conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled Claude Levi-Strauss about Claude, Levi-Strauss with the genre: Biographies & Memoirs, Arts & Literature.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In this lucid guide to the often abstruse works of Claude Levi-Strauss, the author synthesizes the thought of one of the twentieth century's greatest anthropologists and provides a thoughtful introduction to the theory and practice of structuralism.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first three paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Claude Levi-Strauss
  Anthropologists were but another aspect of Western expansion, their very presence a sign that the rot had already set in. By the time Lévi-Strauss's team had reached the Nambikwara, they were already cooking their meals in rusty jerry cans dumped by local motorboat operators. (Look closely at Lévi-Strauss's photographs of the Nambikwara and, in among the bows and arrows, gourds and woven baskets, there is also an assortment of smaller tins, planks of wood, bottles and enamel plates.) Lévi-Strauss found himself "caught within a circle from which there is no escape." Centuries before, in a more diverse, culturally atomized world, travelers were exposed to untold riches, but through ignorance responded with indifference or active prejudice. Now, just as greater contact and interpenetration have opened these worlds up to us, they are disintegrating before our eyes, like parchments turning to dust in our hands.
  For Lévi-Strauss, these designs were not merely aesthetic inventions, passed down and perfected through the generations. They were subconscious meditations on structures found in traditional Caduveo social organization. This culture, a highly stratified system of intermarrying castes, which Lévi-Strauss compared to medieval European society, was in mourning for the loss of reciprocity to hierarchy, solidarity to division. The fissures and contradictions of their rigid social systems found expression in the subtle imbalances of the designs' alternating motifs. Caduveo art was in the last instance "a phantasm of society" expressing, at a subconscious level, the unease, the anxieties, the conflicts involved in being Caduveo.
  At the end of this strange yet somehow compelling analysis, Lévi-Strauss went one step further: parallels could be drawn between the formal properties of Caduveo art and Bororo hut plans. Although less dysfunctional than the Caduveo, the Bororo system had its own partially unresolved contradictions. It too was at once balanced and unstable, with its complicated combination of dual and tripartite social groupings. Lévi-Strauss's broader theoretical point was that structural echoes could be found in many aspects of social and cultural life—art, metaphysics, social systems, even the positioning of huts in a village. Again and again the human mind threw up similar relationships across domains that at first glance seemed completely unconnected.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Although Lévi-Strauss was only three years younger than Sartre, there was a sense that a generational shift was under way, a rupture of both style and substance. Power was passing from a chain-smoking, pill-popping haunter of Left Bank café society to a sixteenth-arrondissement aesthete. Pitted against the image of the grandstanding intellectual was the sober technician, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu recalled in an interview in the 1980s:
  It is true that philosophers like Sartre are still admirable and perhaps also important: the person who speaks when no one knows what to say—in times of crisis, etc.—but at the same time we were a bit tired of that kind of discourse, as prophets can also speak in the void, at the wrong time. So someone [that is, Lévi-Strauss] telling us, "See, we can understand, we can analyze, there are conceptual tools to understand things that seemed incomprehensible, unjustifiable, absurd"—I think that that was a very important thing.
  The promise of scientifically based humanities over philosophical rhetoric—though in reality Lévi-Strauss mixed both with abandon—was potent for young thinkers searching for a foothold in what had become a highly politicized activity. Technical terminology of "signs," "signifiers" and "oppositions," which had been road tested in linguistics, a discipline with true scientific pretensions, seemed more concrete than the interpretive terms from German philosophy like "ontotheology," "Dasein" and "noema" that they replaced. Like logical positivism after the First World War, structuralism offered to clean up philosophy, rid it of its vagueness and solipsistic reflections; but unlike logical positivism, it was built not on empiricism, but on high rationalism.
  THE PHILOSOPHICAL TIDE was turning. Once more, a clear choice was opening up between what writer and philosopher Alain Badiou defined as the two branches of twentieth-century French thought: the Bergsonian philosophy of "vital interiority, a thesis on the identity of being and becoming," and the Brunschvicgian philosophy of "the mathematically based concept"—or theories which took subjective experience as their point of departure as opposed to theories which looked at relationships between objects and concepts in the world. One sought meaning; the other, form. Lévi-Straussian structuralism, unambiguously pitched at the formal end of the spectrum, represented a radical break from the post- World War II orthodoxy.
  WHEN LÉVI-STRAUSS FIRST TURNED his attention to the analysis of myth in the 1950s, he envisaged a machine—a "special device"—consisting of a series of upright boards two meters long and one and a half meters high on which cards containing mythic elements could be "pigeon-holed and moved at will." As the analysis moved into three dimensions, the cards would need to be perforated and fed through IBM equipment. The whole operation would require a substantial atelier, along with a team of dedicated technicians working to divine the "genetic law of the myth."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Power was passing from a chain-smoking, pill-popping haunter of Left Bank café society to a sixteenth-arrondissement aesthete. Pitted against the image of the grandstanding intellectual was the sober technician, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu recalled in an interview in the 1980s:
  It is true that philosophers like Sartre are still admirable and perhaps also important: the person who speaks when no one knows what to say—in times of crisis, etc.—but at the same time we were a bit tired of that kind of discourse, as prophets can also speak in the void, at the wrong time. So someone [that is, Lévi-Strauss] telling us, "See, we can understand, we can analyze, there are conceptual tools to understand things that seemed incomprehensible, unjustifiable, absurd"—I think that that was a very important thing.
  The promise of scientifically based humanities over philosophical rhetoric—though in reality Lévi-Strauss mixed both with abandon—was potent for young thinkers searching for a foothold in what had become a highly politicized activity. Technical terminology of "signs," "signifiers" and "oppositions," which had been road tested in linguistics, a discipline with true scientific pretensions, seemed more concrete than the interpretive terms from German philosophy like "ontotheology," "Dasein" and "noema" that they replaced. Like logical positivism after the First World War, structuralism offered to clean up philosophy, rid it of its vagueness and solipsistic reflections; but unlike logical positivism, it was built not on empiricism, but on high rationalism.
  THE PHILOSOPHICAL TIDE was turning. Once more, a clear choice was opening up between what writer and philosopher Alain Badiou defined as the two branches of twentieth-century French thought: the Bergsonian philosophy of "vital interiority, a thesis on the identity of being and becoming," and the Brunschvicgian philosophy of "the mathematically based concept"—or theories which took subjective experience as their point of departure as opposed to theories which looked at relationships between objects and concepts in the world. One sought meaning; the other, form. Lévi-Straussian structuralism, unambiguously pitched at the formal end of the spectrum, represented a radical break from the post- World War II orthodoxy.
  WHEN LÉVI-STRAUSS FIRST TURNED his attention to the analysis of myth in the 1950s, he envisaged a machine—a "special device"—consisting of a series of upright boards two meters long and one and a half meters high on which cards containing mythic elements could be "pigeon-holed and moved at will." As the analysis moved into three dimensions, the cards would need to be perforated and fed through IBM equipment. The whole operation would require a substantial atelier, along with a team of dedicated technicians working to divine the "genetic law of the myth."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Lévi-Strauss lived long enough to see his worst fears realized—the inexorable rise of the world's population, the wanton destruction of the environment, the wiping out of cultures that had taken millennia to develop and that he had spent his whole life trying to decipher. "This is not the world I knew, I liked, or can still conceive of," he said in old age, surveying contemporary realities. "For me it's an incomprehensible world."
  Montaigne said that aging diminishes us each day in a way that, when death finally arrives, it takes away only a quarter of half of the man. But Montaigne only lived to be fifty-nine, so he could have no idea of the extreme old age I find myself in today. At this great age that I never thought I would attain, I feel like a shattered hologram.
  His hundredth birthday was celebrated across the world, but especially in France. President Nicolas Sarkozy visited him at his apartment; Arte, the Franco-German television station, devoted a day's programming to him, with France 3 featuring a live television debate between the young Columbia professor of French Vincent Debaene, one of the editors of the Pléiade edition, and the eighty-year-old anthropologist and longtime Lévi-Strauss critic Georges Balandier—one of the few dissenting voices on a day of effusive eulogies. Entrance was free for the day at the Musée du quai Branly, where a hundred scholars gathered in the Lévi-Strauss Auditorium to pay homage. By now confined to a wheelchair after breaking his femur, Lévi-Strauss did not appear publicly, but said that he felt there was little to celebrate about reaching such a morbid milestone. It is hard to imagine a similar outpouring for an intellectual, let alone an anthropologist, in America or Britain. But in France, Lévi-Strauss fit into a long tradition of the literary-philosophical thinker who has always occupied a special place in the soul of a nation.
  A public funeral for such a revered intellectual figure would have attracted a grand procession through the streets of Paris, ending in a burial thronged by the great and good—politicians, intellectuals, students, as well as thousands of ordinary members of the public paying their respects to the last giant of mid-twentieth-century thought. But this was not Lévi-Strauss's style. By the time the news of his death broke, he had already been buried in a small cemetery near his château in Lignerolles. The ceremony was attended by close family—his wife, Monique, his two sons, Laurent and Matthieu, and two grandsons, along with the mayor of the town, Denis Cornibert. His last wishes were to be lowered into the grave in total silence. "That wasn't easy," recalled Cornibert. A simple gold plaque reading CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS—1908-2009 sits on the gravel burial mound. A stone's throw away from this bare grave are the forests where, in summers gone by, Lévi-Strauss would go out walking in the afternoons, hunting for wild mushrooms, bundling them into his scarf as he went.
  I am grateful for a research grant from The Society of Authors, which funded one of my trips to France. A traveling fellowship from the Winston Churchill Trust gave me the opportunity to visit the region where Lévi-Strauss carried out his fieldwork. Special thanks go to Alfeu França for enduring a five-thousand-kilometer drive along the potholed roads of the Brazilian central west during this trip. In Mato Grosso, my thanks go to Ivar Busatto, Anna Maria and José Eduardo da Costa and João dal Poz.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Claude Levi-Strauss
  What won over readers beyond the confines of anthropology was Lévi-Strauss's conversational style, his literary prowess and his moving descriptions of the indigenous peoples he studied. Lévi-Strauss has been much criticised for the brevity of his fieldwork—and indeed, a few snatched months of observation, captured through an interpreter via Portuguese, could hardly measure up to the kind of in-depth ethnography that was already being produced by British and American anthropologists. But Tristes Tropiques gave us something else: not the dry inventories found in conventional ethnographies, but a kind of immediacy—the vivid first impressions of each encounter. From the beguiling passages on the Caduveo's body art—repeat patterns of arabesques, coils and volutes stencilled across the women's faces as if they were 'peering out from behind a complicated ornamental screen'—to the descriptions of Bororo men smeared with vegetable dye and decorated with shells, palm fronds and feathers, Lévi-Strauss brought the reader in close. Of the many groups Lévi-Strauss encountered, it was the seminomadic groups of Nambikwara which left the deepest impression on the young anthropologist, as he accompanied them filing across the savannah 'like a column of ants'. Virtually naked, wearing only nose feathers, bracelets and waistbands, clustered together around their night fires, Lévi-Strauss found in these vulnerable groups what he described as 'the most truthful and moving expression of human tenderness' (p. 293).7
  Lévi-Strauss was on a journey that was as much mental and sensual as physical. So vivid are some of the descriptions of sounds, smells and tastes that Lévi-Strauss has been not implausibly likened to a Symbolist poet. From his fantasies of the burning perfumes of the tropics (an association he later described, in an allusion to Proust, as coming from the similarities between the words 'Brésil' and 'grésiller' [to sizzle]); to descriptions of his sensations as he caught the scent of forest, fruit and tobacco, drifting off the Brazilian landmass out into the ocean, Tristes Tropiques is alive to the senses. In the field he jotted down tasting notes from the tropics, including the thirteen different flavours of honey that the Nambikwara gathered, whose aromas he likened to bouquets of burgundy, and detailed appreciations of exotic fruits. The araca had 'a turpentine taste with a fizz of faint acidity', crushed açaí produced a 'thick raspberry-flavoured syrup' and the bacuri was 'like a pear stolen from the orchards of Paradise'. As he breathed in the chocolate aromas of decaying leaf litter, he wondered how soil produces cocoa, and how the gravelly earth of Haute-Provence could beget both the floral scent of lavender and the pungency of truffles. Incomprehensible native languages became natural sounds: the Caduveo's abundance of liquid phonemes 'give the impression of a stream leaping over pebbles', he wrote; stress patterns of Munde speech were like 'clashing cymbals' in contrast to the 'muted', 'aspirated or whispered' (p. 279) tones of the Nambikwara dialects.
  Lévi-Strauss's fears for his faltering career proved unfounded. Far from condemning him to obscurity, Tristes Tropiques provided the platform for his academic career that would flourish in the 1960s. Its first imprint sold sixty thousand copies, and established him as a leading thinker. After finally being admitted to the Collège de France in 1959, he would produce his finest academic work and achieve global fame with structuralism, a theory which sought to establish a kind of deep grammar of culture, analogous to the work then being done in structural linguistics. Tristes Tropiques was the literary rendering of structuralism; in the 1960s and 70s the arguments would be hammered out in a drier, academic prose. Although he would never again return to the genre, it is impossible to dissociate the tone and style of Tristes Tropiques from his later academic works, such as La pensée sauvage (The Savage Mind) and the Mythologiques quartet.
  Tristes Tropiques has gone on to become a landmark in anthropology, not just in France but also in the United States. Lévi-Strauss's literary turn and confessional approach would be much imitated in the 1960s and 70s, as the wheel came full circle and anthropologists abandoned pretences to truly objective description in favour of what has since been called the 'reflexive' ethnography. The impossibility of absolute objectivity in any scientific enterprise, acutely felt in the social sciences, had brought ethnographers face-to-face with a philosophical dilemma, something that Lévi-Strauss only grasped after the fact:
  For this reason, he wrote in the concluding pages of Tristes Tropiques, his own discipline anthropology should be renamed 'entropology' (p. 414) since it was really studying a process of decay ending in a sterile uniformity, akin to what cosmologists have dubbed 'heat death', when all temperature differentials are evened out and the universe enters a period of prolonged, perhaps eternal, stasis.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Yet there was no real jollity. The diamond-yielding gravel was becoming exhausted, and the region was infested with malaria, leshmaniosis and hookworm. A few years before, yellow fever had made its appearance. Two or three lorries at most now journeyed along the track every month, as against four per week in the old days.
  How we got through I do not know; the journey remains in my memory as a confused nightmare: pitching camp interminably in order to overcome a few yards of arduous terrain, loading and unloading, halts where we were so exhausted through shifting the logs to the front of the lorry every time it managed to move a length forward that we fell asleep on the ground, only to be awakened in the middle of the night by a rumbling which came from the bowels of the earth: the termites were rising to the surface to attack our clothes and were already swarming over the outsides of the rubber capes we used as mackintoshes and ground-sheets. Finally, one morning our lorry moved down towards the São Lourenço, which could be located by the dense valley mist. Feeling that we had accomplished a great feat, we announced our approach with much blowing of the horn. Yet not a child came to meet us. We emerged on to the bank among four or five silent huts. There was no one, not a sign of life anywhere, and a quick look round convinced us that the hamlet had been abandoned.
  Somewhat frayed after the previous days' efforts, we began to lose heart, and wondered whether we should not give up. Before going back, we decided to make one last attempt. Each of us would set off in a given direction and explore the surrounding area. Towards evening we returned, only to report failure, except for the driver who had discovered a fisherman and his family and had brought the man back with him. The latter, bearded and with an unhealthily white skin, as if he had spent too much time in the river, explained that yellow fever had struck six months before, and that the survivors had scattered. But upstream we would still find one or two people and an extra canoe. He would be pleased to accompany us, because for months he and his family had lived entirely on fish caught in the river. He would obtain manioc and tobacco plants from the Indians, and we would give him a little money. On these terms he could also guarantee the co-operation of the other canoeist, whom we would pick up on the way.
  A few hours later, we moored alongside a clayey bank, above which we could see the huts. Half a dozen naked men, painted red with urucu from the tips of their toes to the roots of their hair, greeted us with bursts of laughter, as they helped us to disembark and carried our belongings. We found ourselves in a large hut which housed several families; the village chief had cleared a corner for our use; during our stay he himself would live on the other side of the river.
  In what order should one describe those profound and confused impressions which assail the traveller when he first arrives in a village where the native culture has remained comparatively untouched? In visiting the Caingang and the Caduveo, whose hamlets are similar to those of the neighbouring peasants, and notable for their extreme wretchedness, the initial reaction is one of weariness and discouragement. When one is faced with a society which is still alive and faithful to its traditions, the impact is so powerful that one is quite taken aback: which strand in the multicoloured skein should one first try to unwind and disentangle? In thinking back to the Bororo, with whom I had my first experience of this kind, I rediscover feelings which assailed me again during the most recent such experience, in a Kuki village on the Burmese frontier, when I reached the summit of a high hill, after hours spent scrambling on all fours up slopes which had been transformed into slippery mud by the unceasing monsoon rains: physical exhaustion, hunger, thirst and mental confusion, certainly; but the organic giddiness was shot through with perceptions of forms and colours: the houses were majestic in size in spite of their fragility, and were the result of the utilization of materials and techniques which we in the West are acquainted with in small-scale forms: they were not so much built as knotted together, plaited, woven, embroidered and mellowed by use; instead of crushing the occupants under an indifferent mass of stones, they adapted to their presence and their movements; they were the opposite of our houses in that they remained always subordinate to man. The village rose round its occupants like a light, flexible suit of armour, closer to Western women's hats than to Western towns; it was a monumental adornment retaining something of the living bowers and foliage whose natural gracefulness the builders had skilfully reconciled with the rigorous demands of their plan.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The village rose round its occupants like a light, flexible suit of armour, closer to Western women's hats than to Western towns; it was a monumental adornment retaining something of the living bowers and foliage whose natural gracefulness the builders had skilfully reconciled with the rigorous demands of their plan.. When one is faced with a society which is still alive and faithful to its traditions, the impact is so powerful that one is quite taken aback: which strand in the multicoloured skein should one first try to unwind and disentangle? In thinking back to the Bororo, with whom I had my first experience of this kind, I rediscover feelings which assailed me again during the most recent such experience, in a Kuki village on the Burmese frontier, when I reached the summit of a high hill, after hours spent scrambling on all fours up slopes which had been transformed into slippery mud by the unceasing monsoon rains: physical exhaustion, hunger, thirst and mental confusion, certainly; but the organic giddiness was shot through with perceptions of forms and colours: the houses were majestic in size in spite of their fragility, and were the result of the utilization of materials and techniques which we in the West are acquainted with in small-scale forms: they were not so much built as knotted together, plaited, woven, embroidered and mellowed by use; instead of crushing the occupants under an indifferent mass of stones, they adapted to their presence and their movements; they were the opposite of our houses in that they remained always subordinate to man.
  In what order should one describe those profound and confused impressions which assail the traveller when he first arrives in a village where the native culture has remained comparatively untouched? In visiting the Caingang and the Caduveo, whose hamlets are similar to those of the neighbouring peasants, and notable for their extreme wretchedness, the initial reaction is one of weariness and discouragement. We found ourselves in a large hut which housed several families; the village chief had cleared a corner for our use; during our stay he himself would live on the other side of the river. Half a dozen naked men, painted red with urucu from the tips of their toes to the roots of their hair, greeted us with bursts of laughter, as they helped us to disembark and carried our belongings.
  A few hours later, we moored alongside a clayey bank, above which we could see the huts. On these terms he could also guarantee the co-operation of the other canoeist, whom we would pick up on the way. He would obtain manioc and tobacco plants from the Indians, and we would give him a little money. He would be pleased to accompany us, because for months he and his family had lived entirely on fish caught in the river. But upstream we would still find one or two people and an extra canoe. The latter, bearded and with an unhealthily white skin, as if he had spent too much time in the river, explained that yellow fever had struck six months before, and that the survivors had scattered. Towards evening we returned, only to report failure, except for the driver who had discovered a fisherman and his family and had brought the man back with him. Each of us would set off in a given direction and explore the surrounding area. Before going back, we decided to make one last attempt.
  Somewhat frayed after the previous days' efforts, we began to lose heart, and wondered whether we should not give up. There was no one, not a sign of life anywhere, and a quick look round convinced us that the hamlet had been abandoned. We emerged on to the bank among four or five silent huts. Yet not a child came to meet us. Feeling that we had accomplished a great feat, we announced our approach with much blowing of the horn. Finally, one morning our lorry moved down towards the São Lourenço, which could be located by the dense valley mist.
  How we got through I do not know; the journey remains in my memory as a confused nightmare: pitching camp interminably in order to overcome a few yards of arduous terrain, loading and unloading, halts where we were so exhausted through shifting the logs to the front of the lorry every time it managed to move a length forward that we fell asleep on the ground, only to be awakened in the middle of the night by a rumbling which came from the bowels of the earth: the termites were rising to the surface to attack our clothes and were already swarming over the outsides of the rubber capes we used as mackintoshes and ground-sheets. Two or three lorries at most now journeyed along the track every month, as against four per week in the old days. A few years before, yellow fever had made its appearance. The diamond-yielding gravel was becoming exhausted, and the region was infested with malaria, leshmaniosis and hookworm.Yet there was no real jollity
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: North American Indians, 60; death and afterlife, ideas on, 232, 233, 241; decorative designs, 189, 190; Plains, 388; puberty ordeals, 39–40; South American cultures related to, 253–260
  São Paulo, 90, 94–105; population growth, 112; social life, 99–103; towns near, 109–111; University, 21, 37, 47, 102–105
  São Paulo (state), 93, 111–119; Germans, 109; Indians, 49, 109; Japanese, 109–110; rebellion (1924), 262
  Tupi Indians, 84, 116, 153, 334–335, 344, 346, 351, 353, 372; Cabahiba group, 335; Mundurucu group, 335; Paranawat group, 334, 336; Parintintin group, 335, 348; Takwatip group, 334, 335
  Tupi-Kawahib Indians, 325, 334–337, 343–360, 364; artifacts, 350; chief, role of, 354–358; chief's song and trance, 311, 359–360; clans, 354; games, 358; houses, 347–348; music and dancing, 358; names, 353–354; ornaments and clothing, 349–350; polygamy, 353–356; wall-paintings, 347–348