Claude Lévi-Strauss - Thinking about the world differently

Alongside the illustrious founding figures of the social sciences who taught at the École pratique des hautes études - Mauss, Durkheim, Dumézil - Claude Lévi-Strauss left his mark on his time and continues to fascinate. His work began with two encounters: with the Nambikwara, Bororo and Caduveo peoples in Brazil between 1935 and 1938, and with Roman Jakobson in New York in 1942. The discovery of structural linguistics transformed the ethnologist, awakening in him the founding intuition that the distinctive value of observed facts, their Combinatorics and the resulting logics of transformations are the very target of anthropology. Yet such a science cannot abandon the terrain of thought in motion. The refounded discipline reveals how, in the rainbow of human cultures, it is possible to think differently by ordering the data of sensitive experience in a singular way. There is no area of life that the thinker does not examine with alacrity, from botany to ornithology, from Bororo myths to boreal mushrooms and the mad cow crisis. For Lévi-Strauss, unearthing the logic of this "wild" way of thinking about matter, language and the body is the founding challenge of anthropology.

This is undoubtedly a modern challenge in several respects. Leading the human sciences towards an emancipation from relativism, the structural approach at the same time legitimizes an exploration of the diversity of worlds to which the disciplines of the human sciences bear witness, each from a distinct perspective. Comparative mythology, a monument to the colossal work of Lévi-Strauss, gives way to a modern practice of comparison in anthropology, bringing to light the dissimilarities and similarities between ways of being-in-the-world, of feeling, of believing, beyond cultural or biological frontiers. Shaking up our investigations, a myriad of non-human actors, modern figures of otherness, are bursting onto the scene as new objects of our disciplines. The practice of comparison has the merit of considerably extending the field of anthropological analysis. However, is it more than a thought experiment encompassing the difference between a conventional and an unconventional way of perceiving reality? How and to what extent does anthropology enable us to think about the world differently? In a world where the distant has become strangely close, where "nature" is demystified, do Lévi-Straussian lessons enable us to apprehend the discontinuity of human experience? Can we read the contemporary debate on the future of worlds, indigenous knowledge and the "human condition" in a different way, with Lévi-Strauss, in the light of ethnography? By bringing together researchers from the sister disciplines of ethnology, anthropology, philosophy, religious studies and history, this symposium aims to pay modest tribute to the vitality of Claude Lévi-Strauss's work, bearing witness to the influence it continues to exert on the human sciences in the ^21st century.

Organized by the École pratique des hautes études, the Laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale and the Collège de France.