Collection Box for the Back of My Mind
From his introduction to Myth and Meaning:
I never had, and still do not have, the perception of feeling my personal identity. I appear to myself as the place where something is going on, but there is no ‘I’, no ‘me.’ Each of us is a kind of crossroads where things happen. The crossroads is purely passive; something happens elsewhere. There is no choice, it is just a matter of chance.
I don’t pretend at all that, because I think that way, I am entitled to conclude that mankind thinks that way too. But I believe that, for each scholar and each writer, the particular way he or she thinks and writes opens a new outlook on mankind. And the fact that I personally have this idiosyncrasy perhaps entitles me to point to something which is valid, while the way in which my colleagues think opens different outlooks, all of which are equally valid.
I’ve always been intrigued by that passage as it’s written by the man who invented structuralism. Written ahead of his ordered thoughts, it acknowledges the situated knowledge movement that would come into anthropology (especially at Santa Cruz) while allowing room for him to make sweeping statements. After all, he saw the world as himself. Lévi-Strauss was certainly pragmatic.
