Claude Lévi-Strauss Quotes

Binyıllar üzerinden bakıldığında, insanî tutkular birbirine karışır. Zaman insanların duyduğu aşk ve nefretlerden, bağlanmalardan, mücadelelerden ve arzulardan bir şey de eksiltmez, onlara bir şey de katmaz: Geçmişi ile bugünü hep aynıdır. Tarihin on ya da yirmi asrını rastgele aradan çıkarsak, insan doğası hakkındaki bilgimizde elle tutulur bir eksilme olmazdı. Yeri doldurulamayacak tek kayıp, o asırların dünyaya getirmiş olduğu sanat eserlerinin kaybı olurdu. Zira insanlar eserleriyle birbirlerinden farklılaşır, hatta var olur.

I never had, and still do not have, the perception of feeling my personal identity. I appear to myself as the place where something is going on, but there is no ‘I’, no ‘me.’ Each of us is a kind of crossroads where things happen. The crossroads is purely passive; something happens there. A different thing, equally valid, happens elsewhere. There is no choice, it is just a matter of chance.

People who are without writing have a fantastically precise knowledge of their environment and all their resources. All these things we have lost, but we did not lose them for nothing; we are now able to drive an automobile without being crushed at each moment, for example, or in the evening to turn on our television or radio. This implies a training of mental capacities which ‘primitive’ peoples don’t have because they don’t need them.

La tolérance n'est pas une position contemplative, dispensant les indulgences à ce qui fut ou à ce qui est. C'est une attitude dynamique, qui consiste à prévoir, à comprendre et à promouvoir ce qui veut être.

L'idéologie marxiste, communiste et totalitaire n'est qu'une ruse de l'histoire, w:Le Monde

The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.

Kültürlerin çeşitliliği insan topluluklarının birbirinden yalıtılmasından çok, onları birleştiren ilişkilere bağlıdır.

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.

From time to time, too, and for the space of two or three paces, an image or an echo would rise up from the recesses of time: in the little streets of the beaters of silver and gold, for instance, there was a clear, unhurried tinkling, as if a djinn with a thousand arms was absent-mindedly practising on a xylophone.

Freedom is neither a legal invention nor a philosophical conquest, the cherished possession of civilizations more valid than others because they alone have been able to create or preserve it. It is the outcome of an objective relationship between the individual and the space he occupies, between the consumer and the resources at his disposal.

À quoi sert d'agir, si la pensée qui guide l'action conduit à la découverte de l'absence de sens? Mais cette découverte n'est pas immédiatement accessible: il faut que je la pense, et je ne puis la penser d'un seul coup. Que les étapes soient douze comme dans le Boddhi; qu'elles soient plus nombreuses ou qu'elles le soient moins, elles existent toutes ensemble, et, pour parvenir jusqu'au terme, je suis perpétuellement appelé à vivre des situations dont chacune exige quelque chose de moi: je me dois aux hommes comme je me dois à la connaissance.

If this represents a basic need for order in the human mind and since, after all, the human mind is only part of the universe, the need probably exists because there is some order in the universe and the universe is not a chaos.

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.

...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.

Pour retrouver une position d’objectivité, nous devrons nous abstenir de tous jugements de ce type. Il faudra admettre que, dans la gamme des possibilités ouvertes aux sociétés humaines, chacune a fait un certain choix et que ces choix sont incomparables entre eux : ils se valent. Mais alors surgit un nouveau problème : car si, dans le premier cas, nous étions menacés par l’obscurantisme sous forme d’un refus aveugle de ce qui n’est pas nôtre, nous risquons maintenant de céder à un éclectisme qui, d’une culture quelconque, nous interdit de rien répudier : fût-ce la cruauté, l’injustice et la misère […]. Et comme ces abus existent aussi parmi nous, quel sera notre droit de les combattre à demeure, s’il suffit qu’ils se produisent ailleurs pour que nous nous inclinions devant eux ?

L’opposition entre deux attitudes de l’ethnographe : critique à domicile et conformiste au-dehors, en recouvre donc une autre à laquelle il lui est encore plus difficile d’échapper. S’il veut contribuer à une amélioration de son régime social, il doit condamner, partout où elles existent, les conditions analogues à celles qu’il combat, et il perd son objectivité et son impartialité. En retour, le détachement que lui imposent le scrupule moral et la rigueur scientifique le prévient de critiquer sa propre société, étant donné qu’il ne veut en juger aucune afin de les connaître toutes. A agir chez soi, on se prive de comprendre le reste, mais à vouloir tout comprendre on renonce à rien changer.