A courtship but not much of a marriage. Lévi-Strauss and British Americanist anthropology

Bibliographic Data

ID2632835
AuthorsStephen Hugh‐jone (corresponding author), Stephen Hugh‐Jones (corresponding author), Stephen Hugh-Jones
Year2008
Volume94
Issue2
Pages17-27
Publication date2008-12-20
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal de la Société des Américanistes (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0037-9174 • E-ISSN: 1957-7842
PublisherSociety of Americanists (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.4000/jsa.10547
OpenAlexW1879143281
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited9

To begin with 1 should say how ho noured 1 am to be able to render homage to Lévi-Strauss, who I personally consider to be not only the g reatest !il'ing anthropologist, but a lso the g reatest anthropologist, full stop.So it 's a great pleasure to be allowed to say some words about him.H owever, l'm afraid I'm the bringer of not particularly good news in that what 1 want to say to you is that my colleagues -my British colleagues -probably should have rendered rather more homage than they have do ne.1 want first to show you a virtual slide.This is a picture of a cartoon, which has unfortunately bcen destroyecl but which Alfred Gell passed tome in 1965.Alfred Gell , my alas dead colleague, was an excellent draftsman and, in the middle of a lecture by Leach, he drew a cartoon which he entitled «The M atchmaker ».The cartoon showed F rance and England separated by the Channel.On the French sicle was a rather reluctant looking bride, called Lévi-Strauss [laughs] and o n the English sicle were a series of functionalists -Fortes, Radcliflè-Brown , Goody and others -who were supposed to be the groom s.Leach was in the middle of the Channel trying to introduce the grooms to the bride.But the reluctant grooms were ail holding up their hands in horror like this [laughs].So now yo u know where my title cornes from.It is usually assumed, I think, that, al lcast relative to the America n tradition, Britain and France share a conunon structuralist tradition.To simplify matters one might say that the US tradition is characterized, on the o ne hand, by cultural ecology and, on the o ther hand, by various kinds of ling uistic tradition: ethnosemantics (which some people have also called « structuralism »), discourse studies etc., and also « Culture and Personality ».Ali that may be relatively or comparatively true, but what I want to say is that adherence to what l'm going to call « generic, vulgar strncturalism » -the accepted cano n of exchange theory, • King's College, Cam bridge, C D2 IST [shl 16

Cohabitation · Levi strauss · African Studies and Ethnography · Emile Durkheim and Sociology · French Urban and Social Studies