Influential anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss died this week, just shy of his 101st birthday. The Savage Minds blog has a good summary of his significance.
Coming coincidentally at a time when I’m experiencing a renewed interest in my old BA degree’s subject, this has given me pause to reflect on what I’ve forgotten, what little I knew to begin, and what I think about anthropology and want to learn.
I know I am biased by the age I live in and my familiarity with computers, information science and science fiction, and these ideas are nothing new, but I tend to think of culture as an emergent phenomenon of the psychological software running on the biological hardware of Homo sapiens sapiens. I know there’s a lot to quibble with in there, and a lot that demands definition or explication. But it’s generally how I see things at this point in my life. In a way, this means I see different cultures as organisms in their own right, made up of constituent parts, constrained by their underlying substrate (biology) and environment, carrying information across generations, subject to adaptation and selection… the analogies are just too tempting. Is culture a little like a computer virus?
None of this answers any particular great questions, it’s just a vague, tentative model in my head. But, in an era where “people who study humans” are generally splintered between “objective” physical anthroplogists, “post-modern” cultural anthropologists, “statistical” sociologists, “misguided” economists (*ahem*), and other various fora and fauna, I dream of a day when biological, cognitive, neurological, cultural, psychological and social studies can somehow be melded into more coherent models and studies. It need not mean “one discipline to rule them all,” any more than understanding that physics underlies chemistry which underlies biology means those studies should be held under one discipline. But where you can pretty much clearly see the links there, it’s still all pretty fuzzy above biology.
We are story-telling creatures, without much of a clear story to tell about ourselves. And this post is my small, poor attempt to honor Lévi-Strauss for his theoretical synthesis dreams and efforts. Perhaps one day I’ll actually read some of his work. *sigh*
