the savage mind summary
Levi-Strauss on the ‘Savage Mind’ Claude Levi-Strauss was one of the twentieth century’s most renowned anthropologists. The main idea of The Savage Mind is that people from so-called primitive cultures are equipped with the same mental faculties as those from so-called advanced cultures.
It was desired and conceptualized, for few civilizations seem to equal the Australians in their taste for erudition and speculation and what sometimes looks like intellectual dandyism, odd as this expression may appear when it is applied to people with so rudimentary a level of material life.
In spite of the contact and inter-change with the outside world which has also taken place in Australia, Australian societies have probably developed in isolation more than appears to have been the case elsewhere. It is perhaps because [anthropologists] Spencer and Gillen’s material related to a comparatively limited number of Australian tribes and was at the same time remarkably full for each, that they were more acutely aware than their successors of the systematic relations between [concepts in indigenous languages] … The greater our knowledge, the more obscure the overall scheme. There is no Hobbesian h
It was by direct imitation of their technique of dehydration that the American army was able during the [Second World] war to reduce the rations of powdered potatoes sufficient for a hundred meals to the volume of a shoe box. The book also played a role within the larger currents of Native classifications are not only methodical and based on carefully built theoretical knowledge. It was a professional biologist who pointed out how many errors and misunderstandings, some of which have only recently been rectified, could have been avoided, had the older travellers been content to rely on native taxonomies instead of improvising entirely new ones. ... [Later in the book, Levi Strauss discusses Australian Indigenous people.] They were also agriculturalists and botanists, and developed the cultivation and taxonomy of the genus The Aymara Indians of the Bolivian plateau (who may be descended from the legendary Colla to whom the great civilization of Tiahuanaco is attributed) are able experimenters in the preservation of foodstuffs. Savage Mind is intended to arrest our sense of time in the macro-historical sense, asking us to see humanity and the culture that humanity presupposes as something nearly eternal at its very depth. But the day may come when all the available documentation on Australian tribes is transferred to punched cards and with the help of a computer that their entire techno-economic, social and religious structures can be shown to be like a vast group of transformations. [Claude Lévi-Strauss] -- Discusses the significance of totemism among primitive peoples and its interpretation by anthropologists and philosophies. The dimensions multiply, and the growth of axes of reference beyond a certain point paralyses intuitive methods: it becomes impossible to visualize a system when its representation requires a continuum of more than three or four dimensions.
For L-S we are all natives. Moreover, this development was not undergone passively. Lévi-Strauss makes clear that "la pensée sauvage" refers not to the discrete mind of any particular type of human, but rather to 'untamed' human thought: "In this book it is neither the mind of savages nor that of primitive or archaic humanity, but rather mind in its untamed state as distinct from mind cultivated or domesticated for the purpose of yielding a return."
The result was that eleven different authors between them applied the scientific name Native classifications are not only methodical and based on carefully built theoretical knowledge. Thus the variety If scientific thought is represented by the engineer who asks a question and tries to design an optimal or complete solution, savage thought resembles the One of Lévi-Strauss's many examples is the relationship between two Australian groups, the In other words, the operation of identifying with a totem is secondary to the underlying process of re-appropriating structure (for example, observed differences between animals) for the purposes of society.
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