[...]Thinking through Claude Lévi-Strauss « Neuroanthropology[...]…

http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/levi_strauss_2_subject_and_object/

Here’s the correct URL for the “Kubla Khan” piece:

http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2003_benzon02.shtml

You might want to take a look at an essay I just posted at The Valve where I suggest a comparative morphology of the (literary) text along Lévi-Straussian lines. And this longish essay on “Kubla Khan” is where I’ve gone with that old structuralism and the newer cognitive and neuroscience.

I certainly wouldn’t argue that these approaches are not productive, but I would say that something like an argument for universal grammar does have a creeping tendency (among some proponents) to make biological/neurological/genetic claims that I really don’t think it can support.

One thing your comment brings to mind is something a linguistics instructor once said to our class—“Anyway, Chomsky’s not the problem. It’s the sycophants.”

I would argue that this particular preference for simple generative machines is ideological, even aesthetic (the preference for binarism, for example, is frequently credited to Lévi-Strauss’s reading of Hegel, although it can often be found in the work of Jakobson and the Prague school of linguistics).

French Symbolist poets were also an important influence. I think you would enjoy Jim Boone’s From symbolism to structuralism: Lévi-Strauss in a literary tradition.

For neuroanthropologists, however, the structure that produces thought is the brain-body-world nexus. One would make the same idealist error made by structuralists if assuming that grammar produced speech, rather than the brain-mouth-lungs-tongue-parental influence-social interaction-etc. nexus. Grammar is descriptive, not explanatory in any materialist sense (this is also Steinmetz’s [1984] criticism of Lévi-Strauss; see Doja 2006: 82).

One thing that I get out of this comment is that the analyst shouldn’t loose sight of what it is he is analyzing. I don’t feel that the operations of a phonological analysis by themselves are evidence for the workings of the human mind and am incredulous when a Baroque solution to a phonology problem is presented as “what the mind does.” I don’t doubt that it may be but a little evidence beyond the application of formal logic would be nice.

Another thing I get from the comment is the suggestion that grammars are a genre of reference writing rather than a real-world phenomenon. I have to disagree with that just as I do with the suggestion that culture is a reification. Grammar and culture are differentially distributed across populations and no one individual has perfect control of every aspect of either but that’s by definition as both are supra-individual models. The study of language requires tools beyond those required by someone trying to write a grammar; speech of part of language, too, so phonetics and discourse analysis have their place, as well. By the same token I think there’s a place for both structuralist analysis of the semantics of incest and marriage prohibitions vis-à-vis the culture as a whole as well as a neuroanthropological analysis of individuals’ sexual behavior. I hope that makes some sense…

(in fact, I don’t believe I’ve ever read anything by LS that I’d really call ‘historical’ analysis, but I might very well be missing something)

He did history via comparative ethnology (The way of the masks, for example). The concept of culture areas is one of his biggest debts to Boas. Chapters 1 & 8 of Regna Darnell’s Invisible genealogies are great intros.

That said, the article really does focus on the streams in Lévi-Strauss that feed into cognitive science, less so into many of the more traditional anthropological topics that he explored. One of the reasons that I want to think through Lévi-Strauss again is that, like a number of other anthropologists (Victor Turner, John Blacking, even Clifford Geertz), he made statements about being open to the brain sciences, neuropsychology and the like, but then also indicated that there was a gap between the sorts of things that anthropology needed from the brain sciences, and what those disciplines were able to provide at the time. In other words, I’m looking for intellectual predecessors who pointed out that the time wasn’t really yet auspicious for a neuroanthropological synthesis of any sorts; obviously, I think we’re getting there, although it’s still sometimes a dangerous stretch. We may be jumping the gun in some dimensions of this synthesis, but I’m willing to take a few risks and focus on those topics where the material is particularly promising, conveniently ignoring other areas where the analytical leaps are still overly daunting.

It’s funny that you point out my own dialectical argument; Jovan Maud at Culture Matters pulled me up on the way to the vending machine the other day to do the same. I would say it’s not quite the logic of the debates you describe, but more of an idealist/materialist divide that’s specific to psychology. Intellectually spurious? Mate, I’m not sure that my whole career won’t go down under that banner. But I think for me at least, the real problem is pulling back together brain-mind, abstracted or lived body and organic body, mental and physical.

I certainly wouldn’t argue that these approaches are not productive, but I would say that something like an argument for universal grammar does have a creeping tendency (among some proponents) to make biological/neurological/genetic claims that I really don’t think it can support. We could probably get into an abstract argument about culture v. social life analysis, but the argument would probably be less heated if we actually started discussing the particular examples we work on. For example, when I was talking with Harvey Whitehouse, I think for his project, his approach is entirely appropriate, even though — in abstraction — I would probably argue vehemently against it. This is simply because I subterraneanly think with my own research as the example, and subjecting my material to some forms of analysis, though they work on other topics, would be ludicrous in my particular case (sports, skill acquisition, perceptual training…).

I try to just keep reminding myself that other researchers, let alone a pioneer like Lévi-Strauss, are often hell of smart, so if they’re saying something that sounds completely off base to me, there must be something else in operation (like a different unspoken case study being used to generate theoretical insights).

I do not believe that it follows that because that apparatus fails in the analysis of the three that it necessarily fails in the analysis of one or both of the others.

That’s supposed to read—“I do not believe that it follows that because that apparatus fails in the analysis of one of the three that it necessarily fails in the analysis of one or both of the others.”

This is one of the great challenges of contemporary neuroscience, and one reason that I think the older ‘level of analysis’ needs to be subjected to an organic layer of analysis.

A good retrospective/appraisal of Lévi-Strauss’ work needs to do some seriation—the guy lived to be 100, after all!—and identify his main areas of interest. I understand him as having been mainly interested in three inter-related but distinct things: how the mind worked, history, and culture (as conceived by the Boasians). Structural anthropology was the apparatus he used for the analysis of all three. I do not believe that it follows that because that apparatus fails in the analysis of the three that it necessarily fails in the analysis of one or both of the others. I am in complete agreement that neuroanthropology as you conceive it is a better apparatus for explaining how the human mind works that is Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism. But for history and culture? I do think that would indeed be impractical in complexity.

While binary logic is an important item in the Lévi-Straussian tool kit structural analysis does not equal arrangement of your data into binary oppositions. Those that really know the difference between Jakobson’s phonology and Chomsky’s are able to grab this.

For neuroanthropologists, however, the structure that produces thought is the brain-body-world nexus. One would make the same idealist error made by structuralists if assuming that grammar produced speech, rather than the brain-mouth-lungs-tongue-parental influence-social interaction-etc. nexus. Grammar is descriptive, not explanatory in any materialist sense (this is also Steinmetz’s [1984] criticism of Lévi-Strauss; see Doja 2006: 82).

I don’t know if this is what you are getting at, but the above smells a lot like the logic of the Discourse Analysis/Universal Grammar or the culture history/processualist or any number of other professionally productive but intellectually spurious debates. Phonetics requires a materialist analysis, phonology does not; the analysis of social life requires a materialist analysis, the analysis of culture (again, as conceived by the Boasians) does not.