3. Critique and Evaluation

 

If claims like those above can seem so persuasive, we might ask what went wrong. What happened to the grand project, embracing international and left wing politics, postcolonial changes, semiotic analysis and anthropology, commenced over 50 years ago? Why did Lévi-Strauss become the object of so much, so-called “post-structural’ disparagement in his later life? And what can be salvaged five decades on from his argument?

 

This paper does not have time to answer how structuralism changed in the decades after 1952, and what response it received. Levi Strauss did become more non political, relying on cognitivist than historical motivations for social organization. However his falling out with Marxist scholars in the 1960’s was not so much due to a lack of politics – he quoted his three academic mistresses as being “Marx, Freud and geology”, and he was a member of various socialist groups in the years around 1930 –  but how he positioned structuralism against the vicissitudes of modern politics movements, and in part against the “cumulative” or determinist accounts of social development that premised left wing accounts of dialectic materialism. Certainly his thinking in 1952 can be seen to have political implications based on a distinct account of cultural history. I would argue however that structuralist (or semiological) methodology can and should be the subject of present day “salvaging” or re-evaluation, at least in terms of the need for new international, geo political identities.

 

Of course the idealism in post colonial liberation of nation states has waned, and the national state itself is now questioned as a force of hegemony and control of regional and ethnic differences within its borders. Lévi-Strauss’s work remains rich and explorative, yet it focus on national independence seems over-argued, making his argument for regional difference incomplete.