Durkheim and Levi-Strauss and Thought

The ritual examination of the other functions as a harvesting of intellectual resources to formulate a theory of the western self. In the case of the sensitive but scientific anthropologist, the mind of the other is a key to understanding the universal nature of the human mind. Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss consider ‘primitive thought’ to be rooted in certain modes of classification which they consider to be precursors and parallels, respectively, to ‘modern’ Euro-American scientific rationality. They take this connection between modes of classification and thought as indicative of a universal condition of human existence that shows the subject is rule bound and order loving. This conclusion of thought from classification from society is ultimately but the reenactment of their definitions and presuppositions that arise from the form of religious thought they call ‘rationality’.

To begin with, for both Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss , ‘primitive thought’ is the result of how the ‘primitive’ classifies the world, which in turn is the result of accident and human nature. Classification is the center of thought, for both writers. Durkheim explains this well in his reconciliation of the theories of apriorism and empiricism. He argues that the categories that are the sine qua non of thought are themselves the results of social conditions. “If the categories are essentially collective representations … they translate states of the collectivity, first and foremost. They depend upon the way the collectivity is organized, upon its morphology, its religious, moral, and economic institutions, and so on.” (Durkheim 15) He then takes up the remainder of the apriorist narrative; these categories are the foundations of thought and it is only ...

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... ordered mind seems a perfect example of Durkheim’s division in all ‘religious thought’ between the sacred and the profane. For both writers, a universal and order loving subject is a sacred necessity which cannot be questioned within and by the structure of their modes of religious thought. But of course, this totalizing theory would not grant my argument an exception either, if my view of the subject were also an article of faith, but this presumes the very system of classification of the academic in describing the classification of the subject that this argument is meant to question. In the case that we do not presume the existence of a classifying, order loving thinker, religious thought may well never even occur, as there is no one to think of the profane and the sacred, and no one to generate a science of the concrete. There is, instead, only the concrete.