Claude Lévi-Strauss Quotes

A day will come when the idea that for the sake of food the people of the past raised and massacred living beings and with complete equanimity displayed their flesh in bits and pieces in shop windows, will no doubt inspire the same revulsion that the cannibalistic meals of the Americans, Oceanians, or Africans inspired in the travelers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

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

Marxist, communist and totalitarian ideology is only a ruse of history.

<nowiki>[</nowiki>Serialism<nowiki>]</nowiki> is like a sailless ship, driven out to sea by its captain, who has grown tired of its being used only as a pontoon, and who is privately convinced that by subjecting life aboard to the rules of an elaborate protocol, he will prevent the crew from thinking nostalgically either of their home port or of their ultimate destination.…

Never better than after the last four centuries of his history could a Western man understand that, while assuming the right to impose a radical separation of humanity and animality, while granting to one all that he denied the other, he initiated a vicious circle. The one boundary, constantly pushed back, would be used to separate men from other men and to claim—to the profit of ever smaller minorities—the privilege of a humanism, corrupted at birth by taking self-interest as its principle and its notion.

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

We can understand, too, that natural species are chosen not because they are "good to eat" but because they are "good to think." [Les espèces sont choisies non commes bonnes à manger, mais comme bonnes à penser.]

Our science arrived at maturity the day that Western man began to see that he would never understand himself as long as there was a single race or people on the surface of the earth that he treated as an object. Only then could anthropology declare itself in its true colours: as an enterprise reviewing and atoning for the Renaissance, in order to spread humanism to all humanity.

Humanity is confined to the borders of the tribe, the linguistic group, or even, in some instances, to the village ....

The entire village left the next day in about thirty canoes, leaving us alone with the women and children in the abandoned houses. [Le village entier partit le lendemain dans une trentaine de pirogues, nous laissant seuls avec les femmes et les enfants dans les maisons abandonnées.]

"(...) Ama diğer yandan, "herkes kendi alışık olmadığı şeye barbarlık der". Oysa ne kadar acayip, sarsıcı, hatta başkaldırtıcı görünürse görünsün, bağlamına yerleştirilirse, iyi yönlendirilen bir aklın açıklayamayacağı inanç ya da örf ve âdet yoktur."

...I cannot conceive that a day will come when science will be complete and achieved. There will always be new problems, and exactly at the same pace as science is able to solve problems which were deemed philosophical a dozen years or a century ago, so there will appear new problems which had not hitherto been not perceived as such.

Humanity is forever involved in two conflicting currents, the one tending towards unification, and the other towards the maintenance or restoration of diversity. As a result of the position of each period or culture in the system, as a result of the way it is facing, each thinks that only one of these two currents represents an advance, while the other appears to be the negation of the first. But we should be purblind if we said, as we might be tempted to do, that humanity is constantly unmaking what it makes. For, in different spheres and at different levels, both currents are in truth two aspects of the same process.

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

la antropología proclama que nada de lo humano puede ser ajeno al hombre.