators or just through observation.
So he's basically a tourist with a notebook.
I mean, that sounds harsh, but if you can't talk
to the people, how are you understanding their
deepest cultural secrets, their myths, their
kinship rules? It is harsh, but not entirely
unfair regarding his fieldwork methods. Leach
suggested he was never able to converse easily
with any of his native informants. He was collecting
fragments, sketches, data points. Which brings
us to my favorite irony of this whole story.
In his most famous book, Trister Tropic, which
is basically his travel memoir, the very first
sentence is him admitting he hates traveling.
I hate traveling and explorers. It's a shocking
way to start a book about travel and exploration.
A complete provocation. It's like a chef opening
a cookbook by saying, you know what, I hate food,
and cooking is a chore. Exactly. But it reveals
his philosophy. For Levi Strauss, the truth wasn't
in the experience of the jungle. He didn't think
you learned the truth by getting bug bites and
sweating in a hammock for a year. So where was
the truth? He believed the truth was found in
the analysis of the data afterwards, in the quiet
of the library where his mind could actually
work on it. He viewed the travel as a necessary
evil way to go out, grab the raw material, and
then bring it back to the laboratory. He wanted
the data, not the dirt. Precisely. He was an
armchair anthropologist who was forced to get
up out of the armchair for a few years, and he
couldn't wait to sit back down and think about
what he'd seen. So he wraps up in Brazil in 1939.
He heads back to France. And talk about bad timing.
Terrible timing. The worst possible. Yeah. He
returns just as World War II is starting. He's
mobilized for the war effort, serving as a liaison
on the Maginot Line. Which didn't go so well
for France. Not at all. As we know, the German
Blitzkrieg happens. France capitulates in 1940.
The Vichy government takes over, collaborating
with the Nazis. And Lévi -Strauss is Jewish?
He is the grandson of a rabbi. Under the Vichy
racial laws, he is stripped of his French citizenship.
He's fired from his teaching job. Overnight,
he becomes a non -person in his own country.
So he has to run. He has to run for his life.
And this escape story is absolutely cinematic.
He manages to get on a boat to Martinique. And
this boat... It was just a passenger liner. It
was packed with refugees. And on this boat, he's
having these deep philosophical conversations
with the revolutionary Victor Serge, with Andre
Britton, the surrealist. It's this floating container
of exiled European intellect just bobbing across
the Atlantic. Exactly. I kind of know his arc
of the European mind. He gets to Martinique,
then Puerto Rico, and then the FBI gets involved.
What's that about? Yes. He arrives in Puerto
Rico, which is U .S. territory, and the FBI goes
through his luggage. They find all these papers
covered in what to them are just strange scribbles
and diagrams. His anthropology notes, his kinship
charts. Right. But to an FBI agent in 1941, they
look like codes. They see German letters or what
they think are German letters because of some
of the linguistic symbols he used. They suspected
he might be a spy. Spy for who? The Nazis. He's
a Jewish man fleeing the Nazis. Paranoia was
at an all -time high. It was wartime. They eventually
realize their mistake, that they were just academic
papers, and let him through. He finally arrives
in New York City. And this is where the story
shifts gears. This is Section 2, New York, linguistics,
and the birth of structuralism. Because it turns
out, getting kicked out of France was the best
thing that could have possibly happened to his
career. It was the crucible. It was the moment
everything came together for him. You have to
imagine New York in the 1940s. It was, as you
said, a university in exile. All these brilliant
European minds had fled there. So he wasn't alone.
Far from it. He helped found the École Libra
d 'Haute Étude. He's hanging out with surrealists
like Max Ernst, wandering through antique shops
on 3rd Avenue, looking at totem poles in the
Museum of Natural History. He was soaking it
all in. But the most important meeting, the one
that changes the history of anthropology forever,
is with a Russian guy. Roman Jacobson. Okay,
let's slow down here because this is the pivot
point. Roman Jacobson. Why is this linguist so
important? Because Jacobson gave Levi Strauss
the key to the code he had been looking for his
whole life. Jacobson was a pioneer in what's
called structural linguistics. And what is that?
Well, he taught Levi Strauss that language isn't
just a big pile of words. It's a system. It's
built of foams, the smallest units of sound.
And here is the absolute key concept. A sound
like B or P has no meaning on its own. Right.
But doesn't mean anything. But doesn't mean anything.
Exactly. A phoneme only has meaning in relation
to other sounds. We can distinguish the word
bat. from the word pat, because our brain can
distinguish the sound B from the sound P. The
meaning comes from the difference, from the contrast.
Okay, I want to make sure I really get this,
and I want to make sure everyone listening gets
this, because everything else depends on it.
You're saying meaning doesn't live inside the
thing. Meaning lives in the space between things.
That is a beautiful way to put it, yes. Let's
use an analogy. Think of a traffic light. Okay.
Red, yellow, green. You're driving, and you see
a red light. What does red mean? It means...
But why does it mean stop? Is there something
inherently stopping about the wavelength of red
light? I mean, if you showed a red light to an
alien who'd never seen a car, would they instinctively
slam on the brakes? Of course not. We just decided
it means stop. It could have been blue. It could
have been purple. Exactly. Red only means stop
because it is positioned in a system of opposition
to green, which means go. The meaning isn't in
the color itself. The meaning is in the difference
between the two colors. It's the relationship.
Red is simply not green. Green is not red. Okay,
so meaning is a system of contrasts, a system
of opposites. Precisely. This is what we call
a binary opposition. And sitting there in New
York listening to Jacobson talk about sounds,
Lovie Strauss had this massive world -changing
realization. He thought, wait a minute, if language
works like this based on hidden rules of opposition,
Maybe culture works like this, too. That is a
huge leap to go from Beavis SP to how an entire
society functions. It's the birth of structuralism.
He made the leap. He realized that culture is
like a language. We follow its rules without
being consciously aware of them. I mean, you
don't wake up and say, today I'm going to perform
the binary opposition of raw versus cooked by
making a salad for lunch. You just make a salad.
But Levi Strauss believed that underneath that
action is a mental grammar at play. So if we
stick with the traffic light, he's saying that
our marriage customs, our art, our table manners,
they're all just traffic lights. They're signals
that only have meaning because they're different
from other signals. Yes. Take food again. The
opposition between raw and cooked. Levi Strauss
would say we don't just cook food to kill bacteria
or make it digestible. That's the functional
reason. Right. The structural reason is that
we cook food to mark a symbolic transition. Raw
is nature. Coke is culture. By cooking the meat,
we are turning a biological object from the natural
world into a social object from the cultural
world. We're symbolically saying, I am a human,
not an animal. So the act of barbecuing a steak
is actually a linguistic statement. You're speaking
culture. In the structuralist view, yes. It's
a sentence in the language of food. You're communicating
your humanity. That is wild. It makes everything
feel so deliberate, even if we aren't doing it
on purpose. And that's why he felt connected
to American anthropology, too. He actually met
the great Franz Boas in New York. The father
of American anthropology. The big one. The giant
of the field. And talk about a dramatic passing
of the torch. In 1942, they were having dinner
at the faculty house at Columbia University.
A nice, quiet, scholarly dinner. And Franz Boas
literally died in Lévi -Strauss' arms. He had
a heart attack at the table. Wow. That's cinematic.
That's mythic in its own right. It sounds like
a myth, doesn't it? The old king dying in the
arms of the young prince who will take his place.
It gave Lévi -Strauss this direct, almost physical
lineage to American anthropology, which helped
his work get accepted in the U .S. later on.
But the shift he was proposing was radical. He
was moving the entire field from functionalism
to structuralism. Yes. Let's clarify that shift,
because before Levi Strauss, pretty much everyone
was a functionalist. Right. Functionalism asks,
what is the purpose of this custom? What does
it do? If a tribe does a rain dance, a functionalist
asks, does this bring the group together? Does
it relieve anxiety about the harvest? They look
for the function. They assume the custom exists
because it does something useful for society.
Like a tool. A hammer exists to hit nails. That's
its function. Exactly. But structuralism asks
a completely different question. It asks, what
is the underlying logic? What is the grammar
of this dance? It doesn't care if the dance works
to make rain. It cares about how the symbols
in the dance, the colors, the movements, the
sounds, relate to each other to create meaning.
It's a fundamental shift from what does it do
to how was it built. So let's see this in action.
Because abstract theory is fine, but I want to
see how he actually applied this. Let's move
to section three, decoding the family. Because
if there's anything that seems personal, emotional,
and biological, it's family. Who we love, who
we marry. But Levi -Strauss comes along and says,
nope, it's math. It is algebra to him. He started
with his book, The Elementary Structures of Kinship,
in 1949. And he looked at kinship systems all
over the world. Now... The British anthropologists,
like Radcliffe Brown, thought kinship was all
about descent. Meaning bloodlines. Yes. Passing
things down from father to son. Property, names,
titles. That's how we usually think of it. My
name comes from my father, who got it from his
father. It's a vertical line through time. Makes
sense. Levi Strauss said that's important, but
it's not the most important thing. He said kinship
is really about alliance. It's horizontal, not
vertical. It's about marriage. Specifically,
he argued that the incest taboo, which is nearly
universal across all human cultures, wasn't just
a moral rule. It wasn't just don't do that, it's
gross. Or about avoiding genetic defects. Okay,
so what was it about? He saw it as a structural
necessity, the foundational rule of culture.
Because if you are forbidden from marrying your
own sister or daughter, you must give her to
someone else. And in return, you expect that
someone else will give you a wife. So it forces
groups to interact. It's an anti -isolation device.
Exactly. It forces men to obtain wives from outside
their immediate family group. He saw it as a
system for circulating women. And he was very
explicit about this language. He said women were
being exchanged like meaningful signs in a language
or like currency in an economy. To build alliances.
To build alliances. It keeps clans from killing
each other because now my brother -in -law is
in that other clan. My nephew's in that clan.
We can't go to war. We're family now. It's the
glue that holds society together. This brings
us to what he called the atom of kinship. And
this is the part where he really tries to turn
family drama into an algebra equation. It literally
is an equation. He said the basic elementary
unit of family isn't just husband, wife, and
child. And the nuclear family. Right. He says
that's too simple. That's a biological unit,
not a cultural one. The basic cultural unit requires
four roles to make sense. Brother, sister, father,
and son. You have to include the uncle. The mother's
brother. You have to. Because the uncle represents
the group that gave the wife. He is the link
to the outside world, to the alliance. And Levi
Strauss found this incredible pattern, this formula.
He said the relationship between the uncle and
the nephew is to the brother and sister as the
father and son is to the husband and wife. Okay,
my brain just cramped. A is to B as C is to D.
What does that actually mean in real life? Give
me a concrete scenario. It's a system of balances.
It's about positive and negative emotional charges.
He argued that you can predict the emotional
tone of these relationships based on the others.
Let's say you're in a society where the father
is very stern. He is the authoritarian figure.
He disciplines the son. Their relationship is
formal, respectful, maybe a little tense. Okay,
stern dad. I got it. Common enough. In those
societies, Levi Strauss predicted that the maternal
uncle will almost always be familiar, playful,
and kind. He's the cool uncle. The one the nephew
can joke with, confide in. He's the emotional
release valve. But, and here's the structure
kicking in. In societies where the relationship
between father and son is warm and casual, where
the dad is the buddy. Let me guess. The uncle
becomes the mean one, the authority figure. Exactly.
The uncle becomes the representative of authority.
The structure demands balance. You can't have
authority everywhere and you can't have familiarity
everywhere. It has to be distributed logically.
If the father is a plus charge, the uncle has
to be a minus charge and vice versa. That is
wild. So he could walk into a village, watch
a father scold his son, and immediately predict
how the uncle acts without ever meeting him.
That was the claim. That was the predictive power
of structural analysis. And it worked a surprising
number of cases. But, and I have to pause here,
we need to address the elephant in the room.
Yeah, I was waiting for this. This entire theory
rests on the idea that men are exchanging women
like they're trading cards to build alliances.
That feels pretty dehumanizing to modern ears.
You are hitting on one of the major modern critiques
of Levi Strauss. Feminist scholars have pointed
this out for decades. His model, as groundbreaking
as it was, views women essentially as signs or
messages being sent between groups of men to
facilitate communication. I give you my sister
so you don't kill me and my clan. Basically.
Now... In his defense, Levi -Strauss would say
he isn't endorsing this system. He's just describing
the underlying machinery of how many patriarchal
societies have functioned for millennia. He's
analyzing the code, not writing it or approving
of it. But you're absolutely right. It reduces
women to objects of exchange within the theoretical
model itself. And beyond the, let's call it,
problematic framing, there's also a data problem,
right? Augustus Elkin, the expert on Australian
Aboriginals, he had a bone to pick with this
neat little atom. He did. This is the classificatory
kin problem. That's a huge issue for the theory.
Break that down for me. What's classificatory
kin? In many tribal societies, you don't just
have one father. You call all men of your father's
generation and lineage father. You call all of
your female cousins from a certain side sister.
It's a way of knitting the whole tribe together
into one big family. So if I have 20 fathers,
which one is the stern one that the formula requires?
Exactly. Levi Strauss' neat little Adam assumes
a one -to -one biological relationship. My specific
dad, my specific mother's brother. But if the
mother's brother is just a distant relative you
happen to call uncle, the psychological formula
of the stern father versus nice uncle completely
fall apart. The emotional charges get all mixed
up. It's like trying to apply a strict chemical
formula to a soup where the ingredients keep
changing names and you're not even sure which
one is which. That's a great way to put it. He
was accused. often of forcing the messy reality
of human life into these beautiful, rigid mathematical
boxes. He wanted the world to be cleaner and
more logical than it actually was. But man, even
if they are flawed, those boxes are fascinating.
Let's move to section four, because this is the
book that really put him on the map for the general
public, not just for anthropologists. The Savage
Mind. La Pensée Sauvage, published in 1962. A
cultural bombshell. It was a sensation. And we
have to talk about the title. Because the savage
mind sounds a bit colonial. It sounds dismissive,
like, oh, look at those savages and how they
think. It does in English, and it's a terrible
translation, really. In French, it's a beautiful,
untranslatable pun. Pensee means thought, but
it also means pansy, the flower. And sauvage
means wild. So the title means the savage mind,
but it also means wild pansies. That is so much
more poetic. It is. He even suggested the English
title should be Pansies for Thought, which is
a reference to Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet.
But the publishers went with the more aggressive,
more provocative The Savage Mind. The main argument
here is that primitive people aren't stupid,
which sounds blindingly obvious to us now, but
it wasn't the consensus back then. Correct. For
a long time, the Western view, inherited from
thinkers like Lucien Lévi -Bruhl, was that indigenous
people thought like children. that their minds
were pre -logical, mystical, irrational. Levi
Strauss said, absolutely not. He argued that
the savage mind is just as complex, just as logical,
and just as rigorous as modern scientific thought.
It just uses different tools and applies itself
to different problems. This is the famous distinction
between the engineer and the bricoleur. I love
this concept. I think about this constantly in
my own life. It's one of his most powerful and
enduring ideas. It's a lens you can apply to
almost anything. So break it down for us. The
engineer versus the brickler. Okay. The engineer
represents modern scientific thought. The engineer
has a specific project, say building a bridge.
He designs the bridge first. Then he invents
or manufactures the exact tools and materials
he needs for that specific project. If he needs
a drill bit of a very specific size, he makes
it. His universe of tools is open. He can create
new tools for the job. And the brickler. The
brickler is more like a tinkerer or a DIY enthusiast,
a handyman. He has a closed set of tools, just
whatever happens to the lying around in his garage,
a bent nail, a piece of string, an old tire.
When he faces a problem, say a leaky pipe, he
doesn't go buy a new tool. He looks at his pile
of junk and asks, What can this object do? How
can I repurpose this old tire to fix this pipe?
The analogy I always use is cooking. The engineer
is a professional chef who decides to make a
souffle. He writes a detailed list, goes to a
specialty grocery store, and buys the perfect
eggs. The right Gruyere cheese, the right kind
of cream. He gets exactly what he needs for the
recipe. Right, a top -down approach. The bricoleur
is the home cook who gets home at 7 p .m., totally
exhausted and hungry. He opens the fridge. He
sees half a roast chicken from two days ago,
a jar of mustard, one sad -looking carrot, and
some stale bread. He has to make dinner out of
that. He can't go to the store. He has to improvise
with what's at hand. That is a perfect analogy.
And Levi Strauss said that myth -making is intellectual
bricolage. indigenous cultures take the materials
at hand the animals plants stars and geography
around them the stuff in their fridge and they
rearrange them into stories that solve deep abstract
intellectual problems like the opposition between
life and death and the key point is that both
the chef and the home cook get you fed Both the
engineer and the bricoleur solve the problem.
Exactly. One isn't better or smarter than the
other. They're just different modes of thought
operating on different materials. The bricoleur
speaks with things. The engineer speaks with
concepts. Now, this book also got him into a
huge public fight with Jean Pulsarch. And in
1960s Paris, a fight with Sartre was like a heavyweight
title bout. It was the Super Bowl of philosophy.
It was the clash of the titans. Existentialism
versus the brand new structuralism. Everyone
in Paris was taking sides. Sartre was all about
freedom, right? The individual makes himself.
Yes. For Sartre, existence precedes essence.
We are born as a blank slate and we define ourselves
through our choices. History is made by human
action, by conscious decisions. We are the authors
of our own lives. We are radically free. And
Levi Strauss comes along in The Savage Mind and
says... He says, not so fast. He argued that
we are profoundly constrained by these invisible
structures, these grammars. We think we're making
free choices, but we're actually just operating
within the pre -existing grammar of our culture.
He famously said that history is not as free
as we think it is. That must have driven Sartre
absolutely crazy. It did. Levi Strauss was essentially
saying that the individual subject, the I, that
Sartre and the existentialists loved so much,
was an illusion. He argued that the I is just
a focal point where these huge impersonal structures
intersect. He was, in a sense, trying to dissolve
the individual into the structure. It was a devastating
critique of existentialism. It feels like he
is saying, we are characters in a book that's
already been written by a grammar we can't even
read. Sartre is screaming, I am writing the book!
And Levi Strauss... Strauss -Conley says, no,
you're just descendants on page 42. That is a
haunting and very accurate way to put it. And
nowhere is that grammar more complex or more
beautifully analyzed than in his masterwork,
Mythologiques. This is section five. This is
the four -volume monster, the raw and the cooked,
from honey to ashes. It's monumental. It's over
2 ,000 pages. He took a single myth. Literally
starting with one story he heard in Brazil and
followed its variations and transformations from
the tip of South America all the way up to the
Arctic Circle. He treated myths like a type of
speech, like a language. Yes. He broke them down
into their smallest component parts, which he
called mythemes. Think of mythemes like the sentences
or key ideas of a myth. And then he looked for
those binary oppositions again. Raw versus cooked.
Fresh versus rotten. Silence versus noise. Sky
versus earth. Nature versus culture. Let's use
a concrete example because this can get very
abstract. Let's look at the trickster figure
because this is where the theory actually makes
a kind of beautiful weird sense to me. Why are
tricksters in so much Native American mythology
almost always coyotes or ravens? This is a classic
example of his logic in action. The simple functionalist
answer would be, oh, it's because coyotes are
sneaky in real life or ravens are smart birds.
Right. That's what I would assume. The animal
has a personality that fits the story. Levi Strauss.
says no. That's too simple. That's looking at
the content, not the structure. It says you have
to look at their place in the system. First,
you establish a primary binary opposition, life
and death. Okay. Life versus death. The big one.
Now, how do human beings interact with that opposition?
Well, one way is through food. So let's look
at that. What represents life? Agriculture. Growing
plants. What represents death? Hunting. The killing
of animals. Okay. So plants, life. Hunting, death.
I'm with you. Now look at the animal kingdom
from that perspective. Herbivores eat plants.
So they are structurally on the side of life.
Predators eat meat. They kill. So they are structurally
on the side of death. So you have these two opposite
poles in the animal world. Where do the raven
and coyote fit in? They are carrion eaters. Scavengers.
This is the key. They eat meat. So they are like
predators on the side of death. They don't necessarily
kill to get it, so they are like herbivores on
the side of life. They are in the middle. They
break the rule. They are mediators. They bridge
the conceptual gap between herbivore and predator.
And because they bridge that gap in the natural
world, they can be used symbolically in myths
to bridge the ultimate gap between life and death.
So because they are biological hybrids in their
eating habits, they become spiritual hybrids
in the myths. They can travel between worlds.
Precisely. They are chosen as tricksters not
because they are sneaky, but because their structural
position makes them the perfect logical tool
to think with about the biggest, most unsolvable
contradiction of all. That is, it's just so elegantly
complex, it's beautiful. But is it actually true?
That is the million -dollar question that has
followed his work for 60 years. Because when
I hear this, my first thought is of Stanley Diamond's
criticism. He basically wrote a response saying,
hey, Claude, have you ever actually, you know,
seen a coyote? Right. Stanley Diamond, another
anthropologist, pointed out that the biological
premise is flawed. Coyotes aren't just scavengers.
They are very effective hunters. They kill rabbits,
mice, fawns. They are predators and ravens. They're
corvids. They'll absolutely kill small animals
if they get the chance. And on the flip side,
bears are massive scavengers. Bears eat everything.
But bears aren't usually tricksters in the same
way as coyote. They're more often symbols of
power or nature. Exactly. Diamond argued that
Levi Strauss was cherry picking the biological
facts to fit his beautiful formula. He was accused
of threatening people with mathematics. I love
that phrase, threatening people with mathematics.
It implies he was bullying the data until it
confessed to fitting his theory. There is definitely
a sense, especially in mythologics, that the
theory was so beautiful. So crystalline that
Levi Strauss didn't want messy reality to ruin
it. He was building a cathedral of logic. And
if a particular brick from the real world didn't
fit, he would chisel it down until it did. So
he was the engineer pretending to be the bricoleur.
Or maybe the other way around. It gets confused.
Perhaps he was a myth maker himself, creating
a grand, overarching myth about myths. A metamyth.
That is a head spinner. Let's move to our final
section, section six. Because for all this high
theory and complex logic, the man was also a
beautiful writer. We mentioned Tris Tropic earlier.
Yes, published in 1955. It's a masterpiece. It's
a memoir of his time in Brazil, but it's also
an elegy. A song of mourning for a world that
was disappearing. The title translates to sad
tropics or a world on the wane. It's so good
that the organizers of the Prix Goncourt, which
is the biggest literary prize in France, like
the Pulitzer for fiction, they wanted to give
it to him. But they couldn't, because the rules
said it had to be a work of fiction. It's just
unheard of for an anthropology book to be considered
for a prize like that. It contains some of the
most beautiful prose written in the French language
in the 20th century. And in his later years,
the sadness, this melancholy, it really deepened.
He wasn't just analyzing myths anymore. He was
looking at the modern world and recoiling in
horror. He became a very pessimistic environmentalist.
long before it was trendy. In his later works
and in posthumously published essays like in
the book We Are All Cannibals, he argued that
humanity is poisoning itself. There's that quote
about overpopulation that's so chilling. Yes.
He said the density of human beings has become
so great that they've begun to poison themselves.
He saw the disappearance of species not just
as a biological loss, but as a symbolic and intellectual
loss. Remember, if we think with animals, if
animals are the tools in our bricoleur kit, then
when we drive them to extinction, we are losing
our ability to think. We are emptying the fridge.
Soon there will be nothing left to cook with.
Exactly. We are left with nothing to think with.
We're impoverishing our own minds. And he had
a very strong take on vegetarianism, right? Which
fits his whole raw versus cooked obsession. He
did. It follows his logic perfectly. He wrote
that one day he believed the idea of raising
and massacring living beings for food will inspire
the same repulsion in us that we currently feel
towards cannibalism. That is a heavy prediction
to put meat eating on the same level as cannibalism.
It's consistent with his worldview. If we are
all part of the same grand structure, if the
savage and the civilized are identical in their
mental software, then drawing a hard absolute
line between human and animal is just another
arbitrary binary opposition, one that we might
one day deconstruct. He lived to be 100 years
old. He died in 2009. And the irony of his long
life is so poignant. He spent his career studying
the incredible diversity of human cultures, the
wild pansies of thought. But he died believing
that the modern world, the monoculture, the globalized,
homogenized world we live in now, was systematically
destroying that very diversity. He felt he was
watching the world he loved vanish before his
eyes. So let's try to wrap this up. Let's recap.
We've traveled from the rabbi's house in Versailles
to the Brazilian rainforest, from the university
in exile in New York to the prestigious College
de France. We have gone from the atom of kinship
to the trickster coyote. It's a massive intellectual
journey. So what does this all mean? Why should
a listener driving to work in 2026 care about
structuralism? Why does it matter today if we
are bricolers or engineers? I think it matters
because it is a profound challenge to our modern
arrogance. love to think we are the engineers
of our own lives, that we are rational, independent,
modern, that we have outgrown myths and superstition.
Levi Strauss comes along and reminds us that
we are also, and perhaps primarily, prequelers.
We are working with the scraps of myths, symbols,
and structures that we inherited from our ancestors,
whether we know it or not. We aren't smarter
than the people who painted caves 30 ,000 years
ago. We just have different tools in the garage.
Exactly. And the hidden grammar is still there.
We still operate on binary oppositions. Red state,
blue state, 1%, 99%, Beamer Gen Z, Android phone.
We are constantly defining ourselves by what
we are not. We are still telling myths to resolve
our contradictions. We just don't call them myths.
Which leads us to a final provocative thought
to leave everyone with. Levi Strauss suggested
that myths exist to solve problems that are in
reality unsolvable. The biggest one being the
conflict between life and death. Yes. The myth
creates a symbolic, logical solution where reality
cannot provide one. It papers over the cracks
in our existence. So if our modern world has
stopped believing in myths, if we think we're
too smart for Zeus or the coyote or the story
of Genesis. What mechanisms do we have left?
That is the dangerous question, isn't it? If
we don't have the myths to mediate our deepest
contradictions, are we just left with the raw,
unbearable contradictions themselves? Or have
we just replaced the old myths with new ones
that we don't even recognize as myths yet? Things
like progress or the market or the algorithm.
And if those are our new unrecognized myths,
what hidden grammar are they imposing on us right
now? What is the binary opposition of the algorithm?
What unseen structures are we living inside today?
That is something I'm going to be thinking about
for a very long time. Thanks for diving deep
with us. It was a pleasure. We'll see you next
time.