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[a] Journeying RF |
VI—An End to Journeying
At the very end of Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss—mired in the binary opposition between Islam and Christianity—contemplates the Buddha, specifically the Buddhist monasteries in Taxila. He begins with this sentence: "At Taxila, in Buddhist monasteries bristling with statues becasue of the influence of Greece, I was aware of the slim opportunity of remaining united which is open to our Old World; the schism is not complete. A different future is possible, the very future that Islam opposes by erecting its barrier between the West and the East, which, without it, would perhaps not have lost their attachment to the common ground in which their roots are set."[1] Lévi-Strauss continues:
What else, indeed, have I learned from the masters who taught me,
the philosophers I have read, the socieites I ahve visited and even from
that science which is the pride of the West, apart from a few scraps of
wisdom which, when laid end to end, coincide with the meditation of the
Sage at the foot of the tree? Every effort to understand destroys the
object in favour of another object of a different nature; this second
object requires from us a new effort which destroys it in favor of a third,
and so on and so forth until we reach the one lasting presence, the point
at which the distinction between meaning and the absence of meaning
disappears: the same point from which we began. It is 2,500 years since
men first discovered and formulated these truths In the interval, we have
found nothing new, except—as we have tried in turn all possible ways out
of the dilemma—so many additional proofs of the conclusion that we
should have liked to avoid.[2]
The anecdote lies at the heart of the “feminine”
anthropology of receptivity that Lévi-Strauss espouses. We observe other
peoples, other societies, distant from us in space, time (if documented in
historical works) or both. All the historian or ethnographer can do, writes
Lévi-Strauss, “is to enlarge a specific experience to the dimensions of a more
general one, which becomes accessible as experience to men of another country
or another epoch.” We must be disappointed, however, if we search for a
resolution to the problem posed by Lévi-Strauss in Tristes tropiques. Lévi-Strauss quite persuasively argues that
merely physical escape from the confines of Western civilization is irrelevant
to the problem.
Our great Western civilization, which has created the marvels we now
enjoy, has only succeeded in producing them at the cost of corresponding
ills. The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous
achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of a complexity as yet
unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious
mass of noxious by-products that now contaminate the globe. The first
thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into
the face of mankind.[3]
Our great Western civilization, which has created the marvels we now
enjoy, has only succeeded in producing them at the cost of corresponding
ills. The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous
achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of a complexity as yet
unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious
mass of noxious by-products that now contaminate the globe. The first
thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into
the face of mankind.[3]
Lévi-Strauss’s critique of Western society (and the masculinity of its historical
development) is devastating; yet he points a path toward regaining receptivity
to those same societies that the West has tarnished—especially those closer to
their “origins”—through a carefully planned ethnographic method. It is as
though, following his observations on Rousseau’s work, we
have left the ruins left by worldwide “monoculture” for the “ample structure”
of an anthropologie anecdotique. Yet
the secret, the revelation of how we are to put it all back together, is
nowhere adequately treated in Tristes
tropiques or Lévi-Strauss’s later works. Lévi-Strauss pointed a way for the
West to restore its receptive, feminine nature, but left for others the
revelation of its integration.
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Notes
[1] Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropique [Translated by John and Doreen Weightman] (New York: Penguin Classics, 2012), 406.
[2] Tristes Tropiques, 411.
[3] Tristes Tropiques, 37-38.
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[c] End RF |
[1] Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropique [Translated by John and Doreen Weightman] (New York: Penguin Classics, 2012), 406.
[2] Tristes Tropiques, 411.
[3] Tristes Tropiques, 37-38.
Bibliography
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques [Translated by John and Doreen Weightman]. New York: Penguin Classics, 2012.
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