3/5第2週—旅行作為移動的隱喻：Claude Lévi-Strauss

出席狀況：博士班 5人( 2女、 3男)；碩士班 7人( 6女、 1男)：校外博士班：1人（男）

Narrative as Metaphor: The Concept of Traveling

The portion of the first part (Ch 1-4) of Tristes Tropiques centers on the notion of traveling, metaphorized as a way to pursue knowledge: “Nowadays, being an explorer is a trade, which consists not, as one might think, in discovering hitherto unknown facts after years of study, but in covering a great many miles and assembling lantern-slides or motion picture, preferably in colour, so as to fill a hall with an audience for several days in succession” (1973[1955]:17-8). Ironically, the way to pursue knowledge meanwhile has become a traveler’s fate—“doomed to have only a very remote resemblance to the inevitably false picture we were already conjuring up” (ibid:19). Traveling or exploring no longer represents the “magic caskets full of dreamlike promises,” but a “proliferating and overexcited civilization” (ibid:37). “What else can the so-called escapism of traveling do than confront us with the more unfortunate aspects of our history?” In Lévi-Strauss’s sense, the images that traveling brings to his readers are “the illusion of something which no longer exists but still should exist” (ibid:38). After all, yet, we are in the process of creating a “mass civilization” (ibid.). That is why Lévi-Strauss writes, “however honest the narrator may be, he cannot—since this is no longer possible—supply them in a genuine form” (ibid:39).

There was a time when traveling brought the traveler into contact with civilization which were radically different from his own and impressed him in the first place by their strangeness. During the last few centuries such instances have become increasingly rare. Whether he is visiting India or America, the modern traveler is less surprised than he cares to admit. … The search for the exotic boils down to the collecting of earlier or later phases of a familiar pattern of development (ibid:86).

Traveling hence becomes a way to grasp power which “finds expression in the writing of newspaper articles and bestsellers and in lecturing to packed halls” (ibid:41). In this sense, traveling itself utters a use of metaphor which can “sanctify the traveler” and in this perspective, “the savages of the Amazonian forest are sensitive and powerless victims, pathetic creatures caught in the toils of mechanized civilization” (ibid.). If we recall Lakoff and Johnson’s argument, traveling itself creates a metaphor of disengagement through travel to remote foreign countries, and then a re-engagement when returning as a traveler to have such a power to identify reality of our own life by showing travelogues. So, why does Lévi-Strauss hate traveling and explorers? Lévi-Strauss writes,

… I refuse to be the dupe of a kind of magic which is still more feeble than their own and which brandishes before an eager public albums of coloured photographs, instead of the now vanished native masks. Perhaps the public imagines that the charms of the savages can be appropriated through the medium of these photographs. Not content with having eliminated savage life, and unaware even of having done so, it feels the need feverishly to appease the nostalgic cannibalism of history with the shadows if those that history has already destroyed (ibid:41).

There are thus only two possibilities of being a traveler—either being a traveler of the olden days, who faces a stupendous spectacle and yet is unable to perceive its meanings, or being a traveler who is “chasing after the vestiges of a vanished reality” (ibid:43). Lévi-Strauss writes that “I am subject to a double infirmity: all that I perceive offends me, and I constantly reproach myself for not seeing as much as I should” (ibid.).

Such a sense of “nostalgia” for the vanishing plurality of the past causes Lévi-Strauss’s own journey back to search for the primitive knowledge. Paradoxically, what Lévi-Strauss himself conducts echoes as a traveler looking for something which exists no more. Lévi-Strauss writes, “Through a remarkable paradox, my life of adventure, instead of opening up a new world to me, had the effect rather of bringing me back to the old one, and the world I had been looking for disintegrated in my grasp” (ibid:376). Thus Lévi-Strauss agrees that he is a man of the nineteenth century (Eribon 1988:181). In response to this question during the interview with Eribon, Lévi-Strauss refers to James Boon’s work (1972), in which he himself is in comparison to Proust and Baudelaire. Lévi-Strauss answers that “I have the feeling that if someone waved a magic wand and I were transported to that time without losing my twentieth-century consciousness, I would not feel too far from home. There I would find the seeds of our great inventions before this progress essentially became devoted to creating the remedy for the discomfort it causes” (Eribon 1988:181).

Savage Mind/ Neolithic Thought

The assumption of nature vs. culture that runs through Lévi-Strauss’s works is the basic opposition on which the whole conceptual system rests. Inherited from Mauss’s study in Australian aborigines, Lévi-Strauss has learned that the solidarity may be best “achieved by setting up a structure of reciprocity: a system of exchanges binding the segments in alliances” (Kuper 1993[1973]:162).

According to Lévi-Strauss, exchanges may involve one of three media: goods and services, language and symbols, and super-gift, women. Underlying the system of exchange is the rule of reciprocity, the rule that every gift demands a return. Yet, in his theory of kinship, forcing men to exchange their women, that marked the movement from nature to culture, links to the idea of incest taboo. The incest taboo indicates the conception between women who are permitted and women who are forbidden and thus “generates a distinction between women of the category wife and women of the category sister” (Leach 1974:45). Leach claims that “Incest and exogamy are therefore opposite sides of the same penny, and the incest taboo is the cornerstone of society” (p61). For Lévi-Strauss, societies are like a system of “communication.” Women are “exchanged” as a sort of message between groups, and these exchanges are linked up with other forms of communication, particularly the communication of goods and symbols of status.

For Lévi-Strauss, both “complex” and “primitive” societies “should be successfully interpreted to provide universally valid conclusions from a synchronic or diachronic point of view.” When Lévi-Strauss says that “my intelligence is Neolithic,” it is referring to this same complex imbrication of reality. The idea of Neolithic is threefold. First, the substantial mode of Neolithic is metaphorized to Lévi-Strauss himself as a way to pursue knowledge. In Tristes Tropiques, he writes,

I have a Neolithic kind of intelligence. Like native bush fires, it sometimes sets unexplored areas alight; it may fertilize them and snatch a few crops from them, and then it moves on, leaving scorched earth in its wake. (Tristes Tropiques p53)

And being interviewed nearly 30 years later, he would add that

In Tristes Tropiques I said that I have a neolithic mind. I’m not the kind of person who can capitalize on or make what I’ve acquired bear fruit—instead I keep moving along an endlessly shifting boundary. Only the work of the moment counts for me, and it is over very quickly. I don’t have the inclination or the need to record my progress. (Eribon 1988:vii-viii)

Second, it literally refers to the period of human history that provides the arts of civilization including agriculture, animal husbandry, pottery, weaving, conservation and preparation of food. This would be analogous to saying that all societies are “civilized” societies, rather than a proclamation of superiority of one to the other. “No one today would any longer think of attributing these enormous advances,” says Levi-Strauss, “to the fortuitous accumulation of a series of chance discoveries or believe them to have been revealed by the passive perception of certain natural phenomena.” As Leach expresses, Lévi-Strauss “conceives of primitive people as ‘reduced models’ of what is essential in all mankind.” Such idealization or “reductionism” is clearly identified by the following passage: “There are only three possible elementary kinship structures; these three structures are constructed by means of two forms of exchanges; and these two forms of exchange themselves depend upon a single differential characteristic, namely the harmonic or disharmonic character of the regime considered.”

Third and last, in return, the rhetorical use of Neolithic as a way to express the unity of all cultures is brought to the realm of cognition as a type of “savage mind.” Yet, who is this savage? Is he a certain person in the Neolithic period or Lévi-Strauss himself in the present society? Does the work titled The Savage Mind, refers to a Neolithic mind or Lévi-Strauss’s own argument? The puzzle may of course be found, if not dangerously then with a degree of insight in the intellectual history of Lévi-Strauss himself. As Clifford Geertz points out, Lévi-Strauss’s “personal relationship to his object of study is, perhaps more than for any other scientist, inevitably problematic.” This is because Lévi-Strauss’s synchronic mode of research, which revivifies history as the present, achieves a synchronic structure that obtains the independent significance in the logic of things. It is like a “kaleidoscope image of ‘concrete thought,’” as Geertz comments on Tristes Tropiques, “a syntactic conjunction of discrete elements…rather than a hierarchy of continuate elements.”