Camille On Claude L

I gave a semi-negative review of Claude Levi-Strauss. Camille Paglia is much tougher. No surprise, actually, since much of her life's work has been attacking modern French intellectuals. Levi-Strauss was the anthropological wing of a philosophical movement she has no use for. This time it's personal:

I was appalled at the sentimental rubbish filling the air about Claude Lévi-Strauss after his death was announced last week. The New York Times, for example, first posted an alert calling him "the father of modern anthropology" (a claim demonstrating breathtaking obliviousness to the roots of anthropology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) and then published a lengthy, laudatory obituary that was a string of misleading, inaccurate or incomplete statements. It is ludicrous to claim that Lévi-Strauss single-handedly transformed our ideas about the "primitive" or that before him there had been no concern with universals or abstract ideas in anthropology.

Beyond that, Lévi-Strauss' binary formulations (like "the raw and the cooked") were a simplistic cookie-cutter device borrowed from the dated linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, the granddaddy of now mercifully moribund post-structuralism, which destroyed American humanities departments in the 1980s. Lévi-Strauss' work was as much a fanciful, showy mishmash as that of Joseph Campbell, who at least had the erudite and intuitive Carl Jung behind him. When as a Yale graduate student I ransacked that great temple, Sterling Library, in search of paradigms for reintegrating literary criticism with history, I found literally nothing in Lévi-Strauss that I felt had scholarly solidity.

I generally agree with the criticism. Far from being the father of modern anthropology, the whole field could have gotten along without him. And it's true, the binary formulations were a tiresome sort of trick that meant nothing.

I once had a biology professor who was very impressed with the concept of yin and yang. He kept reminding us everything had its opposite--as if this were some sort of deep truth. That semester The New York Times reported physicists had determined that underlying all matter were three basic particles. Three, not two. That was a great day.