72 pages • 2 hours read
Clifford GeertzA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Geertz acknowledges the 300-year-old debate about what, if anything, differentiates “civilized” and “savage” peoples. It is important to note here that while the derogatory term “savage” has fallen out of contemporary usage in the social sciences for its connotations, Geertz uses it to examine the work of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. The French term “sauvage” differs from its English cognate in that rather than connoting bestiality and inherent violence, it evokes undomesticated, “wild” freedom. The centrality of French Enlightenment ideas and language connotations to Levi-Strauss’s anthropological theory become evident in his construction of the “Cerebral Savage.”
Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (1955) features an embedded paradox:
The anthropologist seems condemned either to journey among men whom he can understand precisely because his own culture has already contaminated them, covered them with ‘the filth, our filth, that we have thrown in the face of humanity,’ or among those who, not so contaminated, are for that reason largely unintelligible to him (350).
Out of this conundrum arises Levi-Strauss’s theoretical model, which rests on the notion of a universal human mind. By starting from the notion that “[t]he mind of man is, at bottom, everywhere the same” (350), the anthropologist can construct a general, abstract theory of the basic foundations of human existence by “reconstructing the conceptual systems that, from deep beneath its surface, animated it and gave [savage culture] form” (351).
Anthropology
View Collection
Asian American & Pacific Islander...
View Collection
Books About Art
View Collection
Colonialism & Postcolonialism
View Collection
Community
View Collection
Nation & Nationalism
View Collection
Order & Chaos
View Collection
Philosophy, Logic, & Ethics
View Collection
Political Science Texts
View Collection
Politics & Government
View Collection
Popular Study Guides
View Collection
Psychology
View Collection
Science & Nature
View Collection
Sociology
View Collection