The Savage Mind

The Savage Mind is a 1962 book by Claude Lévi-Strauss that advanced structuralist anthropology and comparative analysis of thought across cultures. It situates Indigenous knowledge systems in the broader intellectual history alongside figures such as Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Bronisław Malinowski, Franz Boas, and Ruth Benedict. The work engaged with contemporaries and institutions like Cambridge University Press, Collège de France, Sorbonne University, Harvard University, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Overview and Context

Lévi-Strauss wrote during a period shaped by events and institutions such as World War II, the Cold War, the United Nations, NATO, and intellectual movements centered at École Normale Supérieure, École Pratique des Hautes Études, and the Institut Français d'Afrique Noire. The book dialogues with theorists including Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Jean Piaget, Claude Bernard, and Gaston Bachelard, and addresses ethnographic fieldwork traditions exemplified by Lewis Henry Morgan, Alfred Russel Wallace, James Frazer, and Edward Burnett Tylor. It emerged amid debates in journals associated with Éditions du Seuil, Cambridge University Press, Random House, and academic centers like University of Chicago and Columbia University.

Main Themes and Arguments

Lévi-Strauss contrasts "bricolage" and scientific engineering, invoking examples from cultures studied by Alfred Métraux, Marcel Griaule, Bronisław Malinowski, Ruth Benedict, and Franz Boas. He argues for structural universals that resonate with work by Noam Chomsky, Gottfried Leibniz, René Descartes, and Immanuel Kant, while challenging models proposed by John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and Leslie White. Themes connect to classificatory systems examined by Georges Cuvier, Carl Linnaeus, Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, and Gregor Mendel. Lévi-Strauss uses comparative case studies involving peoples and regions such as the Amazon Rainforest, Andes, Melanesia, Polynesia, and North America with field reports by William Bascom, Margaret Mead, Alfred Kroeber, Edward Sapir, and Claude Lévi-Strauss's own expeditions. The argument interacts with historiographical figures like Fernand Braudel, Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, and E. P. Thompson.

Methodology and Sources

The methodological stance synthesizes structural analysis, comparative philology, and ethnography, drawing on precedents from Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ferdinand de Saussure, Victor Turnbull, Roman Jakobson, G. W. F. Hegel, and Alexandre Kojève. Sources include field notes, mission reports from British Museum, archives of the Musée de l'Homme, collections at the American Museum of Natural History, and ethnographies published by Cambridge University Press, University of California Press, Oxford University Press, and Éditions du Seuil. Lévi-Strauss engages classificatory data akin to works by Alain Testart, Marshall Sahlins, Sidney Mintz, Eric Wolf, Clifford Geertz, and Mary Douglas. He employs analogy and binary oppositions in dialogue with theoretical contributions from Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Aron, and Erving Goffman.

Reception and Critique

Contemporary reception involved academics from Université de Paris, Harvard University, Princeton University, Yale University, and University of Oxford. Critics ranged from structuralists like Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan to critics including Marshall Sahlins, Clifford Geertz, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Stuart Hall, Edward Said, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Debates referenced methodologies practiced in departments such as Department of Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Department of Sociology, London School of Economics, and research centers like the Max Planck Society and the National Science Foundation. The book prompted responses in journals edited by T. S. Eliot, Victor Gollancz, and scholarly outlets connected to Princeton University Press and MIT Press.

Influence and Legacy

The work influenced subsequent scholars and institutions including Harvard University, Columbia University, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, London School of Economics, University of Chicago, Yale University, Princeton University, Stanford University, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution, Brookings Institution, and World Bank when addressing cultural policy. Intellectual heirs or interlocutors include Noam Chomsky, Claude Lévi-Strauss's contemporaries like Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Claude Lévi-Strauss's students, and later figures such as Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway, Marshall Sahlins, Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, Homi K. Bhabha, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Arjun Appadurai. Its concepts entered curricula at Sorbonne University, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Columbia University, New York University, University of California, Berkeley, Australian National University, and museums including the British Museum and Musée du quai Branly.

Category:Books in anthropology