Academic Autobiography (2f)—Tristes Tropiques

One year ago on Round and Square (2 October 2011)—Hurtin' Country: Untanglin' My Mind

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Academic Autobiography"

[a] Journeying RF

Click here for the other posts in this Round and Square series on Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques:

Tristes 1          Tristes 2          Tristes 3          Tristes 4          Tristes 5          Tristes 6

VI—An End to Journeying 

 At the very end of Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss—mired in the binary opposition between Islam and Christianity—contemplates the Buddha, specifically the Buddhist monasteries in Taxila. He begins with this sentence: "At Taxila, in Buddhist monasteries bristling with statues becasue of the influence of Greece, I was aware of the slim opportunity of remaining united which is open to our Old World; the schism is not complete. A different future is possible, the very future that Islam opposes by erecting its barrier between the West and the East, which, without it, would perhaps not have lost their attachment to the common ground in which their roots are set."[1]  Lévi-Strauss continues:

          What else, indeed, have I learned from the masters who taught me, 

          the philosophers I have read, the socieites I ahve visited and even from 

          that science which is the pride of the West, apart from a few scraps of 

          wisdom which, when laid end to end, coincide with the meditation of the 

          Sage at the foot of the tree? Every effort to understand destroys the 

          object in favour of another object of a different nature; this second 

          object requires from us a new effort which destroys it in favor of a third, 

          and so on and so forth until we reach the one lasting presence, the point 

          at which the distinction between meaning and the absence of meaning 

          disappears: the same point from which we began. It is 2,500 years since 

          men first discovered and formulated these truths In the interval, we have 

          found nothing new, except—as we have tried in turn all possible ways out 

          of the dilemma—so many additional proofs of the conclusion that we 

          should have liked to avoid.[2]

[b] Receptive RF

The anecdote lies at the heart of the “feminine” anthropology of receptivity that Lévi-Strauss espouses. We observe other peoples, other societies, distant from us in space, time (if documented in historical works) or both. All the historian or ethnographer can do, writes Lévi-Strauss, “is to enlarge a specific experience to the dimensions of a more general one, which becomes accessible as experience to men of another country or another epoch.” We must be disappointed, however, if we search for a resolution to the problem posed by Lévi-Strauss in Tristes tropiques. Lévi-Strauss quite persuasively argues that merely physical escape from the confines of Western civilization is irrelevant to the problem.

          Our great Western civilization, which has created the marvels we now 
          enjoy, has only succeeded in producing them at the cost of corresponding 
          ills. The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous 
          achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of a complexity as yet 
          unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious 
          mass of noxious by-products that now contaminate the globe. The first 
          thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into 
          the face of mankind.[3]

Lévi-Strauss’s critique of Western society (and the masculinity of its historical development) is devastating; yet he points a path toward regaining receptivity to those same societies that the West has tarnished—especially those closer to their “origins”—through a carefully planned ethnographic method. It is as though, following his observations on Rousseau’s work, we have left the ruins left by worldwide “monoculture” for the “ample structure” of an anthropologie anecdotique. Yet the secret, the revelation of how we are to put it all back together, is nowhere adequately treated in Tristes tropiques or Lévi-Strauss’s later works. Lévi-Strauss pointed a way for the West to restore its receptive, feminine nature, but left for others the revelation of its integration.

Click here for the other posts in this Round and Square series on Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques:

Tristes 1          Tristes 2          Tristes 3          Tristes 4          Tristes 5          Tristes 6

[c] End RF

Notes 
[1] Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropique [Translated by John and Doreen Weightman] (New York: Penguin Classics, 2012), 406.
[2] Tristes Tropiques, 411.
[3] Tristes Tropiques, 37-38.

Bibliography

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques [Translated by John and Doreen Weightman]. New York: Penguin Classics, 2012.