Chapter 7 - Lévi-Strauss and the study of religions

Summary

As a teenager I was very intolerant on the subject [of religion]. Today, after studying and teaching the history of religions—all kinds of religions—I am more respectful than I was at eighteen or twenty. And besides, even if I remain deaf to religious answers, I am more and more penetrated by the feeling that the cosmos, and man's place in the universe, surpasses and always will surpass our understanding. It happens that I get along better with believers than with out-and-out rationalists. At least the first have a sense of mystery—a mystery that the mind, it seems to me, is inherently incapable of solving. One has to be satisfied with the fact that scientific knowledge nibbles tirelessly away at its edges. But I know of nothing more stimulating or enriching than to try to follow this knowledge as a layman, being all the while aware that every advance raises new problems and that the task is unending.

(Claude Lévi-Strauss, Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss)

Johnson (2003, 185) suggests that there is an “excess of cohesion” across Lévi-Strauss’ writings. Pace (1986, 10), by contrast, argues that Lévi-Strauss’ works can be separated into “a neo-positivist strain” and a second “humanistically oriented” corpus. In this book I have assumed the latter: we have dealt with Lévi-Strauss’ anthropological writings and political writings in separate chapters to bring out the contradictions between the “scientific” writings composed for a narrow audience of specialists on the one hand and, on the other, the writings with a strong political content aimed beyond a specialist, academic readership.