Claude Levi-Strauss
Claude Levi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theory of structuralism and structural anthropology. He held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France between 1959 and 1982 and was elected a member of the Académie française in 1973. He received numerous honors from universities and institutions throughout the world and has been called, alongside James George Frazer and Franz Boas, the "father of modern anthropology"...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth28 November 1908
CountryFrance
Claude Levi-Strauss quotes about
The world began without man, and it will end without him.
Objects are what matter. Only they carry the evidence that throughout the centuries something really happened among human beings.
Anthropology found its Galileo in Rivers, its Newton in Mauss.
Nor must we forget that in science there are no final truths.
I have never known so much naive conviction allied to greater intellectual poverty.
With all its technical sophistication, the photographic camera remains a coarse device compared to the human hand and brain.
Freedom is neither a legal invention nor a philosophical conquest, the cherished possession of civilizations more valid than others because they alone have been able to create or preserve it. It is the outcome of an objective relationship between the individual and the space he occupies, between the consumer and the resources at his disposal.
Scientific knowledge advances haltingly and is stimulated by contention and doubt.
The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he is one who asks the right questions.
For everything is history: What was said yesterday is history, what was said a minute ago is history. But, above all, one is led to misjudge the present, because only the study of historical development permits the weighing and evaluation of the interrelationships among the components of the present-day society.
[ Serialism ] is like a sailless ship, driven out to sea by its captain, who has grown tired of its being used only as a pontoon, and who is privately convinced that by subjecting life aboard to the rules of an elaborate protocol, he will prevent the crew from thinking nostalgically either of their home port or of their ultimate destination....
[Photography] remains servile to a thoughtless vision of the world... As the term snapshot suggests, photography seizes the moment and exhibits it.
Civilization has ceased to be that delicate flower which was preserved and painstakingly cultivated in one or two sheltered areas of a soil rich in wild species ... Mankind has opted for monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as beetroot is grown in the mass. Henceforth, man's daily bill of fare will consist only of this one item.
How can my old photographs fail to create in me a feeling of emptiness and sorrow? They make me acutely aware that this second deprivation will be final this time...