Analytics table of contents for ‘Wild Thought’

Posted on by Rex

I recently read Wild Thought, the new translation of Pensée Sauvage from U Chicago Press. In fact, it was the first time I had read the book from beginning to end. I can now confirm that much of the middle can be skipped if you are not interested in 19th century debates about totemism, caste, sacrifice, and so forth. However, reading the book is incredibly strengthening and I highly recommend the new translation. There is a modest amount of useful footnotes, but really the translation is the star, not the new scholarly apparatus. It doesn’t reveal a new or previously-understood Lévi-Strauss, but it greatly eases reading. I’m including my analytic TOC here in case it helps anyone else.

The science of the concrete

  • The universe is an object of thought, not of need
  • Species are useful only because they are first known
  • The human mind has a requirement for order
  • The neolithic paradox is solved by the science of the concrete
  • Bricolage
  • The problem of art
  • Differences between rituals and games

The logic of totemic classifications

  • How to define the logic of the concrete and how it manifests in ethnography
  • ‘Native’ classification is systematic and similar to classificatory systems of classical antiquity
  • Indigenous classification is compatible with zoology and botany
  • Eagle hunting reveals deeper and more general structures of meaning
  • Taxonomies are systematic. There are intrinsic and extrinsic difficulties in elucidating them
  • The example of color symbolism shows there are no universal archetypes in symbolism
  • Synchrony versus diachrony

Systems of transformation

  • Theme and variation in Australian kinship systems
  • A non-reductive accoutn of the ‘primacy of infrastructure’
  • Food prohibitions

Totems and caste

  • Parallelisms in exogramy and food prohibition
  • Are these two different systems…. OR HOMOLOGOUS SYSTEMS OF DIFFERENCE?!?!?!
  • The line between totemism and caste blurs in key cases
  • Caste and totemic groups are inversions of each other
  • Marriage is universal because it mediates culture and nature
  • The combinatorial game of classification is a superstructure

Categories, Elements, Species, Numbers

  • Species as manifestation of the discontinuity of the real.
  • Examples, mostly Osage, of species as the basis of a system
  • The task of a future ethnography and the totemic operator
  • Treelike deeper layers of structural consistency

Universalization and Particularization

  • Early modern thinkers were structuralists, van Gennep and Griaule got things wrong
  • Examples of universalization in totemism
  • Processes of particularization. Personal names do not disprove L-S’s theory.
  • L-S’s theory still works of personal names, even those not based on species names.
  • Proper names are the result of logics

The individual as species

  • ‘proper’ names and all o-nyms are ways to deal with the problem of the flow of history and the need to classify
  • Animal names are derived from metaphorical or metonymic relations to society
  • Personal names are part of the general process of carving up reality

Time regained

  • How L-S solves major problems in the literature.
  • Differences between sacrifice and totemism
  • Ritual and churinga as a means of reconciling structure and history

Time and Dialectic

  • Problems with the concept of ‘dialectical reason’, the progressive-regressive method, and reflexive understanding
  • History and ethnography. The method of history
  • Scientific and wild thought are equal

Published by Rex

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He is a political anthropologist who studies kinship, customary land tenure, and the mining and petroleum industry in Papua New Guinea. He also studies the video game World of Warcraft, and is an advocate for open access scholarly communications. His book "Leviathans at the Gold Mine" was published by Duke University Press.