For Claude Lévi-Strauss, anthropology was not merely the study of marginal, “primitive” societies, but also the road to discovering the deep laws of human life and nature itself. Patrick Wilcken's biography is a fascinating and critical exploration of Lévi-Strauss and his worlda time and place when old verities of Western cultural superiority and imperialism came under question. Lévi-Strauss' meditations on the common patterns he found in social organization and myth drew fire from conservatives, who sensed his evident distaste for much of what passes as Western civilization, and from Marxists, because economics alone cannot explain the structures Lévi-Strauss identified.
Engaged as he was in the pursuit of grand abstractions, Lévi-Strauss was cavalier with inconvenient facts and sloppy as a researcher. But like Freud and Marx, the doubtful material behind some of his ideas gave rise to useful avenues of insight. Lévi-Strauss was no arid academician. His roots included an interest in Surrealism and his scope embraced the value of mysterythe admission of the unknowable. As Wilcken points out, pessimism tainted Lévi-Strauss' lucid prose. Globalization depressed him and he thought modernity imposed a bleak conformity on other cultures. “The first thing we see when we travel around the world,” he wrote, “is our own filth, thrown into the face of humanity.”
