Hunting budies

“The ethnographer pressed the point, asking what they would think or say if, through some impossibility, this eventuality [a man sleeping with his sister] managed to occur.  Informants had difficulty placing themselves in this situation, for it was scarcely conceivable: ‘What, don’t you want a brother-in-law? Don’t you realize that if you marry another man’s sister and another man marries your sister, you will have at least two brothers-in-law, while if you marry your own sister you will have none?  With who will you hunt, with whom will you garden, whom will you go to visit?…Incest is socially absurd before it is morally culpable.  The incredulous exclamatiuon from the informant: ‘So you do not want a to have a brother-in-law?’ provides the veritable golden rule for the state of society”

-Claude Levi-Strass, 1969 (The Elementary Structures of Kinship.  Boston: Beacon Press. Pg. 485)

Off on the right foot

“I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions…Why, I asked myself, should I give a detailed account of so many trivial circumstaces and insignificant happenings? Adventure has no place in the anthropologist’s profession; it is merely one of those unavoidable drawbacks, which detract from his effective work through the incidental loss of weeks or months…The fact that so much effort and expenditure has to be wasted on reaching the object of our studies bestows no value on that aspect of our profession, and should be seen rather as its negative side. The truths which we seek so far afield only become valid when separated from this dross.”

-Claude Levi-Strauss sets out, 1955 (Tristes Tropiques. New York: Penguin. Pg 1)

A passionate science, then?

“Anthropology is not a dispassionate science like astronomy, which springs from the contemplation of things at a distance. It is the outcome of an historical process, which has made the larger part of mankind subservient to the other, and during which millions of innocent human beings have had their resources plundered, their institutions and beliefs destroyed while they themselves were ruthlessly killed, thrown into bondage, and contaminated by diseases they were unable to resist. Anthropology is the daughter to this era of violence. Its capacity to assess more objectively the facts pertaining to the human condition reflects, on the epistemological level, a state of affairs in which one part of mankind treats the other as an object.”

-Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1966 (“Anthropology: Its Achievement and Future,” Current Anthropology, vol. 7, 1966, p. 126.) via Open Anthropology