Chris,

Genius!

Dave

PS Towards the end of your message you are critical of the resurrection
of the emic/etic thing. Amen to you. I know that this has been mentioned
in connection to the Luhrmann discussion and has been a point of
contention in Pagan studies of late, but I really do think that this is
a non-question now, or at least an irresolvable question. Emic/etic,
insider/outsider-isms have been shown to be problematic but it would be
nice to move on and actually tackle the magical and not wet ourselves
about all the problems associated with trying to study it. There are
other more pressing issues if we want the study of magic to be accepted
in the academy, as you point out. 




-----Original Message-----
From: Society for The Academic Study of Magic
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Christopher I.
Lehrich
Sent: 17 February 2006 05:36
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] Levi Strauss: was Methodology: WAS
Persuasions of the Witch's Craft


Daniel Harms wrote:

>Christopher Lehrich said:
>  
>
>>If we're going to get out of this somehow, we have to master pretty 
>>much the whole Levi-Strauss corpus and at least the first third or so 
>>of the Derrida corpus. <<
>>    
>>
>I have to say that this has left me curious.  While Levi-Strauss is 
>still well-known among anthropologists, and while some of his work is
still cited, for the most part he has had little or no influence on the
field as it stands today.  I read some Levi-Strauss as an undergrad and
in my graduate program, but on the whole it was mostly from a historical
perspective, and even then a great deal of attention was paid to the
gaps in his reasoning.
>  
>
>Before people get too far into the work a scholar who was prominent 
>half a century ago and whose theories fell by the wayside in his own
discipline decades before our time, I'd like to know what exactly a
detailed study of Levi-Strauss can offer the field of ritual studies
that we cannot find in the work of subsequent theorists.
>  
>
First of all, if I may put it so, I think you have this backwards.  
Let's suppose a major scholar at the turn of the 20th century said 
something famously and brilliantly -- Saussure, or Durkheim, or Weber, 
for example -- and then somebody else recently said it again.  Why would

I want to learn it from the recent guy?  The history of theory in the 
20th century is a history of constant failures of memory, if you ask 
me.  People keep discovering new ideas that aren't at all new, because 
they don't know enough about what's already been done.  And so we go on,

around and around in circles, and never really get anywhere.

Interestingly, the same is true of early modern magic.  When the 
"linguistic turn" struck out for undiscovered country in the 20th 
century, a lot of the entirely new ideas they had were actually quite 
old ideas that had been batted around by 16th-17th century thinkers, 
several of them major occult thinkers.  But nobody knew this, because 
everyone knows obviously that Descartes and Bacon is what happened 
around 1600 in thought and who cares about a bunch of wackos anyway?

In the last incarnation of this list, as some of you may recall, there 
was a brief spate of argument about whether Malinowski and 
Evans-Prichard, and their respective definitions and theories on magic, 
were really as great as all that.  And it quickly became apparent that 
at least some participants had sort of stumbled on these theories 
recently, and were intrigued.  That's fine on a discussion list like 
this -- it's part of the point -- but in published work too this kind of

thing goes on all the time, and it's got to stop.  There are reasons why

Malinowski's approach was largely discredited, and before one jumps in 
and uses it (or dismisses it) you have to know that history.  
Conversely, if you don't know Malinowski, you have no business accepting

criticisms of him easily.

Which takes us to Levi-Strauss.

I didn't say anything especially about ritual studies, which is not 
Levi-Strauss's strength.  I was talking about his approach to magical 
thought.  As an example of the problem, one of the several things I 
examine in my upcoming book is an interesting discussion in the mid-80s 
about magical analogical reasoning in the early modern period.  The big 
gun here is Brian Vickers, who wrote two very long articles (they could 
be published together as a roughly 125-page book) about this.  And if 
you read those articles very carefully, you find that they all amount to

a kind of European rewriting of the first half of the first chapter of 
_La pensee sauvage_ -- which Vickers mentions once in a footnote that's 
a list of anthropological works that are sort of vaguely relevant.  It 
doesn't look like he's read it.  The thing is, Levi-Strauss wrote this 
really rather famous book 20 years before Vickers wrote his articles. 
Thus Vickers is in fact reinventing the wheel -- and not doing it as 
well as Levi-Strauss did, nor continuing on to the remaining 8.5 
chapters of the book..

As to theories falling by the wayside: if you haven't read them, you 
most definitely should not accept such criticisms lightly.  Consider the

criticisms of Derrida and Deconstructionism a decade or two ago.  Notice

how few of the critics, in the long run, turn out to be philosophers, 
and how often it turned out that everyone just sort of assumed that the 
worst excesses of literary deconstructionists were identical to 
Derrida.  Notice, quite recently, Richard Rorty's spirited _defense_ of 
Derrida, in a scathing review of a stupid book (the review appeared in 
_The Nation_ a couple of years ago).  Now Rorty is hardly into 
deconstruction; he also rightly notes that so-called "deconstructionism"

has nothing much to do with Derrida.  But Rorty is an extremely smart 
and distinguished philosopher, who read a lot of Derrida and found that 
he was also quite brilliant as a philosopher.  There are a number of 
similar examples, such as Manfred Frank.  So whose view should you 
accept?  On balance, if you must choose, I'd go with the guys actually 
in the field, i.e. philosophers, and these days they're mostly positive 
(hardly converts, but positive).  But if on the other hand you really 
want to know, you have to actually read Derrida.

The same goes for Levi-Strauss.  My favorite example is Edmund Leach.  
In the intro to _The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism_, which he 
edited, he makes pretty clear that he's a convert.  In the intro to 
_Levi-Strauss_, a little primer he wrote a couple years later, he 
announces that he is not and never has been a convert.  Makes you a 
little suspicious, yes?  Now notice the lines of division.  Note that 
Geertz can't stand Levi-Strauss, but that unless you've decided Geertz 
is the be-all and end-all of anthropology forever and ever amen, that's 
interesting but not helpful unless you've read the works he's 
criticizing.  Note Pierre Bourdieu, sometimes held up as an 
anti-structuralist or post-structuralist (he was indeed the latter), and

note the way he carefully indicates that his assault on structuralism at

the start of _The Logic of Practice_ does not apply to Levi-Strauss 
(nobody noticed, though, because he put that in his endnotes, and 
clearly nobody read those).

Now, finally, go look at the critical literature on why exactly 
Levi-Strauss's 4-volume masterpiece, _Mythologiques_, really doesn't 
work or make sense or is wrong or whatever.  Not the ones that criticize

the first volume -- the ones that criticize the whole thing.  Notice 
that there really are very few.  Why?

Consider, for a moment, the possibility that "structuralism" became a 
political and ideological force in the late 1960s in France, spreading 
elsewhere thereafter.  For a time, Levi-Strauss was lionized because of 
this, not entirely because of his work.  Then, like any intellectual 
fad, this died -- which, once again, didn't have all that much to do 
with people's wonderful expertise on Levi-Strauss (or the early Derrida,

or Jakobson, or whoever).  And then everyone announced that 
structuralism is dead and we don't have to read Levi-Strauss any more.  
After that, the remaining couple of volumes of _Mythologiques_ appeared,

since he was doing his thing and paying little attention to all this 
faddish nonsense.  Thus few serious responses: everyone decided that 
structuralism was over and just didn't read the rest.  This is called 
bad scholarship, at least among those who continued to say that 
Levi-Strauss was all wet about myth.  And for the next generation, you 
get your response: I hear that structuralism is dead, so we don't have 
to read Levi-Strauss any more, so we won't.

Well, actually, we never did.  And that is precisely the problem. Until 
we have grappled with Levi-Strauss, we cannot go past him, and go past 
him we surely must.  I am emphatically not a structuralist, nor do I 
have the slightest inclination to sign on to some sort of 
neo-Levi-Straussianism or something.  But we have to get out the other 
side, not pretend it didn't happen and walk away.

And, frankly, that is exactly what a lot of people in far too many 
relevant fields have done.  I have not, for example, seen a lot of work 
on magic that grapples with him, although I have seen resurrections of 
Evans-Pritchard and borrowings from Ron Grimes and so forth.  To use a 
pointed example, I find it ludicrous that Wouter Hanegraaff and others 
want to resurrect Marvin Harris's misguided emic/etic thing, which died 
for good reason in anthropology, when they have apparently neither 
examined those debates nor taken seriously the dominant alternatives of 
the same historical moment (such as Levi-Strauss, though not only him).

If they want to say that this distinction is useful despite those 
debates, and explain why, I'd be interested to read it, but without such

an explanation all the same old errors crop right back up.  Von 
Stuckrad's nifty article in _Religion_ says this rather politely 
(probably because Hanegraaff is his boss).

In my experience, the majority of "gaps in Levi-Strauss's reasoning" are

not such.  There are indeed problems, but they tend to be exceedingly 
complex.  The most brilliant attack leveled, and it's not exactly an 
attack, was Derrida's.  He really did find a serious hole in the 
formulation, and developed something rich out of it.  But, as he also 
notes, we're all pretty much structuralists now: the revolution has 
happened, and pretending that it hasn't is hiding your head in the 
sand.  If you don't want to be a structuralist -- and I know I don't -- 
you have to read Levi-Strauss and his colleagues and get _past_ them.  
Then, if you ask me, you have to do the same thing with the next big 
generation, which means Derrida, the German Hermeneutics crew (Gadamer, 
Frank, Habermas, etc.), J.Z. Smith, Eco and Sebeok and the semioticians 
of that period, and so on.  When you've done all that, and gotten past 
all those people, then you're ready to strike out for new territory.

In fact, of course, this isn't necessary for most people in our field.  
But precisely two of these people have written extensively on magic, and

those are Levi-Strauss and Smith (the latter of whom is a very deep 
admirer of Levi-Strauss, interestingly enough).  Close seconds, for 
those who care, would be Derrida (note the constant magical metaphors in

early work like _Grammatology_, and the fascinating discourse on 
necromancy in _Specters of Marx) and Eco (albeit primarily in his more 
popular works and his novels).

Finally, I'd like to note an interesting little fact.  How many of you 
(assuming anyone has read this far in this long email) realize that 
Levi-Strauss is still alive?  I'm betting not many.  Everyone just sort 
of "knows" he's dead, because structuralism is supposed to have died a 
long time ago.  But he has, in fact written some things as late as the 
early 90s, as brilliant as ever.  These days, at 97, presumably he's not

writing, but I wouldn't put it past him.  Levi-Strauss is, frankly, one 
of the very few great geniuses of last century, and taking it on faith 
and secondhand evidence that we don't need to care about what he said is

a stunningly bad idea.

Which is a long way of answering, I hope, your question.

Chris Lehrich

-- 
Christopher I. Lehrich
Boston University


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