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Lévi-Strauss From Elementary Structures of Kinship

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57 views1 page

Lévi-Strauss From Elementary Structures of Kinship

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duscozbek
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Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908- )

from The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949)


Thus it is always a system of exchange that we find at the origin of rules of
marriage…

Indirect, general or special, immediate or deferred, explicit of implicit, closed


Note before reading Irigaray. Her essays are a complex critique or open, concrete or symbolic, it is exchange, always exchange that emerges
of psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan), of Marx and of Saussure. as the fundamental and common basis of all modalities of the institution of
They also refer to the use of structuralism in anthropological marriage. If these modalities can be subsumed under the general term of
theory by Claude Lévi-Strauss, and in particular his account of exogamy… this is conditional upon the apperception, behind the superficially
kinship and marriage as a system of social exchange (indeed the negative expression of the rule of exogamy, of the final principle which,
through the prohibition of marriage within prohibited degrees, tends to ensure
very basis of society) in which women function as signs. the total and continuous circulation of the group’s most important assets, its
wives and its daughters.

The emergence of symbolic thought must have required that women, like
words, should be things that were exchanged…. In contrast to words, which
have wholly become signs, woman has remained at once a sign and a value.
This explains why the relation between the sexes have preserved that affective
richness, ardour and mystery which doubtless originally permeated the entire
universe of human communications.

But that atmosphere of feverish excitement and sensitivity which engendered


symbolic thought, and social life, which is its collective form, can still with its
far-off vision kindle our dreams. To this very day, mankind has always
dreamed of seizing and fixing that moment when it was possible to believe
that the law of exchange could be evaded, that one could gain without losing,
enjoy without sharing. At either end of the earth and at both extremes of time,
the Sumerian myth of the golden age and the Andaman myth of the future life
correspond, the former placing the end of primitive happiness at a time when
the confusion of languages made words into common property, the latter
describing the bliss of the hereafter as a heaven where women will no longer
be exchanged, i.e., removing to an equally unattainable past or future the
joys, eternally denied to social man, of a world in which one might keep to
oneself.

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