The original cultural commentator

by Neil Thomas
December 18th, 2009

As 2009 draws to a close, we can reflect on the life of Claude Levi-Strauss who died this year, aged 100 – a great French intellectual who has been called the Father of Modern Anthropology and described as a heavyweight thinker who didn’t take himself too seriously. We like that.

He was full of paradoxes, which didn’t seem to bother him at all. On the contrary, they inspired him to fresher thinking and increased his standing as a cultural leviathan.

Thorogood’s Speak the Culture project was something he would have approved of, surely! I’ll explain why.

For instance, he said “travel and travellers are two things I hate,” and in condemning guide books on Paris in the 1950s he said they were full of “insipid details, incidents of no significance” and were “compiled with an eye mainly for effect”. So, totally not like any of the Speak the Culture books then.

His work on Stucturalism, looking for the patterns underlying all human behaviour and then applying a structuralist approach to language, saw him revered as a man of letters, a philosopher and an anthropologist. He became a cultural icon and French presidents sought him out (and yes on his 100th birthday he was visited by President Sarkozy), hoping that some of his intellectual dust would settle on them.

He preferred research in the library to ‘field’ study, which he thought was “full of wasted time, hunger, exhaustion, illness and struggle” and that “the truths that we travel so far to seek are of value only when we have scraped them clean of all this fungus”. He was worried too that “cultural exchanges risked destroying diversity”.

Interestingly, he didn’t see the need to learn the language of the cultures he studied – when in Brazil he barely spoke the language of the Caduveo and Bororo Indians that he wrote about. He said (no doubt with a Gallic shrug), “why not admit it. I was fairly quick to discover that I was more man for the study than for the field”. In other words, you don’t have to speak the language to ‘speak the culture’. Exactly so.

Speak the Culture matches the Levi-Strauss criteria then: you can read the books and not have to travel; they celebrate cultural diversity; they draw out similar aspects of different cultures; they’re unlike the faulty guide books Levi-Strauss identified; you don’t have to speak the language to understand and explore the culture; and they are intellectual without taking themselves too seriously!