Quotes from Claude Levi-Strauss

Kültürlerin çeÅŸitliliÄŸi insan topluluklar?n?n birbirinden yal?t?lmas?ndan çok, onlar? birleÅŸtiren iliÅŸkilere baÄŸl?d?r.

I am the place in which something has occurred.

The more we claim to discriminate between cultures and customs as good and bad, the more completely do we identify ourselves with those we would condemn. By refusing to consider as human those who seem to us to be the most "savage" or "barbarous" of their representatives, we merely adopt one of their own characteristic attitudes. The barbarian is, first and foremost, the man who believes in barbarism.

One must be very naïve or dishonest to imagine that men choose their beliefs independently of their situation.

I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions.

The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.

The wise man is not he who gives the right answers; he is the one who asks the right questions.

La tolérance n'est pas une position contemplative, dispensant les indulgences à ce qui fut ou à ce qui est. C'est une attitude dynamique, qui consiste à prévoir, à comprendre et à promouvoir ce qui veut être.

while I complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment, since I have not reached the stage of development at which I would be capable of perceiving it.

Every effort to understand destroys the object studied in favor of another object of a different nature; this second object requires from us a new effort which destroys it in favor of a third, and so on and so forth until we reach the one lasting presence, the point at which the distinction between meaning and the absence of meaning disappears: the same point from which we began.

So I can understand the mad passion for travel books and their deceptiveness. They create the illusion of something which no longer exists but still should exist, if we were to have any hope of avoiding the overwhelming conclusion that the history of the past twenty thousand years is irrevocable.

Scientific knowledge advances haltingly and is stimulated by contention and doubt.

From time to time, too, and for the space of two or three paces, an image or an echo would rise up from the recesses of time: in the little streets of the beaters of silver and gold, for instance, there was a clear, unhurried tinkling, as if a djinn with a thousand arms was absent-mindedly practising on a xylophone.

I may be subjected to the criticism of being called 'scientistic' or a kind of blind believer in science who holds that science is able to solve absolutely all problems. Well, I certainly don't believe that, because I cannot conceive that a day will come when science will be complete and achieved.

Aceptar como tema de discusión, una categoría que nos parece falsa nos expone siempre a un riesgo: el de mantener, en virtud de la atención que se le presta, alguna ilusión acerca de su realidad.

A peculiar feature – no doubt a weakness – of my mental make-up is that I find it difficult to concentrate twice on the same subject. Normally

The world began without the human race and it will end without it…. Man has never—save only when he reproduces himself—done other than cheerfully dismantle million upon million of structures and reduce their elements to a state in which they can no longer be reintegrated.

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact.

Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization; and for us European earth-dwellers, the adventure played out in the heart of the New World signifies in the first place that it was not our world and that we bear responsibility for the crime of its destruction.

Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of progress are in danger of failing to recognize... the immense riches accumulated by the human race. By underrating the achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accomplished.

Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe.

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as an adult, in order to deny him consolation.

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.