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Lévi-Strauss (third and final part)

15 Fevereiro 2024, 09:30 • Chiara Nifosi

Today, we discussed the third and final part of Lévi-Strauss' essay on race and history. After a short recap of the main points touched during the first two sessions (slides with a summary of these points are available in the Google Drive folder), we finished to comment on the imagery used by the author to convey his ideas on the perception of culture. In particular, we read and commented the passages where he draws a parallelism between cultural history and gambling. We mentioned in particular the idea of the "coalition of gamblers" as a way to convey the idea that progress is possible only through relations among cultures, while isolation hinders progress and gives back the impression of more static cultures.

Finally, we discussed the neutrality of Lévi-Strauss' writing: while he stigmatizes previous approaches to the study of cultures, namely the dependency of anthropology on biology and on discourses on race, he seems to maintain a Western perspective in the way he speaks of capitalism and colonialism as remedies to maintain and preserve diversity within a social group. We discussed whether these two endeavors can be reduced to such a reading of modern and recent history.