Lévi-Strauss on the Oedipus Myth: A Reconsideration

The first half of the article presents a critique of Lévi-Strauss' well-known analysis of the Oedipus myth. A consideration of Greek beliefs suggests that Lévi-Strauss is incorrect in tying certain events in that myth to the "overvaluation of blood relations" and in asserting that the myth is concerned with the "affirmation/denial of man's autochthonous origins." The second half of the article presents a different structural analysis of the entire Theban Saga, of which the Oedipus myth is but a part. It concludes (1) that Lévi-Strauss is correct in identifying a series of events in the myth which indicate the devaluation of blood relations, but that these events specifically refer to the devaluation of patrilineal kin ties and that the range of events indicating the devaluation of patrilineal ties is broader than his analysis would suggest, and (2) there is another series of repeated events (unmentioned by Lévi-Strauss) which indicates the affirmation of patrilineal kin ties. The final hypothesis— that the opposition between the devaluation/affirmation of patrilineal kin ties underlies the Theban Saga— "makes sense" in terms of Greek history, as the period in which the Olympian myths look their present form is also the period in which the Greeks moved from a society organized along patrilineal kin ties to one organized around allegiance to the polis. [structuralism, Oedipus myth, myth and social structure, Lévi-Strauss, anthropological theory]     

The Ideological Bases of Lévi-Strauss's Structuralism

It is clear that Lévi-Strauss combines in his writings, and often inextricably, the roles of anthropologist (read scientist) and philosopher (read ideologist). This rather unusual combination of anthropological and philosophical dimensions of Lévi-Strauss's thought is the result of two tendencies that often seem to be pulling in different directions: his scientific conception of socio-cultural phenomena (or the delineation of a scientific method for harnessing human behavior under the rubric of sociological laws), on the one hand, and his conception of what society should be (or the ideological statement of what constitutes a "good sociological life"), on the other. In order to understand the nature of structuralism and Lévi-Strauss's contributions to anthropological theory and practice, these two aspects of his thought must be clearly distinguished. This is what I hope to accomplish in this article.     

Reconstructing the House in Anthropology

About the House: Lévi-Strauss and Beyond. Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones
African Nomadic Architecture: Space, Place and Gender. Labelle Prussin, with Amina Adan, Peter A. Andrews, Arlene Fullerton, Anders Grum, and Uta Holter     

Kinship vis-à-vis Myth Contrasts in Lévi-Strauss' Approaches to Cross-Cultural Comparison

The enormous secondary literature which relates Lévi-Strauss' comparative studies to different schools of thought has failed sufficiently to emphasize the major discontinuity within his own work. This paper characterizes the basic methodological differences in his approaches to "kinship" and to "myth." It then suggests how, by concentrating on the kinship/myth distinction, we might constructively refine various structuralist concepts, such as distinctive feature analysis and the logical foundations of the "elementary" kinship structures. Only by concentrating on the few inconsistencies in Lévi-Strauss' remarkably coherent corpus of work can an adequate critique of his theories of comparison be commenced.     

Physical Anthropology

Book reviewed in this article:
The Roots of Prejudice. Arnold Rose.
Racial Myths. Juan Comas.
Race and Psychology. Otto Klineberg.
Race and Culture. Michel Leiris.
Race and Biology. L. C. Dunn.
The Significance of Racial Differences. G. M. Morant.
Race and History. Claude Lévi-Strauss.     

The Logic of Misplaced Concreteness: Paiela Body Counting and the Nature of the Primitive Mind

The paper has two goals: to demonstrate ethnographically the connection between "structure" and communication, which Lévi-Strauss has consistently alleged to exist, and to challenge the thesis of Hallpike's book , The Foundations of Primitive Thought, that primitive thought reflects an "incomplete," unsophisticated logic .
The paper focuses on the counting system of the Paiela, a highland Papua New Guinea group. It argues that Paiela counting behavior is best analyzed as an element in a complex communication process. The logic of Paiela counting behavior is then the logic of the encompassing process: a communicational logic founded on concepts such as information and pattern. According to some theorists, the relationship between this logic and the logic that informs Western science is metalogical and dualistic. Paiela thought is thus revealed to be based on a complete and sophisticated alternative logic, a science among sciences. [Papua New Guinea, counting behavior, communication]     

The Oedipus Complex, Antigone, and Electra: The Woman as Hero and Victim

This paper reinterprets the structural interpretation of Greek mythology presented by Leach and Lévi-Strauss from a feminist perspective. The reinterpretation approaches the Oedipus myth and Freud's analysis of it from the perspective of Antigone, daughter of Oedipus and a hero of Sophoclean tragedy. Ancient Greek tragedy allowed a few mythic women the role of hero, although women in ancient Greek society were confined to the domestic sphere. The paper discusses Antigone, Electra, and other mythic women in their relations to family and the public domain. The interpretation of Greek mythology differs from previous ones but is not inconsistent with them, [mythology, gender roles, Oedipus complex, myth and social structure, structuralism]     

Revisiting Hrdlička and Boas: Asymmetries of Race and Anti-Imperialism in Interwar Anthropology

ABSTRACT  Physical anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička is often remembered as an institutional and political opponent of Franz Boas and as an advocate of racial typology against which the Boasian antiracialist position in American anthropology developed. I argue that Hrdlička nonetheless also has more subtle lessons to offer about the political limits of Boasian antiracism. Examining Hrdlička's engagement with the politics of Europe and East Asia from the 1920s to the 1940s, particularly with the intellectual grounding of Japanese imperialism, I suggest that he was perhaps uniquely cognizant of a "second problem of race in the world"—the racist assimilationism of the Japanese empire—vis-à-vis the Boasian grasp of race, rooted in a response to U.S. and Nazi racisms, as a category of invidious difference. Moreover, I contend that the lacuna that Hrdlička helps us identify has continued to haunt the discipline at certain key moments of Boasian critique of other ideological forces.     

The Effectiveness of Shamans in an Indonesian Ritual

Healing is the ostensible purpose of the mabolong, a shamanic ceremony of the Wana of Sulawesi , Indonesia. But the ritual serves political ends as well by providing an arena for performers to establish and maintain their reputations as shamans. Shamans' attempts to attract and to hold an audience can eclipse their efforts to heal. In light of this dynamic, the ritual's therapeutic potential for patients can be considered only when its symbolic and dramatic appeal for an entire community is understood. The interplay of symbolism, drama, and therapy is examined with special reference to theories of ritual and catharsis proposed by Lévi-Strauss and T. J. Scheff.     

Corsets,Culture and Contingency: Reflections on Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock1

This article turns an anthropological sensitivity onto a literary text from its own society. It takes Joan Lindsay's novel ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ and ‘reads’ it in the light of ideas prominent in recent anthropological writings (the ideas of Lévi-Strauss are particularly used): it also articulates an interpretation by using notions current in modern literary and cultural analysis. The article points out that Lindsay's text has most commonly been interpreted as being about mysterious natural forces injurious to man. Whilst the text explores the disjunction between nature and culture, the article interprets the text as exploring the nature of cultural institutions and cultural processes.     

Distributive Models of Culture: A Sapirian Alternative to Essentialism

The Boasian conception of culture has been roundly criticized in recent years for its essentialist, or even racist, implications. Yet an alternative model that avoids these implications was proposed in the 1930s by Boas student Edward Sapir. Having long survived on the margins of anthropological theory, Sapir's "distributive" concept of culture is now entering the theoretical mainstream through recent developments in both psychological and "postmodernist" anthropology.
By emphasizing the full range of variation within any so-called culture, anthropologists have begun to apply the same style of population thinking that helped launch the Darwinian revolution in biology.     

The Promise of Particularism and the Theology of Culture: Limits and Lessons of "Neo-Boasianism"

This article compares the status of "culture" as a politically engaged concept in Franz Boas's time and in our own time. Taking a Boasian approach to "neo-Boasianism," I examine the limits of this comparability in order to shed light on the nature of public culture-talk today and to identify dimensions of the Boasian concept of "culture" particularly relevant to a contemporary anthropology.     

A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries

For the past 30 years, anthropology's critics have repeatedly questioned the notion of "cultural boundaries," arguing that concepts of culture inappropriately posit stable and bounded "islands" of cultural distinctiveness in an ever-changing world of transnational cultural "flows." This issue remains an Achilles' heel—or at least a recurring inflamed tendon—of anthropology. However, in the conception of boundaries, we still have much to learn from Boasian anthropologists, who conceived of boundaries not as barriers to outside influence or to historical change, but as cultural distinctions that were irreducibly plural, perspectival, and permeable. In this article, I retheorize and extend the Boasians' open concept of cultural boundaries, emphasizing how people's own ideas of "the foreign"—and the "own" versus the "other" distinction—give us a way out of the old conundrum in which the boundedness of culture, as conceived in spatial terms, seems to contradict the open-ended nature of cultural experience.     

Myth, Memory, and the Oral Tradition: Cicero in the Trobriands

In nonliterate societies, myths are often linked to specific geographical locations. Using Malinowski's Trobriand material and taking a lead from Cicero's De oratore, it is argued that spatial location functions (1) as a mnemonic device for the recall of a corpus of myth, (2) as a structural marker dividing a corpus into separate thinkable units, and (3) as a means of restricting social change at least temporarily to specific institutions. Malinowski's instrumental theory of myth is contrasted with the cognitive theory advanced by LéviStrauss, and certain didactic functions of myth are also discussed . [myth, memory, oral tradition, social space, Trobriands]     

Boas, Foucault, and the "Native Anthropologist": Notes toward a Neo-Boasian Anthropology

This article proposes the possibility of a neo-Boasian anthropology conceived at the intersection of Foucauldian genealogy, Boasian historicism, and the epistemic rethinking of the discipline's Self/Other binary. Shifting from a perspective of posing the ethnographic object as Other toward a Boasian conception of the past as the principal site of inquiry, the piece thus advocates an anthropological project grounded in the history of the present. This conception, it is argued, can overcome several of the dilemmas currently facing the discipline, the awkward status of "native anthropology" foremost among them.     

T. S. Eliot, Anthropologist and Primitive

T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), a poet of genius, closely followed developments in the social sciences. From the viewpoint of early modern anthropology, important features of his poems resemble the qualities of the "primitive mentality" conjectured by Lévy-Bruhl, whose work (along with Tylor's, Frazer's, Wundt's, Durkheim's, and Rivers') Eliot carefully and critically studied. To recover fundamental cultural unities, Eliot became, in effect, a philosophical anthropologist and, in poetry, a quasi-primitive as well . [anthropology and literature, history of anthropology, T. S. Eliot, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl]     

Houses of Worship in Central Sulawesi: Precedence,Hierarchy & Class in the Development of House Ideology

The social and cultural complexity of the central portion of the island of Sulawesi was well documented by missionary ethnographers at the end of the nineteenth century. Drawing on this extensive corpus of historical material, I sketch out a comparative framework for the analysis of the development of House ideology there. The six coastal kingdoms that encompassed the highlands of central Sulawesi were politically organised in Houses, a kinship strategy first proposed by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Here, I examine the factors that encouraged (or discouraged) the transformation of highland temples associated with headhunting (lobo) into the majestic Houses of aristocrats like the Tongkonan still seen in Tana Toraja. This comparative analysis points to the different political tensions created by the distinct systems of precedence, hierarchy and class in the dualistic Founders’ Cult found across the island as the source of this transformation.     

On the Taxonomic Status of the Family Pfeifferinellidae (Coccidia), with a Description of Pfeifferinella gugleri sp. n.

SYNOPSIS. Pfeifferinella gugleri sp. n. was found in the liver of each of 2 land snails, Triodopsis albolabris (Say), in Iowa. The stages found, their average length × width dimensions (in μm), and their principal features were as follows: oocysts (21 × 14.5) ovoid, with micropyle and oocyst residuum; meronts (20 × 15) with 24–32 merozoites: microgametocytes (15 × 11.5) with many small microgametes; macrogametes (20 × 10.5) with 1–5 nucleoli and 1–2 wall-forming bodies, but without a "vaginal [fertilization] tube." This tube, originally described by Léger & Hollande, 1912, from Pfeifferinella impudica , has since been considered a principal taxonomic feature of the family Pfeifferinellidae. In the absence of this structure, the taxonomic status of this monogeneric family is reexamined with the recommendation that the family be retained as distinct, but redefined to exclude the "vaginal tube" as a valid characteristic. The discovery of P. gugleri brings to 3 the number of pfeifferinellids reported, the other 2 being P. impudica Léger & Hollande, 1912, and P. ellipsoides Wasielewski, 1904, all from gastropods.     

Critical implications of Franz Boas'theory and methodology

The Grand Scheme of unilinear evolution as it was developed in the nineteenth century, placing Western European and American civilization at the pinnacle of humanity, was vigorously attacked by the Boasian school, and the theory of cultural relativism was forged in the heat of many long theoretical battles in the discipline. Simultaneously, the Boas school attacked the fundamental tenets of white supremacy by showing with solid empirical studies that race, language and culture were not coextensive entities and that there was no innate racial inheritance guaranteeing the white man's natural right (or duty) to rule.The attack on race prejudice and ethnocentrism, however, never led to an allout attack on exploitation of subject peoples, to an interest in the modes or oppression and their cultural consequences, or even to scholarly acknowledgement of the fact of exploitation. In fact, the Boas school never showed any real interest in studying thesituation of conquest and exploitation as such.     

Lateral and Vertical Transfer in Biology,Linguistics and Anthropology: An Account of Widely Neglected Ideas in the Formation of Evolutionary Theories

The scope of this paper is to highlight models of reticulate evolution in a dual sense: (1) by stressing the importance of early models of horizontal/lateral transfer instead of models of unilinear vertical transfer in biology, linguistics, anthropology and related disciplines, and (2) by demonstrating that the acceptance of evolutionism as leitmotif in the nineteenth century was only possible by intense and repeated networks between scholars of different academic realms which lead to the assumption that the development of biological species and human cultures could be perceived as part of the same co-evolutionary process. Contrary to these widely popularized models of unilinear evolution, I would like to draw attention to alternative theories emphasizing the horizontal transfer of words, phenotypes/genotypes, and culture traits. Examples are the method of areal typology in linguistics, the theory of endosymbiosis in biology, and the anti-evolutionist attitude in Boasian anthropology, combined with an emphasis on the diffusion of culture traits. Further, it shall be pointed out that, even when—after the general dismissal of evolutionist ideas in the beginning of the twentieth century—the idea of co-evolutionary processes in the development of human populations and languages was again forwarded in the late twentieth century, this ‘modern synthesis’ of genetics, linguistics and archeology relied largely on interdisciplinary reticulations between sciences and humanities and serves as another example of reticulate evolution.