Professional Documents
Culture Documents
C L AU D E L V I - S T R AU S S
Foreword by Maurice Olender
C ONTENTS
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FORE W ORD
Maurice Olender
FORE W ORD
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THE END OF THE W EST S
C ULTURAL SUPRE M A C Y
civilizations, having embraced the same ideal, believed they ought to take the West as their model. All
of them shared the conviction that science and technology would keep moving forward, would provide
human beings with greater power and more happiness; that the political institutions and forms of social organization that appeared in France and the
United States in the late eighteenth century, and the
philosophy that inspired them, would give all members of every society more freedom in the conduct of
their personal lives and more responsibility in the
management of public affairs; and that moral judgment, aesthetic sensibility, in a word, the love of
truth, goodness, and beauty, would spread irresistibly and reach every corner of the inhabited earth.
The events for which the world served as a theater
in the course of the present [twentieth] century have
given the lie to these optimistic forecasts. Totalitarian ideologies have spread and, in several regions of
the world, continue to spread. Human beings exterminated one another by the tens of millions; they
engaged in horrifying genocides. Even after peace was
reestablished, they no longer felt certain that science
and technology offered nothing but benefits, or that
the philosophical principles, the political institutions, and the forms of social life that originated in
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the eighteenth century constituted definitive solutions to the great problems raised by the human condition.
Science and technology have phenomenally extended our knowledge of the physical and biological
world. They have given us a power over nature that
no one could have suspected even a century ago. We
are beginning, however, to assess the cost that had
tobe paid for that power. Increasingly, the question
arises as to whether these achievements did not have
deleterious effects. They placed the means of mass
destruction within reach of human beings, and these
means, even unused, threaten by their mere presence
the survival of our species. In a more insidious but
nonetheless real manner, that survival is also threatened by the growing scarcity or pollution of the most
essential goods: space, air, water, the wealth and diversity of natural resources.
Thanks in part to the advances of medicine, the
number of humans on earth has continued to grow,
to the point that, in several regions of the world, it is
no longer possible to satisfy the basic needs of the
population, who fall victim to famine. Elsewhere, in
regions that are able to provide for their subsistence,
an imbalance arises because, in order to provide work
for more and more individuals, it is constantly neces3
unions.
Humans make and use tools, which they employ in various technologies. Their social lives are
conducted within institutional entities whose content may change from one group to another but
whose form generally remains constant. By different
methods, certain functionseconomic, educational,
political, religiousare assured in a regular manner.
Understood in the broadest sense, anthropology is
the discipline devoted to the study of that human
phenomenon, which undoubtedly belongs to the set
of natural phenomena. When compared to the other
forms of animal life, however, it displays constant
and specific characteristics that justify its being studied independently.
In that sense, we can say that anthropology is as
old as humanity itself. In the eras for which we possess historical evidence, preoccupations of a kind
wewould now call anthropological were on display:
among the memorialists who accompanied Alexander the Great in Asia, in Xenophon, Herodotus, Pausanias, and, from a more philosophical angle, in Aris
totle and Lucretius.
In the Arab world of the sixteenth century, Ibn
Battuta, a great traveler, and Ibn Khaldn, a historian and philosopher, demonstrated an authentically
anthropological sensibility; so too, a few centuries
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Marco Polos long visit to China. In the early Renaissance, we begin to discern the very diverse sources
from which anthropological reflection would henceforth spring, for example, the literature to which the
Turkish invasions of Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean gave rise. The fantasies of medieval folklore
perpetuated those of antiquity concerning the Plinian races, so named because, in the first century c.e.,
Pliny the Elder helpfully described them in his Natural History as savage peoples, monstrous in their anatomy and their mores. Such imaginings were not unknown in Japan and, probably because that country
had intentionally cut itself off from the rest of the
world, they survived there longer in the popular
mind. During my first visit to Japan, I received as a
gift an encyclopedia published in 1789, entitled Zho
Kinm Zui. In the geographical section, exotic peoples,
gigantic or possessing disproportionately long arms
or legs, are taken to be real.
Europe was better informed during that same period, having accumulated the positive knowledge
that had begun to pour in from Africa, America, and
Oceania in the sixteenth century, as a result of the
great discoveries. Very quickly, compilations of these
travel narratives enjoyed a phenomenal vogue in Germany, Switzerland, England, and France. That vast
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body of travel literature would spur anthropological reflection, which began in France with Rabelais
and Montaigne and by the eighteenth century had
reached all of Europe.
An echo of that concern can be found in Japan, in
travels presented as imaginary, for lack of any direct
knowledge about faraway countries. Take, for example, the fictive journey of e Bunpa to the land of
Harashirya, behind which can be discerned Brazil,
inhabited by natives who know nothing of the cultivation of cereals, feed on dried roots, have no king,
and consider noble only those most skillful at shooting with a bow. That is very close to what Montaigne
had reported two centuries earlier, after conversing
with Brazilian Indians brought back to France by a
navigator.
Although we situate the beginnings of anthropological research, as it is now practiced, in the nineteenth century, it was initially motivated by what
could be called an antiquarian curiosity. People noticed that the great classical disciplineshistory, archaeology, and philology, sciences that had their
rightful place in university curriculahad left behind
all sorts of residue or debris. Rather like ragpickers,
curiosity-seekers undertook to collect these scraps of
knowledge, these fragments of problems, these pic9
turesque details that the other sciences cast disdainfully onto their intellectual rubbish heaps.
At first, anthropology was undoubtedly nothing
but that collection of unusual and odd facts. Gradually, however, it was discovered that this debris, this
residue, was more important than had been thought.
The reason is easy to understand.
What strikes a human being at the sight of other
humans are the points they have in common with
himself. Historians, archaeologists, philosophers,
moralists, and literary writers initially sought from
the peoples recently discovered confirmation of their
own beliefs about humanitys past. That explains
why, during the great discoveries of the Renaissance,
the first travelers accounts did not elicit any surprise:
their audience believed not so much that new worlds
had been discovered as that the past of the old world
had been recovered. The ways of life of savage peoples
demonstrated that the Bible and the Greek and Latin
authors were speaking the truth when they described
the Garden of Eden, the Golden Age, the Fountain of
Youth, Atlantis, or the Fortunate Islands.
People neglected or refused to see the differences,
even though they are essential for studying human
beings. Indeed, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau would later
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distance
between the observer and the object does
not exist, phenomena persist that are comparable to
those we travel far and wide to find. Anthropology
asserts its rights and assumes its function anywhere
that customs, ways of life, practices, and techniques
have not been swept aside by historical and economic
upheavals. Their continued existence attests that they
correspond to something profound enough in the
thought and lives of human beings to resist the forces
of destruction. It does so anywhere, therefore, that
the collective life of ordinary peoplethose your illustrious anthropologist Yanagida Kunio called jmin
still rests primarily on personal contacts, family
ties, and neighborly relations, whether in villages or
city neighborhoods: in a word, in the small, traditional environments where the oral tradition persists.
I find it typical of the symmetry in relations observed between Western Europe and Japan that, in
both places, anthropological research got its start
during the same time period: the eighteenth century.
In Western Europe, it was spurred by the great journeys that provided access to knowledge of the most
diverse cultures; by contrast, in Japan, which was isolated at the time, anthropological research probably had its roots in the Kokugaku school. Yanagida
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Kunios monumental enterprise a century later appears still to have belonged within the tradition of
that school, at least in the eyes of the Western observer. In Korea, anthropological research also began
in the eighteenth century, with the work of the Silhak school, which was concerned with rural life and
popular customs in its own country and not, as in
Europe, among remote peoples.
By collecting a multitude of little facts that, for a
long time, historians judged unworthy of their attention, by filling in the gaps and inadequacies of the
written documents through direct observations, by
attempting to learn how people recollect the past of
their little groupor how they imagine itand how
they experience the present, we succeed in constituting archives of an original type and in setting up
what Yanagida Kunio called bunkagaku, the science
of culture, in a word, anthropology.
AUTHENTICITY AND INAUTHENTICITY
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different modalities, what is at issue is always the action of bringing back toward oneself, or of bringing
oneself back inside. Instead of positing the I from
the start as an autonomous, already constituted entity, it is as if the Japanese person constructed his I
by beginning from the outside. The Japanese I thus
appears to be not an original given but a result toward which one moves with no certainty of reaching
it. It is therefore not at all astonishing that, as I have
been told, Descartess famous proposition: I think,
therefore I am, is strictly untranslatable into Japanese! In realms as varied as spoken language, artisanal techniques, culinary preparation, and the history
of ideas (I could add domestic architecture, thinkingof the many meanings you attribute to the word
uchi),* a difference, or more exactly, a system of invariant differences, reveals itself at a profound level
between what, to simplify, I will call the Western soul
and the Japanese soul, which can be summed up by
the opposition between a centripetal and a centrifugal movement. That pattern will serve the anthro* Uchi means at once a house as building, the interior, the
family, the intimate group, and the business in common
parlance.
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social
reality of the emitters and of the receivers(to speak the language of communication theorists) disappears behind the complexity of codes
and relays.
The future will no doubt judge that the most im
portant theoretical contribution of anthropology to
the social sciences is that key distinction between two
modalities of social existence: a way of life perceived
primarily as traditional and archaic, which is that of
authentic societies; and forms of more recent appearance, from which the first type is not absent but in
which imperfectly or incompletely authentic groups
emerge as islands strewn across the surface of a vaster
entity, itself marked by inauthenticity.
MY OWN WESTERN STANDPOINT
ism, which corresponded, in the minds of his contemporaries, to the belief in social and cultural evolution. It was even later, in the first quarter of the
twentieth century, that so-called art ngre or primitive
objects were acknowledged as having an aesthetic
value.
It would be wrong to conclude, however, that anthropology is a brand-new science that emerged from
the curiosities of modern humans. When an effort is
made to place it in perspective, to assign it a place in
the history of ideas, anthropology appears on the
contrary as the most general expression and the culminating point of an intellectual and moral attitude
that came into being several centuries ago and which
we designate by the term humanism.
Allow me to place myself for a moment within my
own Western standpoint. When Renaissance Europeans rediscovered Greco-Roman antiquity, and when
the Jesuits made Latin the foundation for training in
their schools and universities, was that not already
ananthropological initiative? They recognized that a
civilization cannot conceive of itself unless it has at
its disposal one or several others to serve as terms of
comparison. To know and understand ones own culture, it is necessary to regard it from the point of view
of another. This can be likened to the Noh actor
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At the start of the Renaissance, the human universe was circumscribed by the limits of the Mediterranean Basin. People had only an inkling that some
thing more existed. But they had already understood
that no portion of humanity could aspire to understand itself except with reference to others.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, humanism expanded in concert with geographical exploration. China, India, and Japan were gradually
added to the overall picture. At present, anthropology, in taking an interest in the last civilizations still
largely unknown or neglected, is ushering in a third
stage of humanism. It will undoubtedly be the last,
since after that, humankind will no longer have anything to discover about itself, at least in the world
outside us (for there is another search within us,
whose end we are not close to reaching).
There is also another aspect to the problem. The
extension of the first two kinds of humanism, one
limited to the Mediterranean world and one encompassing the Middle and Far East, was limited not only
by surface area but also by nature. Since the ancient
civilizations had disappeared, they could be reached
only through texts and monuments. Although that
difficulty did not arise for the Middle and Far East,
the method adopted was the same, because it was
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In nineteenth-century France, the philosopher Auguste Comte formulated a law of human evolution
known as the three stages, according to which humanity has passed through two successive phases, religious and metaphysical, and is on the verge of entering a third state, positive and scientific.
Perhaps anthropology reveals an evolution of the
same type, though the content and meaning of each
stage differs from those conceived by Comte.
We now know that peoples called primitive, who
know nothing of agriculture and stock breeding or
who practice only a rudimentary agriculture, who
sometimes lack a knowledge of pottery and weaving,
and who live primarily on hunting, fishing, and the
gathering of wild plants, do not have a gnawing fear
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one another. It arises within every society, which includes groups or subgroups that are not homogenous: castes, classes, professional or religious milieus.
These groups develop differences from one another
to which each attaches a great importance; and it
may well be that this internal diversification tends to
increase when a society becomes vaster and more homogenous in other respects.
Human beings undoubtedly developed different
cultures because of geographical distance, the particular characteristics of the environment in which they
found themselves, and their ignorance about other
types of societies. But, alongside the differences attributable to isolation, there are equally important
ones attributable to proximity: a desire to set oneself
apart, to distinguish oneself, to be oneself. Many customs came into being not from some internal necessity or favorable accident but solely from the desire
not to be outdone by a neighboring group, one that
subjected to precise norms a realm of thought or an
activity about which the first group had not thought
to promulgate rules.
The attention and respect that the anthropologist
grants to the differences between cultures and to
those proper to each culture constitute the essential
aspect of his approach. The anthropologist therefore
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in very different fields. But she was an anthropologist, and we may therefore credit the anthropological
state of mind, its inspiration and its methods (even
when considering a culture from afar and without
prior experience) with having been able to penetrate
its structure and to avert its collapse, whose consequences might have been even more tragic than those
of the military defeat.
As a first lesson, anthropology teaches us that ev
ery custom, every belief, however shocking or irra
tional it may appear to us when we compare it to
ourown, is part of a system whose internal balance
has been established over the course of centuries; it
teaches us that one cannot eliminate an element from
that whole without running the risk of destroying all
the rest. Even if it offered no other lessons, that one
would be sufficient to justify the increasingly impor
tant place that anthropology occupies among the
human and social sciences.
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2
THREE G REAT
C ONTE M PORARY PROBLE M S
Sexuality, Economic Development, and Mythic Thought
the groups boundaries, inside that group it is reinforced by an additional quality. Indeed, the members
of the group are not just the only true humans, the
only excellent ones; they are not only fellow citizens,
they are relations, de facto and de jure.
In the second place, these societies hold kinship
and the notions connected to it to be prior and external to biological relationships, filiation by blood, to
which we ourselves tend to reduce them. Biological
ties provide the model on which kinship relations
areconceived, but these relations also provide a logical classification system, a mental framework. That
framework, once conceived, makes it possible to sort
individuals into preestablished categories, assigning to each his or her place within the family and
society.
And finally, these relations and notions pervade
the entire field of life and social activities. Real, postulated, or inferred, they entail rights and duties that
are well defined and different for each type of related
individual. More generally, we can say that, in these
societies, kinship and marriage constitute a common
language capable of expressing every social relationship: not only familial but also economic, political,
religious, and so forth.
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The first imperative of a human society is to reproduce itself, in other words, to maintain itself over
time. Every society therefore possesses a rule of filiation defining how each new member belongs to the
group; a kinship system determining the way that
relations will be classified, as kin by blood or by marriage; and finally, rules that define the modalities of
matrimonial alliance by stipulating whom a person
can and cannot marry. Every society must also possess mechanisms to remedy sterility.
It is the problem of remedying sterility that has
become a pressing issue in Western societies, ever
since the invention of artificial methods to assist in
reproduction. I do not know how it is in Japan, but
the subject has become an obsession in Europe, the
United States, and Australia. In these places, commissions have been officially constituted to debate it, and
parliamentary assemblies, the press, and public opinion largely echo these debates.
What exactly is at issue? It is now possibleor, for
certain procedures, it will be possible in the near futurefor a couple, one or both of whose members are
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seems that the essential question is one of transparency. Must sperm donors, egg donors, and surrogates
be anonymous, or can the social parents, and possibly the child herself, know the identity of those involved? Sweden has opted against anonymity and
England is tending in the same direction, whereas in
France, public opinion and the law are taking the opposite tack. But even countries that allow transparency seem to agree on the need to separate repro
duction from sexuality, and even, as it were, from
sensuality. To limit ourselves to the most simple case,
that of sperm donation, public opinion judges it allowable only if it takes place in a laboratory and
through the intervention of a doctor, an artificial
method that excludes any personal contact, any sharing of emotions or eroticism between the donor and
the receiver. And yet, for both sperm donation and
egg donation, this preoccupation with having things
take place anonymously seems to run counter to the
universal situation, even in our own societies, where
that type of service is rendered close to homealbeit discreetlymore often than one would think. By
way of example, let me cite an unfinished novel by
Balzac that he began in 1843, a time when social prejudices were much stronger than they are in present-
day France. Significantly titled The Petty Bourgeois, this
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cases, individual paternity and maternity are unknown or are not taken into account.
Let us return to Africa, where the Nuer of Sudan
make an infertile woman the equivalent of a man. In
her capacity as paternal uncle, she therefore receives
the livestock representing the bride price paid for
the marriage of her nieces, and she uses it to purchase a wife, who will provide her with children
thanks to the remunerated services of a man, often
a stranger. Among the Yoruba of Nigeria as well,
richwomen can acquire wives, whom they impel to
pair off with men. When the children are born, the
woman, the legal husband, claims them, and the
biological parents must pay her handsomely in order
to keep them.
In all these cases, couples composed of two women,
whomliterally speakingwe would call homosex
ual, practice assisted reproduction in order to have
children; one of the women will be their legal father,
the other their biological mother.
Societies without writing also have the equivalent
of postmortem insemination, which is prohibited by
the French courts. In England, meanwhile, the Warnock Commission has proposed that a law should
exclude from the fathers succession and inheritance
any child who was not yet a fetus in its mothers
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ancestor, who chooses to live again in that descendant. And the ghost marriage of the Nuer allows
for a further refinement in cases where the brother,
asa substitute for the deceased, does not father children on his own behalf. The son fathered in the name
of the deceased (and whom the biological father considers his nephew) will be able to render the same
service to his biological father. Since the biological
father is then the brother of his legal father, the children he will bring into the world will legally be his
own cousins.
All these options provide metaphorical images that
anticipate modern technologies. We therefore see
that the conflict we find so troubling, between biological reproduction and social paternity, does not
exist in the societies anthropologists study. They unhesitatingly give primacy to the social, and the two
aspects do not clash in the ideology of the group or
in the minds of individuals.
I have dwelt at length on these problems only because it seems to me that they show very well the
kind of contribution contemporary society can hope
for from anthropological research. The anthropologist does not propose that his contemporaries adopt
the ideas and customs of one or another exotic population. Our contribution is much more modest, and
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it is made in two directions. First, anthropology reveals that what we consider natural, founded on
the order of things, actually amounts to constraints
and mental habits specific to our own culture. It
therefore helps us rid ourselves of our blinders, so as
to understand how and why other societies can consider simple and self-evident certain practices that we
find inconceivable or even scandalous.
Second, the facts we gather represent a very vast
human experience, since they come from thousands
of societies that have succeeded one another over the
course of centuries, sometimes millennia, and which
are distributed over the entire expanse of the inhabited earth. We therefore contribute toward drawing
out what can be considered universals of human
nature, and we are able to suggest within what frameworks as-yet uncertain changes will come about,
changes we would be wrong to denounce in advance
as deviations or perversions.
The great debate currently unfolding on the subject of assisted reproduction is whether one ought to
make laws about these matters, and if so, in what
areas and in what direction. In several countries, representatives of public opinion, jurists, doctors, sociologists, and sometimes anthropologists sit on commissions and other organizations established by the
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government authorities. It is striking that anthropologists everywhere take the same tack: they oppose
undue haste in making laws, in authorizing this and
prohibiting that.
In answer to overly impatient jurists and moralists,
anthropologists advise liberality and caution. They
point out that even the practices and aspirations that
most shock public opinionassisted reproduction in
the service of single women, bachelors, widows, or
homosexual coupleshave their equivalents in other
societies, which are none the worse for it.
Anthropologists therefore wish to let things be.
They want all individuals to submit to the internal
logic of their own societies, in order to create the familial and social structures that will prove viable, and
to eliminate those that produce contradictions that
only custom will prove to be insurmountable.
FROM PREHISTORIC FLINTS TO THE
MODERNASSEMBLY LINE
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purpose, possessed absolute power to fix the beginning and the duration of the seasons for hunting,
fishing, and collecting wild plants. There was a widespread belief in supernatural masters of each animal or plant species, who punished the guilty for
taking too much, and this belief encouraged moderation. Similarly, all sorts of ritual prescriptions and
taboos made hunting, fishing, and gathering serious
activities laden with consequences and required that
those engaged in them be circumspect and reflective.
At very different levels and in various realms, human societies thus display heterogeneous attitudes in
economic matters. There is not one model of economic activity but several. The modes of production
studied by anthropologistshunting and gathering,
horticulture, agriculture, artisanship, and so on
represent so many different types. It is difficult to reduce them, as some believed possible, to the successive phases of development of a single model, all
leading to the most evolved stage, namely, our own.
Nothing shows this better than the discussions
under way on the origin, role, and consequences
of agriculture. In several respects, agriculture represented progress: it provided more food for a given
space and time, allowed more rapid demographic ex-
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pansion, denser settlements, and societies that covered a larger expanse and that were also larger in
size.
But in other respects, agriculture constitutes a regression. As I noted in my first lecture, it produces a
less adequate diet, limited to a few products rich in
calories but relatively poor in nutrients. Agriculture
is also less reliable, since it takes only one bad harvest
for food shortages to result. And farming requires
more labor. It may even have been responsible for the
propagation of infectious diseases, as is suggested in
Africa by the remarkable coincidence in time and
space of the spread of agriculture and of malaria.
The first lesson of anthropology in economic matters is therefore that there is not a single form of
economic activity but several, and they cannot all be
placed on a single continuum. Rather, they represent
choices among possible solutions. Each has advantages, but a price must always be paid.
We have some difficulty placing ourselves within
that perspective because, in considering the so-called
backward or underdeveloped societies as they appeared when we established contact with them in
thenineteenth century, we neglect one obvious fact:
those societies were nothing but relics, mutilated ves-
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tiges, after the upheavals that we ourselves had produced, directly or indirectly. Indeed, it was the greedy
exploitation of exotic regions and of their populations between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries that made possible the Western worlds rapid
development. The feeling of strangeness that industrial civilization experiences toward the so-called underdeveloped societies consists primarily in the fact
that it rediscovers in these societies what it has itself
produced, but in a negative form that it is unable to
recognize.
The apparent simplicity or passivity of these socie
ties is not intrinsic to them but is rather the result of
our early development, which plundered them so
that it could grow up on their debris, only to return
later to impose itself from the outside.
In attacking the problems of industrialization in
underdeveloped countries, industrial civilization initially encounters the deformed image, as if fixed in
place by the centuries, of the destruction it had to
accomplish in order to exist. Diseases introduced
by whites into populations that had no immunity
against them struck entire societies from the map.
Even in the most remote regions of the planet, where
one might imagine that societies would survive in-
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ral forces; and third, they are loath to take the path of
historical change.
The noncompetitive character of some of these so
cieties has often been invoked to explain their resistance to development and industrialization. Let us
not forget, however, that the passivity and indifference for which they are criticized may be a consequence of the trauma resulting from contact with
industrial civilization, not a condition present from
the start. In addition, what appears to us to be a flaw
and a lack may correspond to an original way of
conceiving the relations of human beings with one
another and with the world. Let me clarify with an
example. When peoples from the interior of New
Guinea learned from the missionaries how to play
soccer, they enthusiastically adopted that game. But
instead of pursuing the victory of one of the two
teams, they increased the number of matches until
the victories and defeats on each side balanced out.
The game ended not, as for us, when there was a winner, but rather when everyone was assured there
would be no loser.
Observations made in other societies appear to
suggest the opposite; yet these societies as well lack a
real spirit of competition. For example, when traditional games are played between two sides that repre67
refusedand still refuse in some casesto cede territories in exchange for sometimes enormous compensation because, in the words of the interested parties
themselves, they view the ancestral soil as a mother.
Pushing that reasoning even further, the Menomini
Indians of the Great Lakes region of North America,
though perfectly well versed in the agricultural techniques of their Iroquois neighbors, refused to apply
them to the production of wild ricethe staple of
their diet, which is in fact very suitable for cultivationbecause they were forbidden to wound their
mother the earth.
The same opposition between nature and culture
often lies at the foundation of the division of labor
between the sexes. However variable the rules may appear when we compare societies, they include constant elements, which are interpreted differently or
which differ only in their application. Many societies
consider the opposition between nature and culture
and that between woman and man to be homologous. They therefore set aside for women the forms
of activity conceived as being on the order of nature,
such as gardening, or those that place the artisan
in direct contact with the material, such as pottery
modeled by hand. Men assume the same tasks when
practiced with the aid of instruments or machines
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gines in terms of their internal structure. Antagonisms comparable to what can be observed in a steam
engine, between the source of heat and the source of
cooling, must exist in these societies. They operate
ona difference in potential, a social hierarchy, which
throughout history has gone by the names slavery,
serfdom, class divisions, and so on. Such societies
create and maintain imbalances within themselves,
which they then use to produce both much more orderindustrial civilizationand, at the level of interpersonal relationships, much more entropy.
The societies anthropologists study can thus be
considered systems of weak entropy, running at a historical temperature near absolute zero. That is what
we express in saying that these societies have no his
tory. Historical societies like our own possess a
greater differential in their internal temperatures, a
differential attributable to economic and social inequalities.
Every society, of course, always entails both aspects, like the yin and yang of Chinese philosophy:
these two principles are opposed and complementary, but there is also always yin in the yang and yang
in the yin. A society is both a machine and the labor
provided by that machine. Like a steam engine, it
manufactures entropy; like a motor, it manufactures
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order. These two aspectsorder and disordercorrespond to the two ways a civilization can be considered: culture on one hand, society on the other.
Culture consists of the set of relations that the human beings of a given civilization maintain with the
world; society consists more particularly of the relations that these same human beings maintain with
one another.
Culture makes order: we cultivate the earth, construct houses, produce manufactured goods. By contrast, our societies make a great deal of entropy. They
dissipate their strength and exhaust themselves in
the social conflicts, political struggles, and psychological tensions they produce in individuals. And the
values on which they rested at the start inevitably
wear thin. One could almost say that our societies
gradually lose their underlying structure and tend to
shatter, to reduce the individuals that compose them
to the condition of interchangeable and anonymous
atoms.
Those we call primitive peoples or peoples without writing make little order in their culture; for that
reason, we call them underdeveloped. By contrast,
they make very little entropy in their society. These
societies are largely mechanistic in their egalitarian-
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in his garden, to prove that he has a good relationship with the agricultural deities, is motivated by
concerns that are at once technical, cultural, social,
and religious.
Anthropology reminds the economist, in case he
might forget, that human beings are not motivated
purely and simply to always produce more. In their
work, they also seek to satisfy aspirations rooted in
their deepest nature: to find fulfillment as individuals, to leave their stamp on matter, to give an objective expression to their subjectivity through their
work.
The example of so-called primitive societies can
instruct us in all these aspects. Such societies are
founded on principles that have the effect of converting the volume of wealth produced into moral and
social values: personal accomplishment in ones work,
the respect of loved ones and neighbors, moral and
social prestige, a harmony achieved between human
beings and the natural and supernatural worlds. Anthropological investigations help us to better understand the necessity of finding a balance among these
various components of human nature. And every
where that industrial civilization tends to destroy
that harmony, anthropology can alert us to some of
the avenues we might take to restore it.
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gether, mythic thought operates with the aid of images borrowed from the sensible world. Instead of
establishing relationships between ideas, it contrasts
earth and sky, land and water, light and darkness,
man and woman, the raw and the cooked, the fresh
and the decayed. It thus elaborates a logic of sensory qualities: colors, textures, flavors, odors, noises
and sounds. It chooses, combines, or contrasts these
qualities to transmit a somewhat coded message.
Here is an example, taken from the hundreds of
others I attempted to analyze in four large volumes
entitled Mythologiques (Introduction to the Study of Mythology), published between 1964 and 1971.
Two lovers, incestuous or forbidden from being together by social conventions, succeed in uniting only
in death, which will form them into a single body:
we easily accept that story, because our literary tra
ditions have made it familiar to us. The West has
themedieval romance of Tristram and Isolde and the
Wagner opera. And I believe the Japanese tradition
also includes that sort of narrative.
By contrast, we would be astonished by another
story, in which a grandmother glues together a newborn brother and sister and makes a single child of
them. That child grows up; one day, it shoots an arrow into the air. When the arrow falls back to earth,
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What We Can Learn from Japanese Civilization
To explain that distance, some in the past have resortedand still sometimes resortto two types of
argument. According to them, that gap is insurmountable because it results from the fact that human groups differ in their genetic inheritance. The
inequality supposedly existing between these inheritances would have an impact on intellectual capacities and moral dispositions. Such is the racist thesis.
According to evolutionist theory, by contrast, the inequality of cultures has not a biological but rather a
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Anthropology has long put forward two arguments against the idea that race and culture are
linked. In the first place, the number of cultures that
exist on the earths surface, and above all, the number that still existed two or three centuries ago vastly
surpass the number of races that even the most meticulous investigators have wanted to distinguish:
several thousand versus a dozen or two. And two cultures developed by human beings who supposedly
belong to the same race may differ from each other
as much or more than two cultures coming from racially different groups.
In the second place, cultural inheritances evolve
much faster than genetic inheritances. There is a
world between our great-grandparents culture and
our own. We could go so far as to say that there is
lessdifference between the way of life of the ancient
Greeks and Romans and that of our eighteenth-
century ancestors than between these ancestors way
of life and our own. Nevertheless, with a few exceptions, we have the same genetic inheritance as they.
These two reasons explain why, nearly a hundred
years ago, a divorce occurred between so-called cultural or social anthropologists, who study technologies, customs, institutions, and beliefs, and old-school
physical anthropologists, who stubbornly persisted
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The diversity of cultures has rarely appeared to human beings for what it is: a natural phenomenon resulting from direct or indirect relations among socie
ties. It has rather been seen as a sort of monstrosity
or scandal. Since the most remote times, a tendency,
so solidly rooted that we might believe it to be instinctual, has impelled human beings to quite simply
repudiate the customs, beliefs, practices, and values
most alien to those in force in their own society. The
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not necessarily coincide with each other. It is somewhat as if, having the same cards in hand, each had
decided to play them in a different order. Like many
other comparisons possible, that between Europe
and Japan challenges the notion that progress occurs
in a single direction.
Is all that true not only of societies that have coexisted in time, far away from one another, but also of
societies of the second type, those that, in a determined place, historically preceded the society of today? The hypothesis of a unilinear evolution, so fragile when evoked to place societies remote in space
along a continuum, seems in this case difficult to
avoid. We know by the concordant evidence of paleontology, prehistory, and archaeology that the territories occupied by the great present-day civilizations
were first inhabited by various species of the genus
Homo, who carved crude flints. With time, these stone
tools were refined and perfected; carved stone made
way for polished stone, bone, and ivory; pottery, weaving, and agriculture followed, gradually combined
with metallurgy, whose phases can also be distinguished. In that case, can we not speak of a true evolution?
Yet it is not as easy as some believe to organize this
indisputable progress into a regular and continuous
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series. For a long time, successive phases were distinguished: the era of carved stone (Paleolithic), the era
of polished stone (Neolithic), the Copper Age, the
Bronze Age, then the Iron Age. But that was too simple. We now know that carved and polished stone
sometimes existed side by side; and, when polished
stone prevailed, it was not as the result of technical
progresssince polishing is much more costly in raw
materials than carving. Rather, it was an attempt to
copy in stone the copper or bronze weapons possessed by more advanced civilizations, ones that
were, however, contemporary to and neighbors of
their imitators. Depending on the region of the world
considered, sometimes pottery appears simultaneously with polished stone, sometimes prior to it.
It was formerly believed that the different carved-
stone technologiescore industries, flake industries, and blade industriesreflected a historical
progress in three stages, which were called the Lower
Paleolithic, Middle Paleolithic, and Upper Paleolithic.
It is now acknowledged that these three forms may
have coexisted, that they do not represent stages of a
progress in a single direction but aspects or, as they
say, facies of a very complex reality. Hundreds of
thousandsperhaps more than a millionyears ago,
stone industries were the work of an ancestor of
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To better convey this point, which I believe is essential, I have in the past used several comparisons,
which I ask for your permission to repeat.
In the first place, the attitude I denounce resembles in many respects the one we observe in our own
societies, where elderly people and the young do not
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zation has devoted itself primarily to scientific knowledge and its applications. If we adopt that criterion,
we will make the quantity of energy available per cap
ita the index of the degree of development in human
societies. If the criterion had been the ability to prevail over particularly hostile geographical environments, the Eskimos and the Bedouins would win first
prize. India was better able than any other civilization to elaborate a philosophical and religious systemcapable of reducing the psychological risks of a
demographic imbalance. Islam formulated a theory
of the solidarity of all forms of human activity (technical, economic, social, and spiritual), and we know
the preeminent place that this vision of humankind
and of the world allowed the Arabs to occupy in the
intellectual life of the Middle Ages. The Middle and
Far East are in advance of the West by several millennia in everything having to do with the relations between the physical and the moral, and in the use of
the resources of that supreme machine, the human
body. The Australian aborigines, backward at the
technical and economic level, elaborated social and
familial systems of such complexity that, to understand them, we must rely on certain forms of modern
mathematics. They can be acknowledged as the first
theorists of kinship.
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human beings without their diversity being compromised. But we must have no illusions. The great creative eras were those in which communication had
advanced enough that distant partners could stimulate one another, but without being so frequent and
rapid that the ease of exchanges reduced the indispensable obstacles between individuals and between
groups to such a point as to obliterate diversity.
It is true that for human beings to progress, they
must collaborate. During that collaboration, however, the contributions, whose initial diversity was
precisely what made the collaboration fruitful and
necessary, come to be identical. Teamwork is the
source of all progress; but, after a more or less brief
interval, it necessarily leads to a homogenization of
the resources of each of the players. If diversity is an
initial condition, we must recognize that the chances
of winning diminish the longer the game goes on.
In the eyes of anthropologists, that is the dilemma
modern humanity is now facing. Everything seems to
show that we are moving toward a global civilization.
But is not that notion itself contradictory if, as I have
attempted to show, the idea of civilization implies
and requires the coexistence of cultures diverse from
one another?
The fascination Japan now exerts both in Europe
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and the United States does not lie solely in its technological progress and economic success. It can be
explained in large part by the vague sense that, of all
the modern nations, yours has proved the most capable of navigating between those two pitfalls, of
elaborating your own formulas for living and thinking, in order to overcome the contradictions to which
humanity has fallen prey in the twentieth century.
Japan has resolutely entered global civilization.
But until now, it has been able to do so without abjuring its specific characteristics. At the time of the
Meiji Restoration, when Japan resolved to be open to
the world, it was convinced that it had to equal the
West at the technical level if it wanted to safeguard its
own values. Unlike so many so-called underdeveloped
peoples, it did not deliver itself to a foreign model
bound hand and foot. It momentarily departed from
its spiritual center of gravity only to better ensure it
by securing its perimeter.
For centuries, Japan maintained a balance between
two attitudes: sometimes open to external influences
and quick to absorb them; sometimes withdrawn
into itself, as if to give itself the time to assimilate
these foreign contributions and to put its own stamp
on them. That astonishing capacity on the part of
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