STRUCTURALISM(in cultural studies) - 1) the application of structural analysis to the study of cultural problems; 2) direction in foreign (primarily French) anthropology, to which it is also customary to refer Tartu-Moscow school, developing problems of structural analysis in decomp. areas of the human sciences. Despite the fact that representatives of this trend did not seek self-identification as structuralists (only Levi-Strauss), on the basis of similarity theoretical and methodological. provisions, it is also customary to refer to structuralists Foucault, Lacan, R. Barthes, Derrida, Eco, L. Goldman.

The emergence of S. as a direction in anthropology dates back to the turn of the 50s and 60s. The basis for structuralism was the methodology of structural analysis, which has been used since the 1920s. to the development of problems of linguistics (structural linguistics - the construction of structural grammatical and syntactic models for natural languages) and literature (structural analysis of the lexical and syntactic material of poetry, fairy tales (Propp), short prose) as a means of revealing the invariant structures of linguistic activity. Dr. psychoanalysis became the source of S. Freud and especially Cabin boy, structuralism borrowed from him the concept of the unconscious as a universal non-reflective regulator of the human. behavior. One can also note the influence of neopositivism and early postpositivism on the formation of S. (the development of logical problems of scientific knowledge and the metalanguage of science). S. was formed as a def. antithesis of a subjectivist-oriented philosophy (existentialism and, in part, phenomenology), the positive program of the structuralists was aimed at rehabilitating the possibilities of objective scientific knowledge in matters anthropology and cultural studies.

S. significantly expanded the field of application of structural analysis, extending it to socio-cultural problems and even metaphysical problems. Common to S. can be called the following theoretical methods. provisions: the idea of ​​culture as a set of sign systems and cultural texts and of cultural creativity as symbolism; idea of ​​the presence of universal invariant mental. structures hidden from consciousness, but determining the mechanism of a person's reaction to the whole complex of environmental influences (both natural and cultural); the idea of ​​cultural dynamics as a result of a person's constant verification of ideas about the world around him and changes as a result of this verification of the principles of combinatorics within the subconscious. the structures of his psyche, but not the structures themselves; an idea of ​​the possibility of identifying and scientific knowledge of these structures by comparing, structural analysis of sign systems and cultural texts.

Based on these provisions, representatives of S. in the development of cultural problems focused on the analysis of decomp. complexes of cultural texts. Taking as the maximum task the identification of the structural unity behind the sign and semantic diversity of texts, generated by the rules of symbolic formation universal for a person. objects, structuralists sought to single out from the entire corpus of cultural texts and sign systems those in which one could see def. similar features (in express, means, uniformity of transmitted information, orientation to certain communicative situations, etc.), suggesting the presence of internal. structures. Then, minimal elements were identified in the texts (as a rule, pairs of heterogeneous or even oppositional concepts such as "nature-culture"), connected by stable relationships. Compare, the analysis of these paired elements (segments or oppositions) was aimed at identifying stable transformation rules within and between oppositions in order to further model the application of these rules on all possible oppositions of a given complex of texts. Verification of the combinatorial mechanisms obtained through such an analysis should have been carried out on a wider range of sign systems and cultural texts in order to eventually form a structured set of rules that are invariant for any sign system (any text), and therefore, as close as possible to the desired deep mental systems. structures.

Dynamic a variant of such a scheme of analysis assumed the disclosure of two types of mechanisms that work sequentially in situations of communication between a person and the outside world. First, it was supposed to reveal combinatorial mechanisms that transform external influences (stimuli) of the environment into internal, individual representations (concepts) - the extraction of significant information from the "noise", its verification and evaluation by cultural experience, the formation of a concept corresponding to it. Secondly, the mechanisms that regulate the transformation of concepts into signs and symbols, by which a person responded to environmental influences - the selection of the necessary concepts, their correlation with the communicative situation, the choice and use of sign means to form a symbol.

It is obvious that the emphasis is explored. interest in the symbolic aspect of culture suggested a close connection between the problems of S. and the problems semiotics and linguistic. semantics. The use of semiotics Theories to cultural material confronted structuralists with the problem of polysemanticism (polysemy) of any cultural object, even in a synchronous study, which was never resolved in S. and, as a rule, was removed by limiting the range of meanings studied. However, this is conscious. the limitation, ultimately, led to the impossibility of synthesizing universal models for the generation of a cultural text and led to the fact that positive results were achieved only at the stage of analysis of local groups of texts.

Levi-Strauss, analyzing the cultural orders of traditions. ob-in (totemism, ritual actions, mythological representations, terminology of kinship relations, etc.) as languages ​​of culture, sought to identify repeating elements in them ("mediators", "binary oppositions", stable schemes for transforming and replacing some positions others), in which he saw elements of hidden logic. The pathos of these studies was the assertion of "super-rationalism" - the idea of ​​harmony of feelings, and rac. began - universal for a person of any culture, but lost by modern man.

Foucault, analyzing the conditions for the possibility of types of knowledge ("the archeology of knowledge") in the situation of history. non-cumulative cognition, consistently considers the specific. forms of functioning of the "languages" of science (relationships between "words" and "things", i.e. names and denotations) in three sequentially replacing each other cognizant. models-epistems (Renaissance, classical rationalism, modernity). Foucault sought to identify combinatorial patterns that determine situations of episteme change, which led him to the need to analyze the "power-knowledge" relationship, interpreted as a universal model of any social relations ("the genealogy of power").

Lacan, developing Freud's "theory of the unconscious", sought to find an analogy between the structures of the unconscious and the structures of language (correcting violations of the language, we heal the psyche of the patient). Structuring the unconscious as a language. Lacan gave him the leading role in human. psyche as "symbolic", which unconditionally subjugates both the "real" (the area of ​​stimuli, influences of a chaotic external environment) and the "imaginary" (the area of ​​concepts, illusory ideas about the outside world), by analogy with language, where the signifier dominates over the signified. However, ch. Lacan's task is to find through metaphor. and metonymic. the structure of the language of the structure of the unconscious is insoluble: it turned out to be impossible to adequately model the psychic. processes using only the grammar and syntax of the language.

Lit. texts with which he did analytical work. operations similar to those applied to the cultural orders of the traditions. on-in Levi-Strauss (the selection of stable elements of the text, the discovery behind the stylistic and lexical diversity of deep "writing" (a historical-typological concept similar to Foucault's "episteme"), combinatorial recoding of the text). Barth saw in the "letter", as well as in the stable elements of other modern. cultural orders (journalism, politics, vocabulary, fashion, etiquette, etc.), universal "sociology", dictating def. stereotyped reaction to the environment, justifying the possibility of building a linguistic. by means of a metalanguage capable of describing the entire modern world. cultural situation. Similar motifs can be traced in the works of Derrida in the 1960s. ("grammatology" and "deconstruction" - destruction-reconstruction of the text as universal methods of mastering the text), interlocking with the otd. the provisions of philosophy. hermeneutics, as well as in prose and essays by Eco, to-ry in lit. In practice, he implemented the principles of construction and reconstruction of the text proposed by Bart and Derrida.

60s can be considered the heyday of S.; in France, this coincided with the rise of the radical leftist youth movement and the predominance of radicalist tendencies in culture (lit. modernism, the "new wave" in cinema, the circle of "new philosophers"). This movement warmly welcomed S. as an ideology of radical criticism of modernity. However, in its development by the end of the decade S., despite the means. success in working with concr. groups of cultural texts, faced the problem of the unsolvability of his chapter. tasks - knowledge objectively-scientific way of deep structures human. psyche. At the same time, the fascination with the abstract “modeling of structures from texts” led S. to dehumanization, reduction beyond the cognition of everything subjective and human, inherent in any cultural order of idiographic. heck. This coincided in time with the strengthening of anti-scientist and post-positivist ideas in the philosophy of science, the crisis of left-wing radical mindsets in France (due to the events of the summer of 1968). All this led to a gradual crisis in S. and its transformation into the 1970s and 1980s. in poststructuralism, in the focus of attention to-rogo turned out to be, first of all, not the structure, but the context, the analysis of cultural texts from the v.sp. concret., the unique situation of their creation and use (the representatives of S. themselves came to poststructuralism - the late Barth and the circle of "Telkelists" founded by him, Derrida).

The crisis of S. as a trend demonstrated the danger of extrapolating the concrete scientific method to the entire range of anthropologists and problems in the face of the unresolved issue of universal units and criteria of analysis. However, the high heuristic application of structural analysis and structural modeling methods to local problems is symbolic. The organization of culture is undeniable, as is the enormous influence exerted by S. on the development of issues related to semantic. and semiotic. aspects of culture, the systematization of cultural texts, the analysis of genetic. processes in culture. It was S. who contributed to the separation of cultural semantics into independent. the field of cultural sciences, had, therefore, an impact on modern. cultural-anthropol. research, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis.

Lit.: Shibutani T. Social psychology. M., 1969; Gretsky M.N. Franz. structuralism. M., 1971; Avtonomova N.S. Philos. problems of structural analysis in the humanities. M., 1977; Foucault M. Words and things. Archeology of the Humanities. SPb., 1994; Levi-Strauss K. Structural Anthropology. M., 1985; He is. Primitive Thinking: Myth and Ritual. M., 1994; Bart R. Fav. works: Semiotics. Poetics. M., 1994; He is. S/Z. [Analysis of the story "Sarrazin" by O. de Balzac] M., 1994; Lacan J. Function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis. M., 1995; Levi Strauss Cl. mythologiques. v. 1-4. P., 1964-71; Derrida J. De la grammatology. P., 1967; Idem. The Deconstruction. N.Y., 1975; Clarke S. The Foundations of Structuralism: a Critique of Levi-Strauss and the Structuralist Movement. Brighton; N.Y., 1981; Structuralism and Sinse: from Levi-Strauss to Derrida. oxf. etc., 1981; Deconstruction and Criticism. L.; Henley 1979; Deconstruction and Theology. N.Y., 1982.

In the 60s. in France, structuralism pushed existentialism into the background. It became the leading philosophical trend in France, just as the philosophy of the Frankfurt School becomes the leading trend in Germany.

Structuralism is a complex of directions in humanitarian knowledge, in which the task is to reveal the structure of social formations. Structuralism was formed in a certain opposition to existentialism, offering a certain reorientation: instead of subjectivity, experience, freedom - objectivity, scientific character, rigid determination by structures.

The formation of methods of structuralism began in the 20s. in linguistics. Here the desire was determined to reveal the structure of the language, abstracting from its development, from geographical, historical, social circumstances. Then the methods of structural analysis began to be applied in psychology and literary criticism. In the 50-60s. methods of structuralism extend to other areas of culture.

In the 60s. structuralism acquires the status of a philosophical trend. It should be noted, however, that the works of the leading structuralists are mainly concrete scientific research, accompanied by philosophical reasoning. The leaders of structuralism were not professional philosophers. Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-1990) was an ethnologist Michel Foucault (1926-1984)- cultural historian Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)- a psychoanalyst Roland Barthes (1915-1980)- a literary critic.

Levi-Strauss, professor at the College de France, the creator of the concept of structural anthrology, spoke about the harmony of sensual and rational principles, lost by modern European civilization, but preserved in mythology. The main task of ethnology, according to Levi-Strauss, is the study of the transition from nature to culture. Here it is very important to consider the unconscious; consciousness exists at the intersection of many unconscious structures of the human spirit, each of which corresponds to a certain level of social reality. The works of Levi-Strauss are devoted to the study of the culture of primitive tribes, their way of life, marriage and family relations and research methodology. In Words and Things (1960), Foucault attempted to identify the unconscious foundations of knowledge common to biology, political economy, and linguistics in modern times. Lacan rethinks Freudian psychoanalysis using the methods of structural linguistics. Barthes explores sign systems (for example, in The Fashion System, 1967).

The isolation of the structural aspect in humanitarian knowledge is carried out, as a rule, on a certain sign system. A characteristic feature of structuralism is the desire to discover unconscious deep structures, hidden mechanisms of sign systems behind the conscious manipulation of images, symbols and signs. The structure in the understanding of structuralists is not just a combination of the elements of an object, available to direct contemplation. Structure is a set of hidden relationships revealed by the "power of abstraction" in the course of movement from phenomenon to essence. In this case, abstraction from the substrate specifics of the elements takes place, they take into account only "relational" properties, that is, properties that depend on their position in the system, on their relationship with other elements. The abstract structure singled out in this way can be investigated by the methods of symbolic logic and mathematics (for example, graph theory).

The level of conscious manipulation of signs and the level of hidden, unconsciously applied rules (mechanisms, patterns, structures) are singled out. “Following the physical sciences, the humanities must make sure that the reality of their object of study is not at all limited to the level at which it is perceived by the subject.” Reality itself consists of many levels that open up to the researcher depending on his approach, on the tasks he solves, just as different pictures of an object are found under a microscope, depending on the degree of magnification used.

Objecting to those who believe that scientific methods are contraindicated for humanitarian knowledge, Levi-Strauss defends the legitimacy of an objective scientific study of "human reality". At the same time, he believes that in scientific knowledge there are different levels associated with empirical-rational and intuitive cognitive procedures.

Levi-Strauss calls his philosophical position "super-rationalism". True reality, he believes, is never given to the subject in direct experience and is comprehensible only by modeling unconscious processes. Consciousness exists at the intersection of many unconscious structures of the human spirit, each of which corresponds to a certain level of social reality.

The sciences of culture face specific difficulties: their object is human activity with its free choices, values, and goals that do not seem to fit into the framework of objective laws. But, from the point of view of the structuralists, human freedom is an illusion; in reality, our behavior is rigidly determined by the deep structures of language, culture, and the subconscious. The discovery of these structures makes it possible to abstract from subjectivity. In science, art, mythology, religion, structuralists seek to discover these structures, deep patterns.

Methodological principles of Levi-Strauss. The main methodological principles of structuralism are as follows. The first principle of Levi-Strauss is expressed in the formula: "The methodological primacy of relations over the elements of the system." In this regard, he wrote: "The error of traditional sociology, as well as traditional linguistics, is that it considered elements, and not the relations between elements."

The second principle: "The methodological primacy of synchrony over diachrony" (this idea comes from F. de Saussure). To reveal the structure of an object, it is necessary to abstract from its development and consider its various parts as existing at one moment (synchronously). And only after the device of the object is revealed, it is possible to study its changes at different points in time (diachronically).

The third methodological principle: "Structure is a set of relations that are invariant under certain transformations."

As a result of concrete scientific research, structuralists came to the conclusion that in various areas of human activity there is some hidden foundation that directs and structures seemingly chaotic human phenomena.

What is this foundation? In answering this question, Levi-Strauss starts from the ideas of Kant. In Kant, the forms of sensibility and reason are superimposed on sensory data coming from outside. In Levi-Strauss, the role of a priori forms is played by the structures of the unconscious. Unlike the subconscious, which is a special form of memory, “the unconscious is always empty, or, more precisely, it is as alien to images as the stomach is alien to the food passing through it. Being an organ of a specific function, it is limited to imposing structural patterns ... on ... elements coming from other places - impulses, emotions, ideas, memories. This function "for all people is carried out according to the same laws and is actually reduced to the totality of these laws."

On a conscious level, a person operates with signs, building messages, texts from them; he does this by obeying certain rules which, in the normal use of sign systems, are applied automatically, unconsciously. So, a person who speaks a language well follows grammatical norms in his speech, without thinking about them and even, perhaps, not knowing about their existence. Moreover, the people of primitive tribes, immersed in various sign systems realized in myths, rituals, totems, etc., did not know about the existence of unconscious mechanisms.

Unconscious patterns, structures of the psyche, according to Levi-Strauss, are universal. The study of sign systems makes it possible to identify the laws of the functioning of the human psyche.

Thus, there are structures independent of the human will (social, mythical and linguistic), and if you study them scientifically, then the person eventually “dissolves” into them. Man is not the master of his own life; it is driven by unconscious structuring forces.

In this regard, Foucault writes: “It turns out that it is the set of structures that, in essence, potentially creates a person; he, of course, can think about them, describe them, but he is no longer a subject, not a sovereign consciousness. The reduction of man to his surrounding structures, it seems to me, characterizes modern thought. History is not created by man, it develops without his participation.

The application of the methodology of structuralism in specific scientific research has made it possible to obtain a number of new results in the understanding of culture.

Levi-Strauss, developing the so-called ethnological structuralism (related to structuralism in linguistics), proposed a new typology of marriage and kinship relations (“Elementary Structures of Kinship”, 1949), an original solution to the problem of totemism (“Totemism Today”, 1962), a new theory of primitive thinking , radically different from the concept of Levy-Bruhl ("Savage Thinking", 1962), structural-semiotic interpretation of myths (four-volume series "Mythological", 1964-1971), structural-semiotic interpretation of ritual masks ("The Way of Masks", 1975), etc. .

When analyzing the social structure, cultural and spiritual life of primitive tribes, Levi-Strauss proceeds from the fact that marriage procedures, kinship terminology, totemism, rituals, myths, etc. are all a special kind of languages. Normally, both in primitive and modern society, phenomena such as naming, table manners, etc., are "carefully observed by everyone, although their origin and real functions do not become the object of reflective research." We need to find the basis of these phenomena.

Lacan put forward the thesis about the similarity (or analogy) between the structures of language and the mechanism of the unconscious. All human desires, all unconscious phenomena fit into linguistic structures. This means that through the structures of language the unconscious can be made an object of scientific knowledge, it can be structured and rationalized.

Barthes set himself the task of finding a universal structure, "sociology" in every product of modern culture: in the structure of the city, fashion, mass media, etc. He studied the history of semiotic practices of various social groups, the hierarchy of languages, the system of genres in art and their foundations. Barth comes to the conclusion that language is not just a tool for the content of thought, but actively produces this content. Bart pays special attention to the study of literature, especially modernist. At the same time, he proves that literature cannot be outside the structures of power, lead a life independent of politics.

Foucault occupied a prominent place in structuralism. He became famous for his works Words and Things: The Archeology of the Humanities (1966), the three-volume History of Sexuality (The Will to Know, 1976; The Enjoyment of Pleasures, Self Care, 1984).

Analyzing the role of language in culture, Foucault draws attention to the fact that the inclusion of a person in social life occurs not only through learning to speak: “You can’t say anything and anytime.” Foucault sets the task of correlating the linguistic layer of culture with the social layer. "Linguistic" and "social" are associated with "discursive" and "non-discursive" types of practice. Discursive practice draws from non-discursive material to be structured and formalized. But in order to reveal the level of this implicit knowledge, it is necessary to carry out a huge "deconstructive-constructive" work, a critical analysis of all sciences, theories, concepts.

Foucault explores the development of modern science, shows the changes in its “unconscious foundation”, “epistems” (“epistemic structures” act at the unconscious level and define different areas of culture and knowledge) in different periods. This "foundation" is a certain configuration of sign systems, which determines in a given period the possibility of posing scientific problems and solving them. Foucault distinguishes three epistemes - the Renaissance, classical rationalism and modernity. As we move from one episteme to another, the role of language in culture changes to the extent that language becomes an independent force in the modern episteme. But why sign configurations are rearranged, there is a transition from one episteme to another - remains incomprehensible.

Foucault pays much attention to the problem of power. Everything that is connected with the comprehension of truth, in fact, turns out to be adapted for the production of power. But power itself, according to Foucault, is interested in not being seen, it needs a masking mechanism. Power can work fruitfully only if its foundations are concealed; “The nature of this concealment underlies the very operations authorities".

The disclosure of the nature of power shows that power has a negative (manifested in suppression, coercion) and positive character. "Power is strong only because it produces action at the level of desire and knowledge." Different types of power give rise to reality itself, and the objects of their knowledge, and the "rituals" of their comprehension. Power relations permeate all social structures.

Modern power, Foucault believes, has three main functions: "oversight", discipline and rationing. These functions involve certain strategies: managing individuals (social physics), supervising them (social optics), procedures for isolating and regrouping them (social physiology).

In the traditions of structuralism, a theoretical basis was formed feminist movement. The origins of this movement are rooted in the late XIX - early XX century. In 1929, the American writer Virginia Woolf stated: "It is obvious that the values ​​that guide women often differ from those developed by the opposite sex." However, masculine values ​​prevail in society. K. Allen, A. Boxster, S. Griffin (prominent ideologists of feminism) argue that culture is still based on a “patriarchal” attitude, a view of the world and reality from the position of a man. It is this attitude that leads to the dominance of abstract cognitive activity, the militarization of society, the practice of sexism, i.e., oppression based on gender. What lies behind these processes?

Feminist ideologists are looking for structures and mechanisms that form a "patriarchal" attitude. They highlight three points.

♦ A division of labor in which women have to reproduce people (labor) and life-sustaining conditions. There is a “removal” of women into the sphere of the household. Moreover, domestic work is not assessed as socially significant; in society it is not customary to pay for this work, although, working at home, a woman creates some unaccounted products.

♦ Understanding a woman as an object (from the side of male consciousness). To illustrate this, F. Parturier cites a selection of quotes from the works of J. Bataille, de Sade, A. Miller: “I use a woman in accordance with my need as an empty round box”, “The state of her mind and heart can be completely ignored” , “Do you feel sorry for the chicken you eat - no, you don’t even think about it, the same with a woman”, “To enjoy yourself, there is no need to give pleasure to them”, etc. The relationship between a man and woman - the relationship of master and slave.

♦ It is noted that the process of socialization, especially in the family, takes place as an orientation towards various gender roles, with special attention being paid to the formation of the “male self”.

As a result of these processes, both sexes suffer. Feminists propose a program that should radically change the situation. It is necessary to establish equal economic conditions for women and men, it is necessary to change the nature of socialization in the family, to form a "partner" family. The process of socialization should take place in such a way that there is no sharp distinction between men and women.

The radical wing of the feminist movement goes further. Barbara Ehrenreich writes: “Equality with men is a wonderful goal, and I will fight for the right of any woman to do the same stupid and boring things for which men are well paid and respected. But assimilation alone is not enough, as was written on one of the feminist T-shirts: "If you think that equality is the goal, then your standards are too low." It is proposed to take the “point of view” of the oppressed group, to analyze and “force out” the hegemony of the “male” consciousness. Feminists advocate for the "point of view" of women to be heard in literature, art, the media, etc. etc. This will lead to the fact that it will become easier for both men and women, the world will become kinder, more humane.

The concept of feminism provokes various reactions - from support to condemnation. Its supporters are sometimes reproached for "retreating from the generally accepted norms of morality", for the fact that they seek to destroy the "male romantic dream", turn a woman into a car, etc. But if we admit that there are differences in worldview and worldview between a man and woman, then it is impossible to prevent the implementation of the installation on the development of a “matriarchal” point of view and the creation of a partner family.

Assessing structuralism in general, it should be noted that the identification of hidden (“abstract”) structures is a really important point in scientific research. But at the same time, the importance of this moment should not be exaggerated.

A. B. Ostrovsky. The ethnological structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss 3

Three Kinds of Humanism 15

Rousseau - father of anthropology 19

Ways of development of ethnography 29

Totemism today 37

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I totemic illusion

CHAPTER II. Australian nominalism

CHAPTER III. Functionalist totemisms

CHAPTER IV. To the intellect

CHAPTER V Totemism from within

Untamed Thought 111

FOREWORD

CHAPTER I The science of concrete

CHAPTER II. Logic of totemic classifications

CHAPTER III. Transformation systems

CHAPTER IV. Totem and caste

CHAPTER V Categories, elements, types, numbers

CHAPTER VI. Universalization and Particulation

CHAPTER VII. The individual as a species

CHAPTER VIII. Time regained

CHAPTER IX. History and dialectics

Structuralism and ecology 337

Relations of symmetry between rituals and myths of neighboring peoples 355

Notes 370

Levi-Strauss K. Primitive thinking

© M.: Respublika, 1994.

© Translation, introductory article and notes by the candidate of historical sciences Ostrovsky A. B.

Transl., entry. Art. and approx. A. B. Ostrovsky. - M.: Respublika, 1994. - 384 p.: ill. - (Thinkers of the XX century).
ISBN 5-250-01662-6

The publication acquaints the Russian reader with the work of the outstanding representative of French structuralism, ethnographer and sociologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908) Exploring the peculiarities of thinking, mythology and ritual behavior of people in "primitive" societies from the standpoint of structural anthropology, Lévi-Strauss reveals the laws of cognition and the human psyche in various social, primarily traditional, systems, in the cultural life of peoples. With the majority of published works, among which are such widely known books in the West as "Totemism Today" and "Untamed Thought", the Russian reader will meet for the first time.

The book is addressed to philosophers, psychologists, historians, ethnographers, as well as to all those interested in issues of culture and religious studies.

THREE KINDS OF HUMANISM

To most of us, anthropology seems to be a new science, evidence of the sophisticated curiosity of modern man. In our aesthetics, works of primitive art took their place less than fifty years ago. Interest in the primitive societies themselves is of a slightly more ancient origin - the first works devoted to their systematic study date back to 1860, that is, to the era when Charles Darwin posed the problem of development in relation to biology. This evolution, according to his contemporaries, reflected the evolution of man in terms of social and spiritual.
To think of ethnology in this way is to be mistaken about the real place that the knowledge of primitive peoples occupies in our worldview. Ethnology is neither a particular science nor a new one: it is the oldest and most general form of what we call humanism.
When people rediscovered Greco-Roman antiquity at the end of the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, and when the Jesuits made Latin and Greek the basis of education, the first form of ethnology arose. The Renaissance discovered in ancient literature not only forgotten concepts and ways of thinking - it found the means to put its own culture into a time perspective, to compare its own concepts with the concepts of other times and peoples.
Critics of classical education are mistaken about its nature. If the study of Greek and Latin were reduced to simply mastering the rudiments of dead languages, they would really be of little use. But - and elementary school teachers are well aware of this - through the medium of language and reading of texts, the student is imbued with a method of thinking that coincides with the method of ethnography (I would call it "transmigration technique" (1)).
The only difference between classical culture and ethnographic culture relates to the size of the world known in the corresponding epochs. The human cosmos was limited at the beginning of the Renaissance to the Mediterranean Basin. The existence of other worlds could only be guessed at. But, as we have already said, no part of humanity can understand itself otherwise than through the understanding of other peoples.
In the XVIII - early XIX century. with the progress of geographical discoveries, humanism also progresses. Even Rousseau and Diderot use only guesses about individual civilizations. But India and China are already beginning to fit into the picture of the world. By his inability to create an original

16
The main term our university science, which designates the study of this kind of cultures with the term "non-classical philosophy", admits that we are talking about the same humanistic movement that fills a new territory (just as for the ancients, everything that came after physics was called metaphysics ). Showing interest in the last of the civilizations in decline, in the so-called primitive societies, ethnology appears as the third stage in the development of humanism. This stage is at the same time the last, since after it there is nothing left for a person to discover in himself - at least extensively (because there is another kind of deep research, the end of which is not visible).
But there is another side of the problem. The scope of the first two types of humanism - classical and non-classical - was limited not only quantitatively, but also qualitatively. Ancient civilizations disappeared from the face of the earth and are available to us only thanks to texts and cultural monuments. As regards the peoples of the East and the Far East, which continue to exist, the method of their study remained the same, because it was believed that civilizations so distant could merit interest only because of their most refined products.
Ethnology is the realm of new civilizations and new problems. These civilizations do not give written documents into our hands, because they have no written language at all. And since the level of their technical development, as a rule, is very low, they have left us no monuments of fine art. Therefore, it becomes necessary for the ethnologist to equip his humanism with new tools of research.
Ethnological methods are both cruder and more subtle than those of ethnology's predecessors, the philologists and historians. These societies are extremely difficult to access, and in order to penetrate into them, the ethnologist must put himself outside (physical anthropology, technology, prehistory), and also deep inside, because he is identified with the group in which he lives, and must pay special attention - since he is deprived of other information - the subtlest nuances of the mental life of the natives.
Ethnology goes beyond traditional humanism in every way. Its field of study covers the entire inhabited earth, and its methodology accumulates procedures related to both the humanities and the natural sciences.
Three successive types of humanism integrate and advance human knowledge in three directions: first, in a spatial sense, the most "superficial" (both literally and figuratively); secondly, in the set of research tools: we are gradually beginning to understand that if, due to the special properties of the "residual" societies that have become the subject of its study, anthropology has been forced to forge new tools of knowledge, they can be fruitfully applied to the study of other societies, including and our own.
Thirdly, classical humanism was limited not only by its
object - the people who benefited from it also made up

privileged class. Even the exotic humanism of the 20th century was associated with the industrial and commercial interests that fed it and to which it owed its existence. After the aristocratic humanism of the Renaissance and the bourgeois humanism of the XIX century. ethnology marks - for the complete cosmos that our planet has become - the emergence of a universal humanism.
Seeking its source of inspiration in the most humiliated and despised societies, it proclaims that nothing human is alien to man, and thus becomes the pillar of democratic humanism, opposed to all previous types of humanism that were created for privileged civilizations. By mobilizing the methods and tools borrowed from all sciences, and putting all this at the service of man, ethnology wants to reconcile man and nature in a single universal humanism.

RUSSO-FATHER OF ANTHROPOLOGY

The invitation of an anthropologist to this anniversary celebration gives our young science an opportunity to pay tribute to a man famous for the versatility of his genius, covering literature, poetry, philosophy, history, ethics, sociology, pedagogy, music, botany - and these are not all aspects of his work.
Rousseau was not just a sharp and subtle observer of rural life, a passionate reader of books about distant travels, a skillful and experienced researcher of foreign customs and beliefs: it can be safely asserted that anthropology was predicted and founded by him a whole century before its official recognition as a science. He immediately gave it its rightful place among the natural and human sciences already established at that time, predicted in what practical form - with the support of individuals or entire groups - it would be destined to take its first steps.
Rousseau's concept is set out in a long footnote to the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. “I find it difficult to understand,” Rousseau wrote, “why in an age that boasts of its knowledge, there are not two people, of whom one would like to donate twenty thousand thalers from his estate, and the other ten years of his life for a glorious wandering around the world, so that learn to know not only grasses and stones, but at least once - a person and customs ... "And then he exclaims:" ... the whole world is inhabited by peoples about which we know only names, and for all that we undertake to talk about Let us imagine Montesquieu, Buffon, Diderot, d'Alembert, Condillac, or people like them, traveling to educate their compatriots, observing and describing as soon as they can, Turkey, Egypt, Barbaria, Morocco, Guinea, Kaffir land, inner Africa and its eastern coast, the Malabar coast, the Mughal empire, the banks of the Ganges, the kingdoms of Siam, Pegu and Ava, China, Tartary, and especially Japan; and in the other hemisphere, Mexico, Chile, the lands of Magellan, not forgetting the Patagonians, true or false, Tucuman, Paraguay, if possible, Brazil, the Caribs, Florida, and all the wild countries. Such journeys will be the most necessary of all and will require special care. Suppose these new Hercules, on their return from their memorable journeys, will describe at their leisure the nature, manners, and political history of what they saw; and then we ourselves would be able to see the new light that is being born under their pen, and thus we would learn to know our own world ... "("Discourse on the Origin of Inequality", note 10).
Is this not a presentation of the subject of modern anthropology and its method? And the names called by Rousseau - aren't these the names of those very

20
people whom modern anthropologists still revere and strive to imitate, firmly convinced that only by following these people can they earn for their science the respect that has been denied to it for so long? Rousseau was not only the forerunner of anthropology, but also its founder. First, he gave it a practical basis by writing his "Discourse on the origin and foundations of inequality between people", in which he posed the problem of the relationship between nature and civilization and which can be considered the first scientific study in general anthropology; secondly, he gave it a theoretical justification, remarkably clearly and concisely pointing out the independent tasks of anthropology, which are different from the tasks of history and ethics: “When you want to study people, you need to look around you, but in order to study a person, you must learn to look into the distance; properties, one must first observe the differences" ("An Essay on the Origin of Languages", Chapter VIII).
This methodological law, first established by Rousseau, which marked the beginning of anthropology, helps to overcome what at first glance can be considered a double paradox: Rousseau, proposing to study the most distant people, was mainly engaged in the study of one person closest to him - himself; through all his work consistently passes the desire to identify oneself with another while stubbornly refusing to identify with oneself.
These two seeming contradictions, which are, in essence, two sides of the same coin, are the difficulty that every anthropologist must overcome sooner or later in his work.
All anthropologists are in a special debt to Rousseau. After all, Rousseau did not limit himself to determining the exact place of the new science in the complex of human knowledge; with his activity, character and temperament, the strength of his feelings, the properties of his nature and individuality, he helped anthropologists in a brotherly way: he gave them an image in which they recognize their own image, coming in this way to a deeper understanding of themselves - not in an abstract sense, purely intellectual contemplation, but as involuntary bearers of that profound transformation which Rousseau produced in them and which all mankind saw in the personality of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
When an anthropologist embarks on his research, he always finds himself in a world where everything is alien to him and often hostile. He finds himself alone, and only his inner "I" is able to support him and give him the strength to resist and continue to work. In conditions of physical and moral exhaustion caused by fatigue, hunger, inconvenience, violation of established habits, unexpected prejudices that the anthropologist did not suspect - in this difficult interweaving of circumstances, his "I" manifests itself as it really is: bearing on traces of the blows and upheavals of his personal life, which once

not only determined the choice of his career, but also affect its entire length.
This is why, in his work, the anthropologist often chooses himself as the object of his observations. As a result, he must learn to know himself, to look at himself objectively and from a distance, as if he were an outsider. And then the anthropologist turns to this extraneous, other person, enclosed in him and different from his "I", trying to give him a certain assessment. And this becomes an integral part of all the observations that the anthropologist makes on individuals or groups of individuals, on the inner self. The principle of "confession", whether consciously written or unconsciously expressed, underlies all anthropological research.
Isn't it because Rousseau's experience helps us to see this side of anthropology because his temperament, his peculiar personal history and circumstances of life involuntarily placed him in a position typical of an anthropologist? And Rousseau the anthropologist immediately notes the impact these circumstances had on him personally.
“And here they are,” he wrote about his contemporaries, “strangers, strangers to me, no one, finally, since they wanted it. And I, what am I myself, cut off from them and from everything? (the first "Walk").
And an anthropologist, considering for the first time the savages whom he chose as the object of his studies, could exclaim, paraphrasing Rousseau: “Here they are, strangers to me, unfamiliar, no one, finally, for me, since I myself wanted it! And I - what am I myself cut off from them and everything? That's what I need to find first."
In order for a person to see his own image reflected in other people again - this is the only task of anthropology in the study of man - he must first renounce his own idea of ​​\u200b\u200bhimself.
It is to Rousseau that we owe the discovery of this fundamental principle - the only principle on which the science of man could rely. However, this principle remained inaccessible and incomprehensible, since the generally accepted philosophy was based on the Cartesian doctrine "I think, therefore I am" and was limited to the logical proof of the existence of a thinking person, on which the edifice of the science of physics was erected by denying sociology and even biology.
Descartes believed that it is possible to go directly from the inner world of a person to the outer world, losing sight of the fact that between these two extremes stood societies and civilizations, in other words, worlds consisting of people.
Rousseau expressively speaks of himself in the third person - "he" (sometimes dividing even this other person into two different parts, as in the "Dialogues"). Rousseau is the author of the famous saying "I am

22
other" (anthropologists do the same before showing that other people are people like themselves, or in other words, "other" is "I").
Thus, Rousseau appears before us as a great innovator who put forward the concept of absolute objectivity. In his first "Walk" he says that his goal "is to give himself an account of the changes of his soul and their sequence", and then adds: "In a certain sense I will make on myself those experiments that physicists make over the air, to know the daily changes in its condition."
Rousseau revealed to us (truly this amazing revelation, despite the fact that thanks to modern psychology and anthropology it has become more familiar) the existence of another person ("he") who thinks inside me and leads me at first to doubt that it is precisely the "I" who thinks.
Descartes believed that in response to Montaigne's question: "What do I know?" (from which the whole dispute began) - he can answer: "I think, therefore I exist." Witty objecting to Descartes, Rousseau in turn asks: "What am I?" This question cannot be answered until another, more fundamental question is answered: "Do I exist?" So, the answer that can be obtained on the basis of personal experience is given by the concept of the "other" person, discovered by Rousseau and immediately and with the utmost clarity applied by him in research ...
If we assume that with the advent of society, man has undergone a threefold change - from the state of nature to civilization, from feeling to knowledge, and from the animal state to the human (the proof of this is the subject of the Discourse on Inequality), then we will have to admit that man, even in his primal state, some important ability or property that prompted him to do this triple transformation.
And we must therefore recognize that both contradictory elements were latent in this ability from the very beginning - at least as attributes, if not as intrinsic parts of it - making it both natural and cultural, emotional and rational, animal and human. We must also agree that the transformation experienced by a person could be carried out with the incidental awareness of the indicated property or ability by the human mind.
This ability, as Rousseau repeatedly pointed out, is compassion arising from identifying oneself with another - not a relative, not a close one, not a compatriot, but simply with any person, since he is a person, moreover, with any living being, since he is alive.
Thus, primitive man intuitively felt himself identical with all other people. In the future, he never forgot his initial experience, even when the growth of the population forced him to go to new places, to adapt to a new way of life, when his individuality awakened in him.
-.

But such an awakening came only after man gradually learned to recognize the peculiarities of others, to distinguish animals according to their species, to distinguish the human condition from the animal, his individuality from other individuals.
The recognition that people and animals are sentient beings (which, in fact, is the identification), significantly precedes the awareness of the differences between them: first in relation to the features common to all living beings, and only later in relation to human features, opposing their animal traits. With this bold conclusion, Rousseau put an end to the doctrine of Descartes.
If this interpretation is correct, if Rousseau fundamentally subverts the philosophical tradition with the help of anthropology, then the deep unity that marked his versatile work becomes more understandable, it becomes possible to understand why he attached such importance to tasks that at first glance were alien to his work as a philosopher and writer. - I mean the study of linguistics, music and botany.
The development of language, as described by Rousseau in An Essay on the Origin of Languages, follows approximately the same path, although on a different plane than the development of mankind.
In the first period of development, this is the stage when the direct and figurative meaning of things do not differ; and only gradually the direct meaning is freed from the original metaphor, in which every object is mixed with others.
As for music, it seems that no form of expression of feelings is better able to refute the theory of Descartes, who contrasted the material with the spiritual, the mind with bodily substance. Music is an abstract system of both opposites and similarities; it has a double effect on the listener; firstly, the relationship between my "I" and the "other" in me changes, because when I listen to music, I hear myself through it; secondly, the ratio between the mind and the bodily substance is changing - after all, music lives inside me. "A chain of similarities and combinations" ("Confession", book twelfth), but the chain that nature gives us is embodied in "objects that amaze our senses" ("Walks of a lonely dreamer", the seventh "Walk").
In the same terms, Rousseau defines his approach to botany, arguing that, by following this path, he hopes to find the unity of the sensible and the rational, because it is a natural state of man that existed at the moment of awakening of his consciousness, but then did not manifest itself, with the exception of individual and rare cases.
Rousseau's thought develops according to two principles: the principle of identifying oneself with another, and even with the most distant "other", including representatives of the animal world, and the principle of refusing to identify with one's "I", i.e., refusing everything that can it is "I" to make "worthy". These two propositions complement one another, and the second is even the starting point for the first: I am not "I", but I am the most

24
the weakest and most modest of the "others". This is the true revelation of the Confession...
As for the anthropologist, does he write anything other than confessions? First, his own, because, as I said, the "discovery" of himself is the driving force that determines his vocation and all his work. And then, in his writings, he creates a confession of his own society, which, through the anthropologist, chooses other societies and other civilizations as an object of study, and precisely among those that seem to be the weakest and most primitive, in order to ascertain to what extent it itself is "unworthy" . When I say "unworthy" I mean that it is not a privileged form of society, but is only one of those other "societies" that have changed over the millennia and which, due to their diversity and short duration, testify that in their collective existence, a person must also know himself as "other" before he dares to claim his own "I".
The revolution in the minds of Rousseau, which preceded and initiated the anthropological revolution, consists in the rejection of the forced identification of any culture with its own culture, or of an individual member of any culture with the image or role that this culture seeks to impose. him.
In both cases, the culture or individual stands up for its own right to a free identification, which can only be carried out outside of man, that is, by comparison with all those beings who live and therefore suffer; and also before a person has become a public figure or has been assigned a historical role, that is, by comparison with a being as such, not yet fashioned and classified.
Thus ego and other, freed from the antagonism that philosophy alone has tried to encourage, regain their unity. The primordial connection finally renewed helps them to unite "us" against "them", that is, against a society antagonistic to man, which man feels ready to reject, since by his example Rousseau teaches how to avoid the intolerable contradictions of civilized life.
For if it is true that nature has expelled man and that society continues to oppress him, then man can at least reverse the poles of the dilemma and seek communion with nature in order to reflect there on the nature of society. This seems to me to be the main idea of ​​The Social Contract, Letters on the Botanist, and Walks of the Lonely Dreamer...
But it is precisely now for all of us, who have experienced the warning delivered by Rousseau to his readers - "the horror of those unfortunate people who will live after you" - Rousseau's thought has received its highest development and reached its fullness.

In this world, perhaps more cruel to man than ever, where murders, tortures, mass exterminations take place, which we, of course, do not always deny, but try not to notice as something insignificant, since they concern distant from us peoples who allegedly endure these sufferings for our good, or at least in our name; in a world whose borders are shrinking more and more as its population grows; in a world where not a single particle of humanity can consider itself completely safe - in this world, the fear of life in society hangs over each of us.
It is precisely now, I repeat, that the thought of Rousseau, who pointed out to us the vices of civilization, which is resolutely incapable of laying the foundations of virtue in man, will help us to discard illusions, the disastrous result of which we, alas, can already see in ourselves and on ourselves.
We began by separating man from nature and placing him above it. In this way we thought to destroy the most inalienable property of man, namely, that he is formerly a living being. By closing our eyes to this common property, freedom was given to all sorts of abuses.
Never in the last four centuries of its existence has Western man had a better opportunity than now to understand that by appropriating right to establish barriers between the human and animal worlds, giving the first everything that he takes away from the second - he descends into a kind of hellish circle. For this barrier, becoming more and more impenetrable, is used to separate some people from others and to justify in the eyes of an ever-shrinking minority its claim to be the only human civilization. Such a civilization, based on the principle and idea of ​​an elevated self-image, is rotten from its very birth.
Only Rousseau could rebel against this egocentrism. He writes in the above-quoted footnote to the Discourse on Inequality that he prefers to attribute the great apes of Africa and Asia, known to us from inept descriptions of travelers, to people of a race unknown to us, rather than risk denying human nature to beings who, perhaps, it possess.
And the first mistake would be less serious than the second, because respect for others arises involuntarily in a person even before calculation and sophistry are put into action. Rousseau finds proof of the responsiveness inherent in man in "an innate aversion to the sight of suffering of his own kind." And this discovery makes him see in every suffering being a being similar to himself and endowed, therefore, with an inalienable right to compassion.
Because the only guarantee that one day other people will not treat us like animals is that all people, and above all we ourselves, will be able to realize ourselves as suffering beings, to cultivate the ability to compassion, which

26
nature replaces "laws, morality and virtue" and without which, as we now understand, there can be neither law, nor morality, nor virtue in society.
Thus, the identification proclaimed by Rousseau with all forms of life, starting with the most modest, means for modern man not a call for a nostalgic return to the past, but the principle of collective wisdom and collective action. In a world whose overcrowding makes it increasingly difficult, and therefore more necessary, to respect each other, this is the only principle that could allow people to live together and build a harmonious future.
Perhaps this principle was already laid down in the great religions of the Far East, but in the West, where from the time of antiquity hypocrisy and neglect of the truth that a person is a living and suffering creature, the same as all other creatures, before how did he separate himself from them due to secondary factors, who else, if not Rousseau, conveyed this truth to us? "I feel a terrible disgust for states that dominate others," writes Rousseau in his fourth letter to Malserb, "I hate the great ones, I hate their state." Does this statement not apply primarily to man who has the intention of dominating other living beings and enjoying special rights, thus leaving the least deserving people the freedom to do the same towards other people and benefit from an idea that is just as dishonorable in this particular form, what was it already in its general form? To imagine oneself as a being eternally or at least temporarily placed above others, to treat people as things, either because of the difference between races and cultures, or as a result of conquest, or for the sake of a "high mission", or simply for the sake of expediency, is an inexcusable sin. which has no justification in a civilized society.
There was a moment in Rousseau's life that was of great importance to him. He remembers him in his declining years, writes about him in his last essay, returns to him in his thoughts during lonely walks. What was it? He simply came to his senses after a fall that caused a deep faint. But the feeling of being alive is without a doubt the most "precious feeling" of all, because it is so rare and so indefinite. “It seemed to me that I was filling with my light existence all the objects I perceived ... I had no distinct sense of my personality ... I felt wonderful calmness in my whole being and every time I remember it, I can’t find anything equal to him among all the pleasures I have known." This famous passage from the second "Walk" echoes the passage from the seventh "Walk", explaining these words: "I experience inexplicable delights, upsurges, dissolving, so to speak, in the system of living beings, identifying with all of nature."

The structural approach, proposed by me more than a quarter of a century ago, is often characterized by my Anglo-Saxon colleagues as "idealism" or "mentalism". I was even branded as a Hegelian. Some critics have accused me of treating thought patterns as the cause of culture, and sometimes even of mixing the two. They also believe that I am tackling the structure of the human mind in order to find what they ironically call "Levi-Strausian universals." In this state of affairs, indeed, the study of the cultural contexts in which the mind operates would be of little interest. But if that were the case, why would I have become an anthropologist, instead of following a philosophical career, in line with my academic background? And why do I pay so much attention to the smallest ethnographic details in my books? Why do I strive to accurately identify the plants and animals known by each community; the various technical purposes for which they are intended; and if these plants or animals are edible, how are they prepared for consumption - that is, boiled, stewed, steamed, baked, grilled, pan-fried, or even dried or smoked? For years I was surrounded by terrestrial and celestial charts, which enabled me to trace the position of the stars and constellations at different latitudes and at different times of the year; treatises on geology, geography and meteorology; works on botany; books about mammals and birds.

The reason for this is very simple: it is impossible to undertake any kind of research without first collecting and checking all the data. As I have often noted, no general principle or deductive process enables us to anticipate the contingent circumstances that form the history of each human group, the particular features of its environment, or the unpredictable way each of them has chosen to interpret particular historical events or aspects of the natural environment.

In addition, anthropology is an empirical science. Each culture is a unique situation that can be described and understood only at the cost of the most diligent attention. Only such a searching eye reveals not only facts, but also criteria, varying from culture to culture, according to which each assigns meaning to certain animals or certain plant species, minerals, celestial bodies and other natural phenomena in order to build a logical system. Empirical study allows one to approach the structure. For even if the same elements are retained here and there, experience proves that these identical elements can be attributed to different causes; and vice versa, different elements sometimes perform the same function. Each culture builds on a small number of distinctive features of its environment, but it is impossible to predict what they are or for what purpose they will be taken. Moreover, the raw material offered by the environment for observation and reflection is so rich and varied that the mind can only comprehend a fraction of it. The mind can use it to develop some system in an infinite number of other conceivable systems; nothing predetermines a privileged fate for one of them.

Thus, at first we stumble upon the factor of arbitrariness, from which arise difficulties that experience alone can solve. Nevertheless, although the choice of elements may be arbitrary, they become organized into a system, and the connections between them form a whole. In Untamed Thought, I wrote that "the principle underlying classification can never be postulated in advance; it can only be discovered a posteriori by ethnographic observation—in other words, by experience." The coherence of any classification system is strictly dependent on constraints specific to the functioning of the human mind. These constraints determine the formation of symbols and explain their opposition and the way they are connected.

Therefore, ethnographic observation does not force us to choose between two hypotheses: either a plastic mind passively shaped by external influences, or universal psychological laws that give rise everywhere, induce the same qualities and act regardless of history and the specifics of the environment. Rather, what we observe and try to describe is an attempt to realize something like a compromise between certain historical trends and the specific characteristics of the environment, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, mental requirements, which in each area are a continuation of previous requirements of the same kind. By adapting to each other, these two orders of reality are mixed, thus creating a meaningful whole.

There is nothing Hegelian in such a concept. Instead of coming from nowhere, in the mind of a philosopher, who would probably make a cursory survey limited to a small part of the globe and a few centuries of the history of ideas, these limitations of the human mind are discovered by an inductive process. We can only reach them by patiently considering how they are reflected, in similar or dissimilar ways, in the ideologies of dozens or even hundreds of societies. Moreover, we do not regard these restraints as acquired at once and for all, and we do not take them as a key that will allow us, in a psychoanalytic way, to unlock all locks henceforth. Instead, we are led by linguists: they are well aware that common properties can be identified in the world of grammar, and they hope that they can discover linguistic universals. But linguists at the same time know that the logical system formed by such universals will be much poorer than any particular grammar, and will never be able to replace it. They also know that learning a language in general and individual languages ​​that have existed or still exist is an endless matter and that a finite set of rules will never exhaust the general properties of these languages. When the universals are comprehended, they will act as open structures: it will always be possible to replenish, expand or correct the previous definitions.

Thus, two kinds of determinism operate simultaneously in social life; and it is not surprising that, since they are different in nature, each of them, from the point of view of the other, may appear arbitrary. Behind every ideological construction, there are older constructions. And they echo back in time, back to a hypothetical moment when hundreds of thousands, maybe more years ago, humanity stumbled over and expressed its first myths. And it is also true that at every stage of this complex process every ideological construct is modified by the prevailing technological and economic circumstances; they distort, deform it in several directions. No general mechanism, which may underlie the various ways in which the human mind operates in different societies, at different stages of historical development, operates in a vacuum. These mental gears must mesh with other mechanisms; observation never reveals the separate action of the parts of a whole mechanism; we can only confirm the results of their interaction.

These views, which are by no means philosophical, are inspired by the strictest ethnographic examination of any particular problem. I will try to illustrate this practice with examples taken from mythological analysis with which I have been dealing for twenty years.

The Heiltsuk Indians, or Bella Bella, are closely related to their southern neighbors on the coast of British Columbia, the Kwakiutl. Both groups tell the story of a child - a boy or a girl - being kidnapped by a supernatural cannibal, usually a woman, called Kawaka by the Bella Bella and Dzonokwa by the Kwakiutl. As in the Kwakiutl story, the bella bella explain that the child manages to escape; the cannibal is killed or put to flight. Her considerable wealth goes to the father of the hero or heroine and he distributes it. This explains the origin of the potlatch.

Sometimes the Bella Bella versions differ from the Kwakiutl versions in a curious incident. The supernatural helper instructs the girl or boy how to get rid of the cannibal: when the cannibal, as usual, at the lowest point of low tide goes to collect shellfish, the child should collect siphons - the cannibal does not eat this part of the shellfish, she throws them out; the child needs to put these organs on his fingertips and brush them off at the cannibal, who will be so frightened that she will fall back into the abyss and die.

Why would a mighty cannibal be afraid of something so harmless and insignificant as the siphons of mollusks - those soft little rods through which mollusks take in and release water? (These siphons are also quite handy for holding a steamed oyster while dipping it in melted butter, a famous specialty of a restaurant near Times Square where I lived in New York.) The bella bella myths don't include this point. To solve the problem, we must apply the indispensable rule of structural analysis: when a version of a myth contains a detail that seems anomalous, we should ask ourselves if this version does not contradict another version that is usually not so far removed from it.

The terms deviant and normal should be understood here relatively. The version chosen for correlation will be called "direct", and relative to it others will be "inverted". But it would equally be possible to proceed in the other direction, except in certain cases (examples are provided in my editions of the Science of Mythologies) where the transformation can only take place in a certain direction. In this case, the "direct" version is easy to localize. She is found among the Chilcothin, who live in the inland part, east of the mountains of the coast. But they were well acquainted with the bella bella and often visited them on the other side of the mountains. Undoubtedly, their languages ​​differed, the Chilcotin language belongs to the Athabaskan family. In all other respects, the Chilcoteen were similar to the tribes of the coast, from whom they borrowed many features of their social organization.

What do we learn from the Chilcotin myth? It says that a baby boy, crying all the time (like the little girl in one version of bella bella), is kidnapped by Owl, a powerful sorcerer. He treats the boy well, and he grows up, content with his lot. When years later friends and parents open his haven, he refuses to follow them. Finally he was convinced. When the Owl goes in pursuit of a small detachment, the boy frightens him by putting the horns of a mountain goat on his fingers and waving them like claws. He took with him all the dentalia shells (small, white, single-shelled mollusks that look like tiny elephant tusks), of which the Owl had been the sole owner until that time.

It is in this way that the Indians obtained these shells, which are the most precious thing they possess.

Since the rest of the Chilcotin myth is irrelevant to our discussion, I will omit it, as well as the Salish-speaking versions of the Bella Coola, neighbors of both the Bella Bella and the Chilcoteen. In these versions, the case of the mountain goat's horns is preserved and the bella bella myth is transformed, giving the cannibal, which the bella bella call Snenik, characteristics that are strictly opposite to those of the bella bella and the Kwakiutl. It is from this special point of view that these versions should be analyzed.

Let's confine ourselves to the bella bella and chilcotin myths, because they are organized in the same way and only the appropriate connotations attributed to each element are inverted. A crying boy among the Chilcotins, a crying girl in a more developed version of the bella bella is abducted by a supernatural being: in one case a cannibal in human form, in the other a benevolent sorcerer in the form of a bird. To get rid of the kidnapper, the hero or heroine resorts to the same strategy: they attach artificial claws to their fingers. But these claws are either the horns of a goat or the siphons of a mollusk—in other words, either something hard and harmful coming from the land, or something soft and harmless coming from the sea. As a result, among the Chilcotins, the Owl falls into the water and does not drown, while among the Bella Bella, the ogre falls on the rocks and dies. So the horns and siphons are the means leading to the end. But what exactly is this goal? The hero or heroine becomes the first owner of either the dentalia shells or the riches that belong to the cannibal. Now all the mythological and ritual data we have concerning this Kawaka, or Dzonokwa as it is called by the Kwakiutl, testify that all its wealth comes from the land, since it consists of copper plates, furs, processed skins and dried meat. In other myths of bella bella and kwakiutl, the same cannibal - an inhabitant of land, an inhabitant of forests and mountains - does not catch fish, but constantly steals salmon from the Indians.

Thus, each myth explains how a certain end was achieved by equally certain means. And since we are considering two myths, each has a distinctive means and a distinctive purpose. It is noteworthy that one of the means turns out to be close to water (siphons of mollusks), and the other to earth (horns of a goat). The first leads to a goal (the wealth of the cannibal) that has to do with the land, and the second leads to a goal (the shells of dentalia) that has a marine character. As a result, the "water remedy" leads, so to speak, to the "land goal"; and vice versa, "a means of land" - to a "water goal".

In addition, there are additional connections between the means from one myth and the goal or result from another. The siphon of the clam, the remedy in the Bella Bella myth, and the shells of dentalia, the goal in the Chilcotin myth, obviously have something in common, both coming from the sea. However, this is opposed by the role assigned to them in native culture: for the Chilcoteen, dentalia shells are far from the most precious thing the sea has to offer; and the myth of bella bella does not attach any value to the siphons of mollusks even as food, since the ogre throws them away without eating.

Well, what about the horns of the mountain goat, the remedy in the Chilcotin myth, and the earthly riches of the cannibal, the acquisition of which is the result in the myth of bella bella? Unlike sea shells, both belong to the land world. Goat horns, however, are not edible, but are used to make ceremonial objects - those wonderfully crafted and sculpted spoons that we admire in museums. These are works of art and emblematic objects; they are wealth. In addition, while not being edible, spoons, like the clam siphon, are a convenient means (cultural, not natural) to bring food to the mouth of the eater. If, nevertheless, despite the common origin, the remedy from one myth and the result from another myth are opposed, then a parallel is established between the result from the first myth and the remedy from the second, which also have a common origin (from land, not from the sea), just opposite.

I just outlined the dialectical connection between the two myths of neighboring tribes - this scheme can easily be enriched and refined. However, this is enough to demonstrate that there are rules that allow one to transform one myth into another, and that these complex rules are still intelligible. Where do these rules come from? We do not invent them in the course of analysis. They are, so to speak, isolated from the myths. Once formulated by the researcher, they come to the surface as a visible manifestation of the laws that govern the train of thought of people when they hear their neighbors expound one of their myths. Listeners may borrow myth, but not without distorting it through mental operations beyond their control. They will appropriate it so they don't feel inferior, while remodeling it, consciously or unconsciously, until it becomes their own.

Such manipulations do not occur at random. The inventory of American mythology(1), which I have been busy with for many years, clearly shows that the various myths result from a transformation subject to certain rules of symmetry and inversion: the myths reflect each other along a list of axes. To explain this phenomenon, one must accept the conclusion that mental operations obey laws similar to those that operate in the physical world. These constraints, which keep ideological constructions within an isomorphism where only certain kinds of transformation are possible, exemplify the first type of determinism I mentioned.

However, this is only half the story: other questions remain unanswered. If we decide to take the Chilcotin myth as a reference, then we must ask why these Indians needed to explain the origin of the dentalia shells, and why they did it in such a bizarre way, giving them a terrestrial rather than an oceanic origin? Assuming also that some necessity required the bella bella to change the image of the mountain goat's horns used as claws, one must understand why they had to choose mollusk siphons from many objects in their natural environment that could perform the same function? Why, finally, did the bella bella turn out to be uninterested in the origin of dentalia shells, turning all their attention to another kind of wealth? These questions oblige us to turn to the second type of determinism, which introduces external constraints based on ideology. But neither the characteristics of the natural environment, nor the way of life, nor even the social and political circumstances were exactly the same between the tribes of the interior of the mainland and the tribes of the coast.

Dentalia shells were highly valued by the tribes of the interior, the eastern neighbors of the Chilcotin, who belonged to the language branch of the settlements. They obtained these shells from the Chilcotin and therefore called them "dental people" (Teit, 1909, p. 759). Consequently, in order to protect their monopoly and give it more prestige in the eyes of their neighbors, the Chilcoteen were directly interested in making others believe that they possessed an inexhaustible supply of dentalia shells that appeared in their territory as a result of supernatural events especially favorable to them.

In doing so, they concealed a completely different reality: in fact, the Chilcotin obtained dentalia shells through trade, through the mountain paths, with coastal tribes, who had direct access to the products of the sea. According to old reports, these coast tribes were on friendly terms with the Chilcoteen, whom they never fought, "as they rarely ventured far from their native home on the seashore or on the river reach, and seem to have experienced awe, entering into forbidden and unknown mountain stronghold" (Teit, 1909, p. 761). Indeed, the Salish of the interior, like the Thompson and Ker-d-Alen tribes, unlike the Chilcotin, were not aware of the actual source of the dentalia shells; they had a series of myths that is both a symmetrical and inverted form of the myths owned by the suppliers of these shells. They say that in ancient times dentalia shells existed in their territory and that after certain events they disappeared, so that at present the Indians can obtain these precious objects only through trade.

A completely different situation has developed with regard to products and land, and the sea among the tribes of the coast. For them, the products of the sea belonged to technological and economic activities: fishing or collecting shells was a common occupation of the Indians of the coast, who either ate these products themselves or sold them to the Chilcotin. As my neo-Marxist colleagues would say, these benefits were an integral part of their practice. On the other hand, the coastal Indians paid with seafood for sushi products coming from those mountains where they did not dare to go and whose inhabitants visited them in order to exchange sushi products for products of the sea. These inverse connections represent a formal analogy to those that we have found between the respective myths at the ideological level: that is, the fact that in myths a means associated with the earth leads to a result associated with the sea; while in the second case - just another roundabout way. Now it becomes clear why the tribes of the coast did not need to "mythologize" sea shells - those belonged to their practice; and also why (if the mythological transformation, as is often the case, takes the form of a chiasma(2)) the shift of the marine element from the category of result to that of means can be appropriately achieved by replacing the siphons of molluscs with the shells of dentalia. Relative to each other, they are in the same doubly inverted relationship, which prevails between the corresponding ecologies of the two types of peoples.

Consider first the horns of the mountain goat. Their sharp end - sharply curved and in this sense convex - makes them a dangerous weapon; while the concave and hollow base allows spoons to be carved out of them, and thus makes them an integral part of wealth. On the contrary, dentalia shells are considered wealth precisely because of their convex hard outer shell. As for the internal contents of these single-leaved, it is an insignificant mollusk, unsuitable for food. Thus, in all these relationships, dentalia shells are opposed to mollusk siphons - hollow soft tubules, internal appendages of bivalves, which play an important role in the diet of coastal populations. However, the bella bella myth denies any nutritional value of mollusc siphons, which turn out to be (paradoxically) organs that attract attention, but are of no practical interest. So, they can easily be "mythologized" for the opposite reason that leads the people of the inner part to explain the origin of dentalia shells: they are highly valued, but they do not have them; the people of the coast have shellfish, but their siphons are not particularly prized.

The mind cannot remain passive when faced with the technological and economic conditions associated with the natural environment. It doesn't just reflect these conditions; he reacts to them and transforms them into a logical system. In addition, the mind not only reacts directly to environmental conditions, but also realizes that there are various natural environments to which their inhabitants react in their own way. All these environments are integrated into ideological systems that are obedient to others - mental constraints that force groups with different views to follow the same pattern of development. Two examples will allow me to demonstrate this idea.

The first is from the same area as the former: the Seachelt Indians, a Salish language group, settled north of the Fraser River Delta. These Indians are strangely distorting the myth that is common west of the Rocky Mountains - from the Columbia Basin to the Fraser Basin. In its usual form, this is the myth of the Trickster persuading his son or grandson to climb a tree in order to get the feathers of birds nesting in the top. With the help of a magical means, he causes the tree to grow so that the hero cannot descend and ends up being thrown into the sky world. After many adventures, he manages to return to earth, where the Trickster took on the physical form of a hero in order to seduce his wives. In revenge, the hero orchestrates his evil parent's fall into the river, which carries him to the sea, where selfish supernatural women keep the salmon locked up. These women save the drowning Trickster and invite him to their place. And he destroys their dam by cunning and frees the fish. From that time on, salmon travel freely and annually rise up the rivers, where the Indians catch and eat them.

The fact that salmon are caught during their annual spawning season, when they return from the ocean and travel up the rivers to spawn in fresh water, is no doubt born of experience. From this point of view, the myth reflects the objective conditions that are vital for the native economy, which the myth is intended to explain. But the Sichelts tell the story differently. The father falls into the water at sunset under unknown circumstances; the woman rescues him and sends him back home. He wants to take revenge on his son, whom he considers the cause of his misfortune, and sends the young man to the heavenly world with the same magical means as in other versions. In heaven, the hero meets two old women, to whom he reveals that near their dwelling the river abounds with salmon. In gratitude for this, they help the young man return to earth.

Therefore, in the Seachelt version, the drowning of the Trickster and then his rescue by a woman living downstream replaces the first chain of other versions; so the drowning episode is no longer relevant. On the contrary, the salmon episode is related to adventures in the heavenly world; and this celestial chain follows the aquatic chain, not before it. Finally, in heaven, the question is no longer about the release of fish, but only about the discovery that they are there.

How to explain all these deviations? It can be imagined that the Sichelts tried to repeat the story they first heard from their neighbors - the Thompson Indians, who had a complete, detailed version of the myth; not understanding it, Sichelt confused it all. Such a theory would not take into account the decisive fact: the Sichelts lived in a geographical area different from that of their neighbors who lived further inland; it was impossible to catch salmon on their territory, since there were no rivers suitable for salmon spawning. To fish, the Sichelts had to wade through the Scylis tribes in the middle reaches of the Garrison River - such intrusions sometimes led to bloody conflicts.

Since the Sicheltas did not have salmon, they could not attribute their release to one of their cultural heroes; or, if they did, such liberation might take place not on earth, but in heaven, in an imaginary world where no experience is required. Such a shift renders the release episode meaningless: the Sichelts did not question how the salmon were freed to go up the rivers, a phenomenon contrary to local experience; since there were no salmon in their dominions, the Sichelts (unlike their neighbors) preferred to ascribe to them a metaphysical abode rather than admit them to an actually ecologically inferior position.

If the local ecology entails a change in any part of history, then mental constraints require that other parts of it be changed accordingly. So the story takes a strange turn: the son takes revenge for no apparent reason for the persecution that did not take place; the father visits the inhabitants of the sea without releasing the salmon; the discovery by the son of salmon in the sky replaces the release of them by the father in the ocean, etc.

There is another lesson from the previous example. If a simple one-way relationship prevailed between techno-economic infrastructure and ideology, as between cause and effect, then one would expect that the Sichelt myths explain why there are no salmon in their territory or why, having once possessed them, they lost them to the benefit of their neighbors; or they might not have the salmon myth at all. In reality, however, something quite different is revealed: absent salmon are made mythically present - and thus the idea is promoted that although salmon are present somewhere, they are nonetheless absent exactly where they should be. The mythological model, which contradicts experience, not only does not disappear, it does not even undergo a change that would allow it to be brought closer to experience. It continues to live its own life, and any transformation of it satisfies not the limitations of experience, but mental limitations, completely independent of the first. In our case, the axis with the poles of land and sea - the only "true" axis - from the point of view of the environment, as well as techno-economic activity - fluctuates from horizontal to vertical. The pole of the sea becomes the pole of the sky; the land pole connotes low, not high; the empirical axis becomes imaginary. The shift entails other shifts that have no comprehensible connection with reality, but are the result of a formal necessity.

Thus, the Sichelt myth impressively illustrates two kinds of influence on mythological thinking, of which there are many other examples. I will confine myself to one particularly striking example, since a problem such as the one I have discussed is interpreted in the same way in other ecological and cultural contexts.

For the peoples belonging to the Algonquin linguistic family who lived in the Canadian ecological zone, the porcupine was a real animal. They hunted him tirelessly for his meat, which they were fond of, and also for his needles, which were used by women in embroidery. The porcupine also played a prominent role in mythology. One myth tells of two girls who, walking to a remote village, find a porcupine nesting in a fallen tree. One of the girls pulls out the needles from the poor animal and discards them. An animal in pain magically causes a blizzard, and the girls die from the cold. In another myth, two lonely sisters act as heroines. One day, wandering far from home, they find a porcupine nesting in a fallen tree, and one of the girls turns out to be so stupid that she sits on the rodent's back, so that all its needles are stuck in her ass. For a long time, she fails to recover from her wounds.

Nowadays, the Arapaho - also part of the Algonquian linguistic family - are making the porcupine the hero of a completely different story. According to her, the brothers Sun and Moon are arguing about the type of wife that each of them would like to marry: which is better - a frog or a human girl? Luna, who prefers the latter, turns into a porcupine to seduce an Indian girl. She is so hungry for needles that she climbs higher and higher on a tree, on which the porcupine's refuge is supposedly located. Thanks to this trick, the porcupine manages to lure the girl into the heavenly world, where the Moon regains her human form and marries her.

What are we to do with the differences between these stories, which, with the exception of the porcupine in both, seem to have nothing in common? Widely distributed in the Canadian ecological zone, the porcupine was rarely seen (if not completely absent) on the plateau, where the Arapaho moved several centuries ago. In the new environment, they could not hunt porcupine, and in order to get quills, they had to trade with northern tribes or undertake hunting expeditions to foreign territory. It seems that these two conditions have had an impact both on the technological and economic levels, and on the mythological level. Products made by Arapaho using needles are considered the best in. North America, and their art was deeply saturated with mysticism, which can hardly be found anywhere else. For the Arapaho, needle-finishing was a ritual activity; their women did not undertake this kind of work without fasting and prayer, in the hope of supernatural help, which they considered essential to the success of the work. As far as Arapaho mythology is concerned, we have just seen that it radically changes the characteristics of the porcupine. From a magical animal, an inhabitant of the earth, a master of cold and snow, he becomes - as in neighboring tribes - the animal appearance of a supernatural being, an anthropomorphic, celestial inhabitant, responsible for biological periodicity, and not for meteorological and physical periodicity. The myth does clarify that the Moon's wife becomes the first of the women who tend to have periods regularly, every month, and when pregnant - resolve after a set period of time.

Therefore, as we move from the Northern Algonquins to the Arapaho, the empirical axis - horizontal, connecting near and far - shifts to an imaginary axis - vertical, connecting heaven and earth. This is exactly the same transformation that we have seen in the Salish: it occurs when an animal that is both technologically and economically significant in a particular geographic situation is lost. In addition, as with the Salish, other transformations follow, determined not from the outside, but from the inside. Once we understand that, despite their different source, these transformations are interconnected, that they are structurally part of the same set, it becomes clear that the two stories are in fact the same and that distinct rules allow one to turn into the other. .

In one case, two women are sisters, they belong to different zoological species - a human and an amphibian. The sisters move horizontally from near to far, while the other two women move vertically from low to high. Instead of, like the first heroine, plucking out the quills of the porcupine, the second heroine breaks out of her village, so to speak, with the quills she craves. One girl recklessly throws away needles; the other covets them as precious objects. In the first group of stories, a porcupine nests on a dead tree that has fallen to the ground, while in the second, the same animal climbs up an endlessly growing tree. And if the first porcupine slows down the sisters' journey, then the second cunning makes the heroine climb up faster and faster. One girl bends her back in front of a porcupine; the other reaches out, trying to grab it. The first porcupine is aggressive; the second is a seducer. While the former torments her from behind, the latter deflowers, that is, "pierces" her from the front.

Considered separately, none of these changes can be attributed to the characteristics of the natural environment; all together they result from a logical necessity that connects each of them with the others in a series of operations. If an animal as central to technology and economics as the porcupine is lost in a new environment, it can only retain its role in another world. As a result, low becomes high, horizontal becomes vertical, inside becomes outside, and so on. The need for coherence is so strong that in order to maintain the same structure of connections, people prefer to distort the image of their environment rather than admit that the connections with the actual environment have changed.

All these examples show how the two kinds of determinism I have mentioned are expressed: one, which is imposed on mythological thinking by the limitations inherent in connection with a particular environment; the other is derived from stable mental constraints independent of the environment. Such an interaction would be difficult to understand if human relationships with the environment and with the limitations inherent in the mind arose from irresistibly separate orders. It is time to consider these mental restraints, the all-encompassing influence of which leads to the assumption that they have a natural basis. If not, then we run the risk of falling into the trap of the old philosophical dualism. The desire to define the biological nature of man in the language of anatomy and physiology in no way alters the fact that his bodily nature is also the environment in which people exercise their abilities; this organic environment is so closely tied to the physical environment that a person comprehends the second only through the first. So, there must be a certain similarity between sense data and their processing in the brain - the means of this comprehension - and the physical world itself.

The essence of what I am trying to define can be illustrated by referring to the distinction in linguistics between "ethical" and "emic" levels. These terms of convenience, derived from phonetic and phonemic, designate two mutually complementary approaches to linguistic sounds: either how they are perceived (or rather thought to be perceived) by the ear, even by acoustic means, or how they are detected after they are described and analyzed, moving from raw acoustic material in depth to its forming units. The anthropologist, following the linguist, seeks to elevate empirical ideologies to the interaction of binary oppositions and to the rules of transformation.

While such a distinction, which may actually exist, is convenient, it would be a mistake to push it too far and give it an objective status. The work of the Russian neuropsychologist A.R. Luria (1976)(3) successfully brings home to us that articulated language is not made up of sounds. He showed that the cerebral mechanisms responsible for the perception of noises and musical sounds are quite different from those that allow us to perceive the so-called sounds of language; and that damage to the left temporal lobe destroys the ability to analyze phonemes, but leaves the musical ear intact. To explain this apparent paradox, one has to recognize that the brain, in linguistic attention, does not highlight sounds, but distinctive features. Moreover, such features are both logical and empirical, because they were recorded on the screen with acoustic devices that cannot be suspected of any mentalism or idealism. Therefore, only the truly "ethical" level is the "emic" level.

Modern studies of the mechanisms of vision suggest similar conclusions. The eye doesn't just photograph objects: it encodes their distinctive characteristics. They do not consist in the qualities that we attribute to the things around us, but in the totality of connections. In mammals, specialized cells in the cerebral cortex perform a kind of structural analysis that, in other animal families, is already being undertaken and even completed by cells in the retina and ganglia. Each cell - retina, ganglia or brain - responds only to stimuli of a certain type: to the contrast between movement and stillness; the presence or absence of color; changes in lightness; on objects whose outlines are positively or negatively distorted; on the direction of movement - straight or sideways, from right to left or vice versa, horizontal or vertical; and so on. Having received all this information, the mind, so to speak, recreates objects that were not really perceived as such. The analytical function of the retina predominates mainly in species without a cerebral cortex, such as the frog; but the same can be said about protein. And among the higher mammals, in which the brain takes over the analytical function, the cells of the cortex only collect those operations that have already been noted by the sense organs. There is every reason to believe that the mechanism of encoding and decoding, which transmits incoming data through several modulators inscribed in the nervous system in the form of binary oppositions, also exists in humans. Therefore, the immediate data of sensory perception are not raw material - an "ethical" reality, which, strictly speaking, does not exist; from the very beginning they are discriminative abstractions of reality and thus belong to the "emic" level.

If we insist on linking to the "ethical"/"emic" distinction, we will have to change the meanings most often given to these terms. The "ethical" level is accepted as the only reality by writers brought up in the spirit of mechanistic materialism and sensationalist philosophy, and it is reduced to a briefly appearing, random image - what we would call an artifact. On the other hand, it is precisely at the "emic" level that both the work of perception and the most intellectual activity of the mind can meet and, mingling, can express their general subordination to the nature of reality itself. Structural arrangements are not the pure product of mental operations; the sense organs also function structurally; and outside of us there are similar structures in atoms, molecules, cells and organisms. Since these structures, both internal and external, cannot be comprehended on an "ethical" level, it follows that the nature of things is "emic" and not "ethical" and that the only "emic" approach brings us closer to it. When the mind processes those empirical data that were previously processed by the senses, it continues to structurally develop the material received by it in a structured form. And it can only do this if the mind, the body to which the mind relates, and the things perceived by the body and mind , are an integral part of the same reality.

If the stereochemical theory of odors developed by John E. Amoore (1970) is correct, then qualitative diversity, which - at the sensory level - can neither be analyzed nor even adequately described, can be reduced to differences between the geometric properties of scented molecules. Let me add one more example: Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, in their significant book Basic Terms of Color (1969), should not, in my opinion, equate the opposition of white and black and the opposition of consonant and vowel. Indeed, the cerebral maps of the visual and auditory systems seem, each in its own way, to be in broader homology with the systems of consonants and vowels. Using the work of Wolfgang Köhler (1910–1915) and Karl Stumpf (1926), Roman Jakobson showed that the opposition of dark and light corresponds to the phonemes p and t, which, from a phonetic point of view, are opposed to each other as obtuse and acute, and in the vowel system the same opposition shifts to u and i. These two main phonemes are opposed by the third - a; and it, being more intensely chromatic - "less sensitive to the opposition of light and dark" - as Jakobson (1962, p. 324) says - corresponds to the color red, the name of which, according to Berlin and Kay, immediately follows in the language the names for black and white. Imitating physicists, Berlin and Kay distinguish three dimensions of color - hue, saturation, and value (brightness). Thus, it is emphasized that the original triangle, which includes white, black, red, when compared with triangles of consonants and vowels, is compared with two linguistic triangles - insofar as none of them requires a color shade, that is, the most “ethical” dimension of the three ( in the sense that the hue of color can only be determined by the criterion of facticity: the wavelength of light). On the contrary, speaking about a color, that it is saturated or not saturated, that it has the brightness of dark or light, one should consider this in relation to another color: the perception of a connection, a logical act, precedes the individual cognition of objects (5). But the place of red in the basic triangle of colors does not include the hue; red is simply placed on the edge of the axis, the poles of which are determined respectively by the presence or absence of chromatism, which characterizes the entire axis of white and black. Thus, it is always possible to determine the saturation of a color or its brightness using binary oppositions, asking the question - with respect to another color, whose color shade is no longer required to be determined - whether such a characteristic is present or absent. Here, too, the complexities of sensory perception suggest an underlying simple and logical structure.

Only close cooperation between the natural sciences and the humanities will make it possible to reject the old-fashioned philosophical dualism. Instead of opposing the ideal and the real, the abstract and the concrete, the "emic" and the "ethical", it will be recognized that the immediate data of perception are not reducible to any of these terms, do not lie here or there: in other words, they are already encoded by the sense organs. as good as the brain, in the form of text, which, like any text, must be decoded in such a way that it can be translated into the language of other texts. Moreover, the physical-chemical processes by which this original text was originally encoded are not fundamentally different from the analytical procedures that the mind uses in decoding. The ways and means of understanding are not peculiar exclusively to the highest intellectual activity, for understanding is taken for the development of intellectual processes, being realized already in the sense organs themselves.

Vulgar materialism and sensualistic empiricism put man in direct confrontation with nature, not imagining that the latter has structural properties, although undoubtedly richer, but not significantly different from those codes by which the nervous system deciphers them, or from the categories developed by the mind. in order to return to the original structure of reality. To admit that the mind is able to understand the world only because the mind itself is a part and product of this world does not mean to be a mentalist or an idealist. It is confirmed daily that, in seeking to understand the world, the mind operates in ways that appear to be no different from those that have unfolded in the world since the beginning of time.

Structuralists have often been accused of playing with abstractions that have nothing to do with reality. I have tried to show that, far from being the entertainment of sophisticated intellectuals, structural analysis, penetrating inside, reaches the mind only because its model already exists inside the body.

From the very beginning, visual perception rests on binary oppositions; and neuroscientists should probably agree that this is true of other areas of the brain. Following a path sometimes erroneously accused of being overly intellectual, structuralism discovers and brings to consciousness the deeper truths that are already latent in the body itself; it reconciles the physical and the spiritual, nature and man, reason and the world, and moves towards the only kind of materialism that is consistent with the actual development of scientific knowledge. Nothing could be further from Hegel and even from Descartes, whose dualism we seek to overcome while at the same time adhering to his adherence to rationalism.

It is a delusion that only those who practice structural analysis all the time can clearly grasp the direction and limits of their enterprise: in other words, combine perspectives that have been considered incompatible by adherents of the narrow scientific approach for the past few centuries - sensibility and intelligence, quality and quantity, specifically - the real and the geometric, or, as we say at the present time, "ethical" and "emic." Even ideological creations whose structure is highly abstract (anything that can be subsumed under the heading of "mythology") and which the mind seems to develop without undue subordination to the constraints of the techno-economic infrastructure, remain beyond description and analysis if thorough attention is not paid to environmental conditions and the different ways in which each culture responds to its natural environment. Only an almost slavish reverence for the most concrete reality can inspire us with the certainty that mind and body have not lost their ancient unity.

Structuralism is aware of other, less theoretical and more practical circumstances that justify it. The so-called primitive cultures studied by anthropologists teach the lesson that reality can be meaningful both at the level of scientific knowledge and at the level of sensory perception. These cultures urge us to reject the gap between the intelligible and the sensible proclaimed by obsolete empiricism and mechanism, and to reveal the secret harmony between humanity's eternal search for meaning and the world where we appeared and continue to live - a world built from shape, color, fabric density. , taste and smell. Structuralism teaches us to love and honor nature and the living creatures that inhabit it more, understanding that plants and animals, no matter how humble they may be, not only provided people with a livelihood, but from the very beginning were the source of their strongest aesthetic feelings, and in intellectually and morally - the source of the first and subsequent deep reflections.

LITERATURE

Amoore John E. Molecular basis of odor. Spriengfield. III. 1970.

Berlin Brent, Kay Paul. Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution. Berkeley, 1969.

Jacobson Roman. Selected writings. Vol. 1 Gravenhage, 1962.

Kohler Wolfgang. Akustische Untersuchungen // Zeitschrift fur Psychologie. Leipzig, 1910-1915.

Levi-Strauss C. La pensee sauvage. Paris, 1962.

Luria A. R. Basic problems of neurolinguistios. The Hague, 1976.

Stump/Karl. Die Spraclante. Berlin, 1926.

Teit James A. The Shuswap // Publications of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition. No. 2. Part 7. New York, 1909.

* This work is not a scientific work, is not a final qualifying work and is the result of processing, structuring and formatting the collected information, intended to be used as a source of material for self-preparation of educational work.

Some civilizations, modern or

already disappeared, could or still

know how to solve problems better than us,

although we tried to achieve the same

results.

Claude Levy - Strauss

Introduction

We live in the 21st century. The era of post-industrialization, information, computerization, etc. reigns on our planet. The list of characteristics of the modern world can be continued almost endlessly. In our time, a person simply cannot imagine his life without all sorts of achievements in science and technology. Every day we use various modernized household appliances and machines, even children cannot do without computers and electronic equipment. "Technogenic civilization" reigns on our planet. Any distances have become comprehensible to a person: we drive cars, fly airplanes, cross the ocean on transatlantic liners, use high-speed trains, we even explore outer space. The military potential of the world is enough to destroy our planet in an instant. In a word, our civilization has reached its apogee in science and technology.

When we talk about a modern person, one cannot ignore such an aspect as culture and the spiritual world of the individual. Every day we perform actions, following not only natural instincts, but also certain customs and traditions. Etiquette, culture and norms of behavior have evolved throughout history. Depending on the historical moment, a person followed certain rules of decency. At the moment, we follow these norms almost instinctively, without even thinking that we can do otherwise.

Now let's mentally draw a portrait of a representative of the 21st century: this is an educated, cultured person who follows etiquette and is surrounded by all kinds of highly scientific technologies. This description fits all of us. And now let's imagine that we have been deprived of everything: the achievements of science, everyday household items, we have ceased to follow the rules of conduct and follow our traditions, we are simply left without our usual dwellings and even without clothes. Is it possible for us to survive in such conditions? At first glance it seems that this is impossible. But this is how our ancestors lived thousands of years ago, and this is how they live in the 21st century. In the deserts of Africa and Australia, the impenetrable jungles of the Amazon and in a number of other parts of our planet, we can see entire villages inhabited by primitive tribes. These people live by their own laws, follow their traditions and preach their culture. What is it? How are the remnants of primitiveness and information civilization combined on our planet? Primitiveness in our days - is it a "shame" for mankind or independently and in parallel developing original human society?

More than one generation of historians, anthropologists, ethnologists, philosophers and a number of other scientists tried to answer these questions. Archaic phenomena in the modern world have more than once become the central problem of the scientific world. Evolutionists, functionalists, structuralists and other representatives of various ethnological schools have devoted work to this issue, conducted research, and experimented. One can name a number of scientists whose names are known in the field of study of this issue: Rousseau, Mauss, Jung, Jacobson, Levy-Bruhl, Durkheim, Foucault, Kant, Toynbee, Boas, etc. An outstanding anthropologist, a leading representative of structuralism, a scientist who devoted a significant part of scientific works to primitiveness, is Claude Levi-Strauss (Lêvi-Strauss Claude). This man spent many years among the Indians of tropical Brazil, studying their thinking and culture. "Elementary Structures of Kinship", "Sad Tropics", "Structural Anthropology", "Primitive Thinking", "Mythologies" are the main works of Levi-Strauss devoted to primitive society. In these works, the author sets out the concepts, approaches, methods of studying archaic tribes.

The purpose of this work is to reveal in detail the meaning of the main approaches and methods of Claude Levi-Strauss in the field of studying primitive culture; identify the strengths and weaknesses of his concept; show the attitude to the works of Claude Levi-Strauss of various scientists; and also get acquainted with some biographical aspects of the life of an outstanding ethnologist.

The subject of this work is directly the works of Claude Levi-Strauss: "Sad Tropics", "Structural Anthropology", "Primitive Thinking", "Mythology" - which outlines his approaches to the study of this problem.

Chapter 1

Claude Levi-Strauss received his philosophical education at the Sorbonne. He taught for more than two years in the provincial lyceums of France, served in the army. At the beginning of 1935, he went to Brazil, where a university was being created based on French scientists. The leading motive for Levi-Strauss was not the desire to improve his teaching status by becoming a professor, but the desire to become an ethnologist, gaining access to unique field material.

At the end of the first year of work, Levi-Strauss goes on an expedition to the Cadiouveu and Bororo Indians. In 193, a unique collection of a young scientist-gatherer was shown at an exhibition in Paris, the ethnographic material amounted to more than 600 exhibits, which included hunting tools, utensils, drawings on the skin, pottery, feather decorations, etc. Later, the entire collection was donated to the Museum of Man. In 1937, Levi-Strauss returned to Brazil, but without the goal of teaching. He again undertakes an expedition, the scientist goes to the Nambikvara and Tupi-Kawahib Indians and spends more than a year among them. The collection brought by him throughout 1939 was classified and described before becoming a gift to the Museum of Man.

In 1936 Levi-Strauss published his first article in the Americanist magazine, which reflected the main points of the social family organization of South American Indians. Several more papers were soon published. Levi-Strauss began to attract the attention of US ethnologists, which was a turning point in his career. In 1940, during the Strange War in France, Levi-Strauss, being a Jew, could not find work in his homeland, even in a provincial lyceum, due to the "racial laws" that came into force. He wanted to return to Brazil, but there were problems with obtaining a visa. However, in the same year, the scientist receives an invitation from the United States - in view of Rockefeller's anti-fascist program to save European intellectuals - as a lecturer in sociology in New York, then he becomes a teacher of ethnology for French-speaking immigrants.

Lévi-Strauss spent four years in the USA. At the beginning of 1945, the researcher returned to France, but a few months later he returned to the United States as a cultural adviser at the French embassy in New York. In the same place, in 1948, the first major work “Elementary Structures of Kinship” was completed.

During his stay in the USA, Levi-Strauss was able to continue his professional education thanks to his contacts with famous American ethnologists A. Metro, R. Lowy and others. R. O. Jacobson had a great influence on the scientist in the formation of Levi-Strauss's own structural method. Thanks to Jacobson, Levi-Strauss was able to get acquainted with the works of Russian scientists - the linguist N. S. Trubetskoy and the semiotic ethnologist P. G. Bogatyrev.

Years of search work in libraries, success in ordering, synthesis of material led Levi-Strauss to change professional guidelines. Now it recognizes itself as an "armchair" scientist, it stops its field research.

Since the late 1940s, Levi-Strauss has been the head of the National Center for Scientific Research, he also reads his author's lectures and works as deputy director for ethnology at the Museum of Man. And later, until 1959, he was in charge of the department of religion of non-literate peoples.

1948 - 1958 - "incubation period" in terms of the formulation of a new scientific method. At this time, Levi-Strauss successfully carried out research and teaching activities. The creation of some fundamental works of an outstanding ethnologist also belong to this period: "Elementary structures of kinship" - 1949; "Sad Tropics" - 1955; "Race and History" - 1952; "Structural Anthropology" - 1958. The work "Race and History" was commissioned by UNESCO for a series of anti-racist brochures, it has not lost its scientific relevance in our time and was neither politically topical nor opportunistic. The work had a clear anti-racist focus, but was quite academic. The source of ideas for this work was the ethnological experience gained by Levi-Strauss in the study of the tribes of the Amazon.

The book "The Sad Tropics" is a scientific and artistic work based on field materials collected by an ethnologist during expeditions in tropical Brazil. This work became one of the stages in the construction of a new theory.

In the late 1950s, when Structural Anthropology was published, Levi-Strauss became the founder not only of anthropological structuralism, but of social anthropology as such. In this work, the scientist relied on the achievements of F. Boas and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, E. Durkheim, M. Moss.

1960 - a milestone on the professional path of the founder of structuralism. Levi-Strauss becomes chair of anthropology at the College de France, where non-literate societies were studied. A Social Anthropology Laboratory was also established to enable young scientists to carry out research work.

The Laboratory, which was led by Levi-Strauss, included as its first employees scientists with significant field and theoretical experience: I. Shiva, J. Pouillon, M. Izard, L. Sebag, F. Heritier and others. The laboratory was engaged in the study of all aspects of the life of primitive societies: mythology, beliefs, shamanism, rituals, marital relations, etc. The main object of study for Levi-Strauss himself was mythology in unity with the mechanisms of thinking of the bearers of primitive culture.

In 1973, Levi-Strauss was accepted as a member of the French Academy, which was an expression of recognition of the scientist's contribution to world science. Several academies in Denmark, Norway, the United States and the Royal Anthropological Institute and the University of Quebec and Vishva Bharati in India also recognized him as a member by that time.

In 1991, Claude Levi-Strauss was awarded the Legion of Honor and the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor.

Chapter 2. Levi-Strauss - the leading representative of structuralism.

Levi-Strauss reworks the theoretical results and formulation of the problems of many thinkers - the founders of social science. Its connection with French structural sociology and social anthropology, as well as with structural linguistics, stands out most clearly. He also develops themes drawn from Freud and Marx, and his works contain a significant amount of covert and open polemics with contemporary scientists and public figures. He also argues with colleagues in the anthropological field, primarily with British anthropologists, who often criticized Levi-Strauss's manner of handling empirical materials.

In his work Structural Anthropology, Levi-Strauss appears as the founder of a new discipline - structural anthropology. In defining the subject area of ​​anthropology, he relied on the approach of French researchers - E. Durkheim and M. Moss, and not the work of F. Boas and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, where there was an orientation to the psychological aspects of traditional institutions or group behavior that lay in the basis of common links inherent in the factors of culture. Levi-Strauss pays special attention to the category developed by Mauss - the total social factor, rethinking it in a semiotic key: first moving from an emphasis on the "wholeness of the phenomena" that collectively form this category, to an emphasis on the "network of functional relationships of all these planes." Later, Levi-Strauss, already in the analysis of the totemic complex, proceeds to interpret this relationship as a sign relationship, that is, denoting and signified.

The concept of structure in Levi-Strauss is different than in Durkheim and in structural-functionalist sociology. Social institutions are external phenomena that are created by more fundamental structures. In semiotic structuralism, they tried to develop an analysis of social phenomena by those methods and with the help of the apparatus of concepts that were developed in structural linguistics. In the sixties and seventies, a significant part of the French social-scientific elite was associated in one way or another with structuralist thinking, although there was no mutual agreement on what exactly "structuralism" was, and few of them accepted the designation "structuralist" to your account.

The basis of the Levi-Strauss theory is the position according to which, by applying the methods of structural linguistics, it is possible to recreate a system of symbols that reflect the structure of a particular sphere of culture. The concept of structuralism proceeds primarily from the idea of ​​some eternal, non-historical structure, which has no cause-and-effect relationships and is the fruit of an unknown, ever-existing human consciousness.

Levi-Strauss seeks to show that all the phenomena of our world are a modification of a certain single model, so they can all be systematized and classified. It is possible to establish connections and correspondences between them that reveal their position in relation to each other and to the original model itself. To do this, you need a complete list of individual private factors, then establish the relationship between them, then identify their relationships and group them into a single whole.

Levi-Strauss carries the central idea that the human mind is one at all stages of historical development. All human activity and forms of human consciousness are subject to strict logic. Levi-Strauss seeks to show that structuralism in his understanding does not negate history, that history and ethnology move in the same direction, and that the opposition of the historical method to the ethnographic one is illusory. For him, all human activity and all forms of human consciousness are subject to strict logic. At the same time, it is the rational, and not the emotional and not the subconscious, that prevails in the human consciousness. Levi-Strauss considers each side of everyday life and culture as a closed system, designating their own logical patterns in them. Most often, he found logic in binary oppositions - paired opposites, the main one of which was the opposition "nature - culture".

The main idea of ​​this concept determines the scientist's attitude to archaic phenomena in the modern world. Primitive culture is one of the main objects of research by Levi-Strauss.

The key idea of ​​Levi-Strauss in the study of this issue was that cultural phenomena, such as features of social organization, ritual, mythology, music or language, are manifestations of universal thought processes. The human mind is a well-organized mechanism that organizes any experience. The orderliness that characterizes the human mind is also found in the phenomena of culture. Therefore, Levi-Strauss compared cultural phenomena with each other, using the logical-mathematical concept of structure. The abstract form of analysis is the main characteristic of structuralism, distinguishing it from empirical methods. Lévi-Strauss argued that there are only a limited number of ways in which cultural phenomena can be organized and rejected the division of societies into "primitive" and "advanced".

The concept of structure in Levi-Strauss is largely borrowed from the theories of structural linguistics. In his opinion, non-verbal aspects of culture, such as the exchange of goods and services, form a communication code system that can be interpreted as a language.

Chapter 3. Primitive culture through the prism of the Levi-Strauss concept.

§ 1. Primitive thinking in the structural method of Levi-Strauss

“Levi-Strauss is a talented writer. This has been noted for a long time and by many, but it means Levi-Strauss - a prose writer. Meanwhile, when he writes about a primitive man, he becomes a poet,” these are the words of N. A. Butilov, one of the researchers of the Levi-Strauss concept. Levi-Strauss speaks of primitive man as a "jack of all trades", a kind of craftsman and magician who does everything out of necessity and solves problems with what is at hand. Levi-Strauss completely disagrees with the use of the term "primitive" when referring to primitive tribes existing in our time. “The primitive people are not a people who have lagged behind or retarded in their development, in one area or another they can show such abilities for invention and for putting inventions into practice that leave the achievements of civilized peoples far behind.”

Levi-Strauss says that a "primitive" people cannot be considered a people without history. The history of these peoples is not known to us either because of the scarcity of oral traditions, or because of the insufficient number of archaeological finds. As a result, she becomes inaccessible. But this is still no reason to say that it does not exist.

The scientist does not divide societies into primitive and developed ones. Levi-Strauss introduces the concepts of "cold" and "hot" societies. This classification does not depend on the dynamics of the supply of energy carriers, but on whether the culture is capable of producing new forms, genres, categories, or it prefers to vary the old ones.

Levi-Strauss argues that the natives, who do not have writing and technical progress, live happily, because around them "there is nothing but people." In the book "Sad Tropics", in which he describes in detail the life of the Indians of tropical Brazil. This work can be divided into three parts:

1) savages live happily;

2) civilization destroys their lives;

3) civilization solves life's problems worse than savages do.

Levi-Strauss introduces such concepts as the external "I" (self) and the internal "I" (I). The scientist formulates the assumption that savages cope with complex tasks better because their outer "I" is closely connected with the inner "I".

Primitive man is no different in his inner "I" from the modern. Despite all historical changes, the mind of a civilized person is exactly the same as that of a savage. Their difference from each other lies only in the fact that in modern man the connections between his self and I are broken.

Among the peoples that K. Levi-Strauss studies, he is primarily interested not in special and exotic, but in universal human traits. Creator of structural anthropology explores kinship terminology, folklore, mythology, cooking methods in different societies and cultures. But always behind external differences, he is looking for internal universal structures that underlie any phenomenon, including the universal structures of human thinking.

Levi-Strauss considers the “thirst for objective knowledge” to be a universal human need. He seeks to refute both the ideas of Levy-Bruhl about the lack of cognitive interest among primitive peoples, and the opinion of many ethnologists about their characteristic manifestation of interest only in what is useful for practical use.

Primitive peoples have zoological and botanical knowledge that is striking in richness and accuracy. There are more than 600 plant names in the Pinatubo Indian language, most of which are of no economic interest to them. And all these terms are systematized in a certain way. Therefore, in addition to the single function of any thinking, Levi-Strauss highlights one more common property - the requirement of order. He argues that primitive thinking does not differ from modern thinking in this, since the cognitive work of human thinking consists in ordering, classifying:

“The Navajo Indians divide living beings into two categories based on whether they are endowed with speech. Non-verbal creatures include both animals and plants. Animals are divided into three groups: "running", "flying" and "crawling". According to the French thinker, the unconscious structures of classifying thinking are also universal. It is enough to reveal the unconscious structure underlying one social custom in order to acquire the principle of interpretation of other customs. To explain what he understands by the term unconscious, Levi-Strauss, as in many other cases, gives an analogy from everyday life. As the stomach digests food, so the unconscious "digests" psychological phenomena, structuring emotions, ideas, memories, giving them a certain form.

Levi-Strauss completely rejects the fact that primitive peoples lack the ability to think abstractly. The thinking of both primitive and modern man is determined by the presence of binary oppositions. This phenomenon will be discussed in more detail in the next section.

§2. binary oppositions.

Binary opposition (lat. binarius - double, dual, consisting of two parts) is a type of relationship in semiotic systems, within which a sign acquires its meaning and meaning only through a relationship with a sign that is in opposition to it. The principle of binarism was formed in linguistics, and then became widespread in semiotics, where the opposition “signifier-signified” became the main one. Within the framework of binarism, the relations of opposites that have arisen as a result of dichotomous separation acquire the status of an organizing center that ensures orderliness and stability of the structure. In the theory of structuralism, binarism is transformed from a private device into a fundamental category and an essential principle of nature and culture. According to classical structuralism, all relations between signs are reducible to binary structures - to a model based on the presence or absence of a certain attribute. Levi-Strauss used binary relations such as "nature - culture", "plant - animal", "raw - boiled" and the like in the analysis of the social structure, cultural and mental life of primitive tribes.

The importance of the principle of bipolarity in the perception of the world is emphasized by many researchers, believing that already primitive man tried to streamline the world around him, categorizing it with the help of many binary oppositions: life - death, sky - earth, sun - moon, day - night, fire - water, animal - a man, a man - a woman, an older - a younger, one's own - a stranger, happiness - misfortune, right - left, light - dark, etc. Moreover, the pairing of categories was accompanied by his absolutization of their opposite.

The reason for the original duality of human thinking is that the archaic man acutely felt the inner conflict of the world. Currently, not all researchers consider bipolarity as a universal principle of categorization. Some, analyzing the thinking of a modern person, single out unipolar semantic constructs, which are characterized by the absence of semantic oppositions.

According to Levi-Strauss, it is the use of binary oppositions in the categorization of the world that indicates that there are no qualitative differences between scientific and mythological thinking, since the same logic works in both cases. Progress has taken place not in thinking, but in the world surrounding mankind, which in the course of a long history has come across ever new phenomena. According to the concept of Levi-Strauss, the function of thinking at any stage of human history is to categorize the world with the help of binary oppositions. Untamed thought, like the thought of modern man, is logical. But if in mythological thinking classifications are carried out at the level of sensually perceived properties of objects and the knowledge gained is built from signs, then scientific thinking is turned to abstract qualities, and knowledge consists of concepts.

Many ethnologists argue that binary oppositions are not inherent in all the phenomena that Levi-Strauss analyzes, but are part of the conceptual scheme he created. Levi-Strauss himself responds to criticism in this way: “Since my thinking and the thinking of the South African Indians do not have qualitative differences, it does not matter whether my thought gave a certain form to the thought of the Indians, or whether their thought influenced the concept I created.”

§ 3. Mythological and scientific thinking.

The great cultural achievements of the Stone Age, such as agriculture, domestication of animals, pottery and weaving, were based, according to Lévi-Strauss, on truly scientific thinking. "Neolithic man was the heir to a long scientific tradition." And this is fair. But here Levi-Strauss is trying to justify the equivalence of scientific and mythological thinking. "The opinion that both types of thinking represent two stages or phases in the evolution of knowledge of the world is a profound delusion," he writes. Behind the isomorphism of magic and science, mythological and scientific thinking, which Levi-Strauss seeks to discover, not only their nature, their features, but also the very possibility of their adequate interpretation disappear.

Levi-Strauss expresses a reasonable idea that natural conditions are not perceived by people passively, their perception is mediated by the conditions of society. It would seem that the perception of nature in myth, at the level of conceptual thinking, is mediated by socio-historical conditions; meanwhile, for Levi-Strauss, nature is only a means for expressing the immanent properties of consciousness. The latter, as it were, were originally set.

Mythological and scientific thinking, according to Levi-Strauss, are equivalent, but still they are not identical. There are some differences. He discovers them in terms of units of analysis: myth focuses on sensory qualities, while science focuses on the abstract properties of things. The elements of mythological thinking, which Levi-Strauss calls signs, are located halfway between the concepts used by scientific thinking and the images of perception. There is a fundamental difference between signs and concepts, which he explains with the help of the words “bricolage” and “bricoleur”, which are difficult to translate into Russian. A bricoleur is a folk craftsman who creates from what is at hand, for example, constructing an airplane in the Russian outback from parts of cars and tractors, and bricolage is an activity to create this aircraft.

Similarly, mythological thinking acts as an intellectual form of bricolage with the help of signs: "... its creations each time come down to a new ordering of already existing elements." People initially developed categories for the most important objects of nature, and then transferred the created categories to all new objects, presenting the natural and social universe as an organized integrity. In their single world, the cardinal points could correspond to parts of the body of a cosmic deity, and the features of the relief could correspond to the phases of the ritual. An example of such a "secondary" use of categories is the satisfaction of the need for social differentiation with the help of totemic classifications, when the categorization of groups into We and They is carried out by identifying them with animals, plants and other objects of the natural environment. For example, the Aranda people raise more than 400 animal and plant species to the rank of totem.

§ 4.K. Levi-Strauss: "Language is the human mind."

An essential place in the philosophical, as well as in the specific scientific problems of Levi-Strauss's structuralism, is occupied by his concept of the unconscious, closely related to the problem of language, since the ideas, concepts and methodological principles developed in structural linguistics served as the foundation for Levi-Strauss to substantiate this concept. . Language, in a broad sense, appears among the structuralists as a symbolic, conditional designation of some unconscious structuring mechanism. The epistemological concept of Levi-Strauss is based on the hypothesis of the unconscious infrastructure of linguistic and social phenomena: the terminology of kinship, totemism, rituals, masks and other cultural institutions are a special kind of language. The cultural researcher is first of all confronted with texts and discourses, the true meanings of which are hidden in the unconscious.

Levi-Strauss recognizes that social facts exist due to human activity, and subjective consciousness is a way of manifesting these facts. However, from his point of view, the conscious level of social processes is the subject of history, while the task of structural anthropology is to study their "unconscious foundations".

Levi-Strauss refers to the American linguist and ethnographer F. Boas, arguing that language, beliefs, skills and customs have in common that their development occurs at the level of unconscious thinking. According to Boas, the classification concepts of primitive people are never formed in consciousness, but arise in unconscious mental processes.

Linguistic and other cultural facts are grouped together according to ideas and categories that are of an unconscious nature. Levi - Strauss carries the general idea that the true meaning is not what we know, but what lies behind it. The leading role in the formation of the methodological principles of philosophical structuralism belongs to structural linguistics, the postulates of which form the core of the Levi-Straussian model of the mental. The escalation of linguistic methods gives the ontology of language the status of a cartography of the unconscious. In order to prove the existence of unconscious linguistic structures, Levi-Strauss turned to the phonological studies of R. Jacobson and N. Trubetskoy. The linguistic facts on which Levi-Strauss is based relate mainly to the phonological level of language: “First of all, phonology moves from the study of conscious linguistic phenomena to the study of their unconscious basis; it refuses to consider the members of a relationship as independent entities, taking, on the contrary, the relationship between them as the basis of its analysis; it introduces the concept of a system...”. Saussure understood language as a system of signs - lexemes; Trubetskoy, in his linguistic analysis, moved from the level of words to the level of phonemes, language, thus, appeared to be an even more complex system. Each word in this system is considered as a whole, organized by phonemes, correlating according to rules that are of an unconscious nature. The phonology created by Trubetskoy reveals the reality of phonemes and shows that the same pairs of oppositions exist in different languages.

Levi-Strauss argues that, from a psychological and physical point of view, distinguishing features exist objectively. In other words, distinctive properties are not only theoretical or methodological tools, like the rules of mathematical analysis, but are built into reality itself. Levi-Strauss proceeds from the premise that the oppositions described by linguists also exist in biological and physical reality. According to Levi-Strauss, language is structured at all levels: phonological, grammatical, lexical; even the architectonics of discourse is structurally organized.

Levi-Strauss formulates the "path" from the structure of language to the structure of the mind and the structure of the unconscious.

§ 5. Mythology in the concept of Levi-Strauss

"The concept of "myth" is a category of our thinking, arbitrarily used by us to combine under the same term attempts to explain natural phenomena, works of oral literature, philosophical constructions and cases of the emergence of linguistic processes in the mind of the subject."

Levi-Strauss created his own structuralist-ideological theory of myth.

Levi-Strauss proceeds from the fact that myth, unlike other phenomena of language, is immediately related to langue and parole (language and code). As a historical narrative about the past, it is diachronic and irreversible in time, but as a tool for explaining the present (and future) it is synchronous and reversible in time.

Since the myth has two dimensions, it must be considered in two directions: horizontally and vertically. The horizontal dimension is needed to read the myth, and the vertical dimension is needed to understand it. Comparison of variants of one myth with variants of other myths leads to a multidimensional system.

Levi-Strauss proposes to express the structure of the myth through the model of the mediative process with the following formula:

Here a and b are two terms (actor, character), of which the first (a) is associated with a purely negative function of x, and the second (b) is associated with a positive function of y, but is able to take on a negative function of x, being such Thus, an intermediary between x and y. Both parts of the formula represent two situations between which there is a certain equivalence due to the fact that in the second part of the formula (and, accordingly, in the second half of the mythical process, plot) one term is replaced by the opposite one and an inversion is made between the value of the function and the terms of both elements. The fact that the last term is precisely fa-1 (y) shows that we are talking not only about the annulment of the original state, but about some additional acquisition, some new state that has arisen as a result of a kind of spiral development.

There are also interesting analyzes of myths in large theoretical monographs by Levi-Strauss devoted to the problems of primitive thinking and mythology. The concepts of Levi-Strauss in this area are very deep and interesting. He struggles with the traditional idea of ​​weakness, the purely intuitive, helplessly concrete nature of primitive thinking, its inability to generalize. Defending the peculiar intellectualism of primitive thought, analyzing its specific character, Levi-Strauss, for example, brilliantly proved that totemic names in primitive society are used to build complex classifications as a kind of material for a sign system. Acquaintance with the main works of Levi-Strauss helps to understand the specifics of his approach to myth, the strength and weakness of this approach. He considers myth as an instrument of primitive "logic" and therefore, contrary to sound and subtle considerations about the methods of structural analysis of myth, his specific analyzes are an analysis of the structure not of mythical narrative, but of mythical thinking.

In principle, Levi-Strauss provides for the narrative aspect (along the horizontal coordinate), but in practice he focuses all attention on the "bundles of relations" and their symbolic-logical meaning.

Levi-Strauss is mainly interested in mythological "logic", so he starts with a myth, connects functions only vertically, trying to identify its paradigmatics from a comparison of myth variants. The structural model of Levi-Strauss is non-linear. The historical distinction of myth for Levi-Strauss is irrelevant, not of a fundamental nature. The analysis of the plot is somewhat related to its mediative formula, to the extent that it tries to capture the "reversal" of the situation in the finale and the "spirality" of development.

§ 6. Shamanism as one of the elements of primitive culture

Levi-Strauss considers all elements of the life of savages: thinking, actions, mythology and such an equally important element as magical phenomena. Psychomagical actions are the most important element of Lévi-Strauss' research.

The most striking example and model of psychomagical action is the ability of a magician to send damage to a person, as a result of which he dies. To explain this phenomenon, it is necessary, apparently, to build a chain between the psychic abilities of a shaman, a well-known magical cult, and further - the psyche and physiology of a bewitched person. The French ethnographer and philosopher K. Levi-Strauss offers the following version of such a connection.

The psyche of a shaman, according to Levi-Strauss, is pathological, that is, it differs significantly from the psyche of an ordinary member of the tribe. It is characterized by a sense of belonging to nature, the ability to mentally transform into animals and plants, into natural forces. The shaman is the owner of an “expanded consciousness”: in his spiritual world, images of people and natural objects easily coexist with fantastic ideas invented by him, which do not even fit into the traditional tribal myth. In himself, the shaman discovers a duality similar to schizophrenic, convincing him that he is able to exist simultaneously in different guises, be in different places, travel in time, move from the world of people to the world of spirits, etc. The rich inner world of the shaman, in part, given to him due to his psychological characteristics, and partly as a result of his specific practice, allows him to find explanations for incomprehensible phenomena and claim the possession of special, superhuman powers. The magical rite performed by the shaman combines a fantastic picture of the world and ways of acting in this world, translated into a language at least partially understood by the tribe. This transformation into a fairy tale of reality, which itself will remain unchanged, unites the psychosomatic state of the shaman with the "collective unconscious" of the tribe and the psyche of the person to whom the rite is directed. This corresponds to the shaman's faith in the effectiveness of the methods used, the faith and psychological need of society, and, finally, the faith in the magic of the very object of witchcraft actions.

A shaman, according to Levi-Strauss, is a typical “professional responder” in the sense that during the course of a ritual he every time reproduces the psychosomatic well-being experienced by him during the formation of shamanic abilities. The rite is a repetition of the “call”, that is, the first insight, shock, fit, which reveals to a person his magical vocation. The shaman makes his neurosis - organic or acquired - his profession, and since primitive people are constantly immersed in situations of stress, they vividly empathize with the shaman. Life on the verge of death requires regular clearing of fear, and the shaman carries out this procedure as an experienced psychoanalyst.

The shaman offers a language full of symbols and able to describe the most incomprehensible situation, thus including it in the world of habitual experience. Levi-Strauss appeals here to the hypothesis of the isomorphism of linguistic and psychophysiological structures and the ability of linguistic symbolism to induce appropriate effects through the psyche on the human body. The main load in this psychological explanation of magic falls on the "efficiency of symbols", although, as we understand, it is precisely this that needs to be substantiated.

Conclusion

Claude Levi-Strauss is a scientist who has made a huge contribution to world science. His approaches to the study of various phenomena in anthropology and ethnology are unique. This scientist is the founder of one of the most famous schools of ethnological thought - structuralism. His concept in this area has received worldwide fame and recognition. His works are fundamental works in ethnology.

Levi-Strauss' research in the field of primitive culture deserves special attention. In his writings on this topic, he outlined his understanding of the culture and thinking of savages. He introduces the concept of the universality of thought. Reason is one, the structure of thinking of a primitive person is the same as that of a civilized one. Levi-Strauss proves this by viewing primitiveness through the prism of his structural method. The scientist refutes the concepts of Levy - Brühl and his followers.

From the point of view of modern psychology, Levi-Strauss's theory is not free from serious shortcomings, primarily because he, in fact, reduces all human thinking to one aspect - categorization. But the great merit of the French thinker, whose numerous works are permeated with the idea of ​​the mental unity of mankind, lies in the tireless striving behind the infinitely diverse phenomena of outwardly completely different cultures to discover the universal operations of the human mind.