Lévi-Strauss, philosopher among the Indians | Hacker News Reader

Lévi-Strauss, philosopher among the Indians

the-tls.co.uk

36 pointsThevet14 comments

"although Emmanuelle Loyer makes a case for Lévi-Strauss as a contemporary – and he has been canonized by the Greens – he has come to rest, rather, as a giant figure in the French cultural tradition: a monument to another time."

And you're surprised that we French have sometime a tooth against the Britons. This sentence is really poisonous. French anthropology is not of the "past glorious days and gone forever", it's still on top, for example with Philippe Descola.

One might suggest that your reading of that sentence is a bit prickly. The subject is not "French anthropology" in general, but rather Lévi-Strauss himself. Surely structuralism's heyday has passed, even within the context of French anthropology? (...and definitely in other contexts)

It's in the colon, which implies a causation, an explication or something similar. Here it means, CLS is a great figure of French philosophy, therefore a figure of the past.

Perhaps that would be a fair reading in French? In English one can't be so sure of such an interpretation. The sentence would still make sense if its subject were Voltaire rather than Lévi-Strauss. Being a monument to another time is simply one way for someone to be a giant figure in a cultural tradition. (Certainly, it's a clumsy sentence, but there's no indication of poisonous motivation.)

This determination to take offense via idiosyncratic hermeneutics seems so "stereotypical", one almost suspects trolling.

Why, no. It's right there, in plain text. No need for hermeneutics.

I find it hard to conclusively read the sentence as you do. Yes, there could be snark meant, but I cannot say positively that the author intends one to understand a French tradition of canonized fossils.

I need to read up on why the "Indians" tag remained and persisted for centuries considering it must have not taken very long for Christopher Columbus to realize he was not in India after all. Certainly subsequent arrivals from Europe would have known it wasn't India so why did they all keep calling them that.

Building on this point, I think it feels wrong to use the unqualified Indians as opposed to American Indians to refer to Native Americans. Clearly the people of India are the default referent. So it is surprising to see the more confusing usage in a TLS headline.

In the past 10 years or so academic historians have switched back to using 'Indian' again.[1] For the most part, I'm told, simply because it's useful (from the perspective of prose style) to have a shorter synonym for 'Native Americans' to pull out once in awhile. But also because some indigenous groups have argued for re-appropriating the term 'Indian.' I agree that it's confusing.

[1] One example from an academic whose background is Shoshone: Ned Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (2006)

https://youtu.be/5YBwDNfOaxU?t=16s

Humorous explanation of the original reason but the persistence of it over such a long time period still baffles me.

> Certainly subsequent arrivals from Europe would have known it wasn't India

I'm not sure that all that many of the Europeans would have cared about the Native Americans for anything beyond slave labor or as an obstacle.

I thought the article would be about THIS Levi Strauss :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levi_Strauss

thanks for sharing this

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