MAN'S NEW DIALOGUE WITH MAN

A primitive people is not a backward or retarded people; indeed it may possess a genius for invention or action that leaves the achievements of civilized peoples far behind.

--Claude Levi-Strauss

IF that hypothesis is true, then civilization has nothing much to brag about. Modern man does not constitute an end product, an exponential improvement of the aboriginal dowry, an evolutionary intellectual advance. He is merely another mode of human society, coexisting and coequal with the most primitive tribes that have somehow survived, despite seemingly naive and archaic customs, into the space age. The marvelous fruits of contemporary Western culture--technology, medicine, literature, TV, the H-bomb--show an exercise of the mind no more commendable or admirable than the savage's totems and bone beads. Today's philosophies reflect no more brilliant a light than mankind's earliest brainstorms in the dim dawntime of thought.

These convictions are held by a highly civilized Frenchman named Claude Levi-Strauss, who has devoted his professional career and seven books to the proposition that, in their potential, all men are intellectually equal. They have probably been equal for something like 1,000,000 years--a bridge of time that carries the world back to the Pleistocene Age and the rude beginnings of social life. It was then that ancient ancestors of modern man equipped themselves with the first language and the first culture and, in so doing, set a pattern that has been followed ever since.

Levi-Strauss occupies the chair of social anthropology at Paris' College de France. He also occupies a place of increasing importance in the world of ideas. At 58, he can scarcely be called a newcomer. Yet for many who are just discovering him, he is the newest and most challenging prophet on the scene. In France and elsewhere, he has deposed Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre as the most notable--and fashionable--intellectual figure.

Civilization's Dropouts

The formidable and frequently forbidding scholarship of his books has not prevented them from being widely read, or at least talked about. From France, the interest in Levi-Strauss and his "structuralism" has spread far afield. Cambridge now offers a course in his anthropological theory, a recognition seldom bestowed by any university until after the subject's death. The Germans have established a school called Strukturforschung (research of life structure), which adapts structural theory to the study of art. In the U.S., the amplifying academic debate commands the ear and the curiosity of non-academicians. Of his books, Structural Anthropology, Totemism, The Savage Mind and Tristes Tropiques are now available in English translation. Two more will arrive in the fall: Kinship Systems and The Raw and the Cooked. Wherever it occurs, the argument about Levi-Strauss takes fire from his provocative approach to the study of man--which has implications far beyond anthropology.

Only a generation or so ago, anthropological theory rested on the comfortable and slightly condescending premise that the human mind evolved, over the millennia, in much the same way that man climbed physically up from the primordial slime. The stages in this intellectual growth were clearly identified: the Old Stone Age, the New Stone Age, the Copper, Bronze and Iron Ages. Savage cultures unaccountably stranded well along the path of progress were conveniently classified as civilization's simple-minded dropouts, lingering and isolated echoes from mankind's distant past.

Levi-Strauss junks this notion as a complacent and self-serving modern myth. In its place, structuralism substitutes the heretical theory that the human intellect has been fully operative, and in the same fundamental pattern, since the creation of human society. Savage and civilized cultures together play the same game and play it equally well, despite an enormous variation in the results. In short, Levi-Strauss has asked man to open a profound--and profoundly unsettling--new dialogue with himself.

For Levi-Strauss personally, the dialogue began 30 years ago in the South American bush. Born in Brussels to middle-class Jewish parents who did not accept their faith or any other, he grew up in France in a posture of skepticism toward traditionalist thought. At the Sorbonne he read for a philosophy degree--"not because I had any true vocation for it, but because I had sampled other branches of learning and detested them, one and all."

One of his earliest enthusiasms was for Karl Marx, but his interest was more scientific than ideological. Marx seemed to be talking about realities, hidden behind surface thought, that controlled some of man's responses to his environment. A chance appointment as professor of sociology at the University of Sao Paulo dispatched Levi-Strauss in 1935 to Brazil. The new arrival's intellectual curiosity shortly lured him into the jungle on anthropological field trips. The experience permanently altered his appreciation of man.

The Dignity of Man

Levi-Strauss had expected to find primitive and ignorant peoples frozen in cultural patterns, which, like the toys of childhood, civilization had long since put by. Instead, he found his intellectual peers. The Bororo, a naked tribe of the Brazilian interior, introduced him to a concept of life that might have been taken from the most sophisticated human thought. Whenever a native dies, the Bororo believed, "an injury is done not only to those near him but to society as a whole."

In the geometrical face paintings of the Caduveo Indians, Levi-Strauss recognized not meaningless makeup, but a subtle statement of man's place in the world: "The face paintings confer upon the individual his dignity as a human being: they help him to cross the frontier from nature to culture, and from the 'mindless' animal to the civilized man." He decided that, "without any play on words," both the Caduveo and the Bororo "could be called in their different ways 'learned societies.' "

Such conclusions are registered, with impressive clarity and lyricism, in Tristes Tropiques, a book described by its author as his "intellectual vacation." Laymen have turned to it as a painless introduction to his thought. All his other works demand rigorous intellectual effort as well as a basic understanding of anthropology. They also require something akin to an act of faith.

Only faith, for instance, will carry most readers past Levi-Strauss's tenet that the mind may be the prisoner of a secret code, locked in the unconscious, that often has as little to do with conscious reality as the rules of grammar have to do with the function of speech. If order exists anywhere--in the behavior of the atom, the dance of heated particles, the orbit of the stars--then, say the structuralists, order must exist everywhere, even in the brain. Just as the law of gravity determined the fall of Newton's apple, so the laws of the intellect imperiously mold human thought.

Levi-Strauss postulates two orders of reality, only one of which is susceptible to human control. At the controllable level, man applies his intellect to the universe about him and builds social systems to suit his needs. But at a deeper level, the implacable pattern that is ingrained in the human intellect, much like the program that decrees the functioning of a computer, directs the shape of everything built by social man. It may work, says Levi-Strauss, like "the least common denominator of human thought."

This approach relies heavily on the spadework done in structural linguistics, a new science, born in this century, that has set out to crack the hidden code of speech. Freud's explorations of the unconscious may also have made a contribution to structural theory. Like the taproots of culture, the foundation of speech exists beneath the level of awareness and the superimposed discipline of grammatical rules. The linguists and the structural anthropologists are united in the suspicion that the origin of human speech and of human society may have been equivalent events. Levi-Strauss's books reflect his conviction that communication is the sine qua non of society, and that speech is only one of many ways by which society explicates itself. Music, art, ritual, myth, religion, literature, cooking, tattooing, the kinship systems founded on intermarriage, the barter of goods and services--all these, and others, can be considered languages by which society is elaborated and maintained.

No one has as yet unlocked the code that the human mind obeys. But Levi-Strauss presents fascinating speculation on how the code may work. It seems based, for instance, on a universal human desire to organize the chaos of the universe--to attach meaning to things. "The thought we call primitive," he writes, "is founded on this demand for order. This is equally true of all thought."

But while all humans apply the same basic code, they can reach dramatically individual and divergent conclusions. The so-called primitive mind, for one example, abhors change. It builds societies designed to repeal history: "What primitive man seeks above all is not truth but coherence; not the scientific distinction between true and false but a vision of the world that will satisfy his soul."

Stone Age Mastery

On the other hand, "moving cultures"--a description that Levi-Strauss applies to modern civilization--not only welcome change but also endorse it. Mindful of the flow of time, these societies place different values on the past, the present and the future, and constantly consult the past as a reference by which to measure the next cultural advance. But the distinction between these two views of time, says Levi-Strauss, is not a measure of intelligence: "It is quite certain that no culture is absolutely stationary. All peoples have a grasp of techniques which are sufficiently elaborate to enable them to control their environment." Civilized societies, he says, "traffic in ideas; the savage hoards them up."

Mankind's most world-changing intellectual achievements were logged by savage cultures. It was during the Stone Age "that man's mastery of the great arts of civilization--of pottery, weaving, agriculture and the domestication of animals--became firmly established." All that has been done since has only "improved on these 'arts of civilization.' "

To proponents of the view that man is perfectible, he extends small comfort. Whatever man is today, Levi-Strauss insists, man already was. Among the more remarkable parallels he notes is the homology between the ideas of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, and those of an unnamed Dakota Indian sage. "Everything as it moves," Levi-Strauss quotes the Indian, "now and then, here and there, makes stops. So the god has stopped. The sun, the moon, the stars, the winds, the trees are all where he has stopped." And from Bergson: "A great current of creative energy gushes forth through matter, to obtain from it what it can. At most points it is stopped; these stops are transmuted, in our eyes, into the appearances of many living species."

It is on the subject of history that structuralism differs most decisively with preceding trains of thought, including Marxism and existentialism, both of which very nearly deify the historical process. Though the study of Marx helped teach Levi-Strauss to look for patterns and driving forces in human affairs, he has cooled to its rigid, dogmatic approach. In his colloquial French he says: "I still have the tripe [guts] of a man of the left. But at my age I know it is tripe and not brain." As for Sartre, he is convinced that man has much to learn from history, while Levi-Strauss holds that history makes at best an undependable instructor. Moreover, Sartre disputes Levi-Strauss's deterministic, science-oriented view of man. "Sartre exemplifies a kind of morose sulkiness at the expansion of science," says Levi-Strauss. "The existentialists think that there is something special in mankind which only philosophy can deal with."

To many French intellectuals, this scientific determinism seems to fill the void left by the failure of humanism. The world Communist revolution failed: the proletariat did not dispossess the capitalists or God. Existentialism failed: numerous reversals in the political causes it supported have exposed the fragility of the notion that human will can dictate history.

Different But Equal

Into this vacuum of thought, structuralism has reared its guidon all over the Gallic intellectual landscape. A new school of fiction has risen with the declared intent of consulting man's subconscious intellectual infrastructure rather than the visible rules of literary composition. The function of writing itself--rather than message, story or character--becomes the novelist's purpose. The formlessness of structural fiction stems from a reliance on the creative inspiration of the unconscious--the hidden intellectual code. At an even more arcane level, literary critics are using structuralism to redefine--and enhance--the critical role. In its name they have demanded equal billing with the works they judge. "It is inconceivable," says Roland Barthes, one of the movement's chief spokesmen, "that the creative laws governing the writer should not also be valid for the critic. All criticism is criticism both of the work under consideration and of the critic."

Levi-Strauss stands aloof from such cultist and far fetched applications of structural thought. Yet in their way they are testimonials to the pull he exerts on the imagination. His approach to man has added something to the human equation that is hard to dismiss or forget. Ironically, time may show that this agnostic's principal gift to human understanding is a spiritual one. "I don't believe in God," he says, "but I don't believe in man either. Humanism has failed. It didn't prevent the monstrous acts of our generation. It has lent itself to excusing and justifying all kinds of horrors. It has misunderstood man. It has tried to cut him off from all other manifestations of nature."

Down the centuries, an extravagant portion of human energy has supported the position that, because of their differences, men are not equal. There is no room for this in Levi-Strauss's view of humanity. "Respect for others," he writes, "springs spontaneously and naturally in man, long before reasoning and its sophistries come into play." Elsewhere, he maintains that "insofar as man is worthy of respect, it is not just civilized man of today or the future, it is the whole of mankind.

"Identification with all forms of life, beginning with the most humble--this principle, in a world where overcrowding makes mutual respect more difficult and that much more necessary, is the only one which can permit men to live together. In a cultivated society there can be no excuse for the only real inexpiable crime of man, that of considering himself abidingly or momentarily superior; be it for reasons of race, culture, conquest, service or merely expediency."

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