Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jane Marie Todd, Maurice Olender-Anthropology Confronts The Problems of The Modern World-Belknap Press (2013)

Anthropology Confronts the Problems
of the Modern World
C L AU D E L V I - S T R AU S S
Foreword by Maurice Olender
Translated by Jane Marie Todd
Anthropology Confronts the

Problems of the Modern World

Claude Lvi-Str auss

for eword by maur ice olender
tr anslated by jane mar ie todd
the belknap press of harvard

university press
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

2013
First published as Anthropologie face aux problmes du monde moderne,

copyright 2011 ditions du Seuil
Collection La Librairie du XXIe sicle,
sous la direction de Maurice Olender
Copyright 2013 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
all r ights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lvi-Strauss, Claude
[LAnthropologie face aux problmes du monde moderne. English]
Anthropology confronts the problems of the
modern world / Claude Lvi-Strauss with a
foreword by Maurice Olender ; translated by Jane Marie Todd.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-674-07290-9 (alk. paper)
1. Anthropology. 2. JapanCivilization. I. Title.
GN29.L4813 2013
301dc23 2012031550
My thanks to Monique Lvi-Strauss,

who followed every stage in the publication
of this volume with equal parts attention
and generosity
M.O.
C ONTENTS
Foreword by Maurice Olender

1. The End of the Wests

Cultural Supremacy
ix
2. Three Great Contemporary Problems:

Sexuality, Economic Development,
and Mythic Thought
45
3. Recognizing Cultural Diversity:

What We Can Learn from
Japanese Civilization
88
About the Author
127
FORE W ORD
Maurice Olender
In spr ing 1986, on the occasion of his fourth visit

to Japan, Claude Lvi-Strauss wrote the three chapters composing this volume and delivered them as
lectures at the invitation of the Ishizaka Foundation
in Tokyo. He chose for that series the title of this
book: Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern
World.
Lvi-Strauss draws freely from his earlier writings
to identify the major themes of his work, and to critique and update them. He rereads some of the texts
that made him famous, reconsidering the main social issues that never ceased to trouble him, especially
the relationships between race, history, and culture.
He also meditates on the possible future of new
forms of humanism in a world undergoing transformation.
Those readers familiar with Lvi-Strauss will redisix
FORE W ORD
cover in this volume the questions underpinning his

work as a whole, and the younger generations will
find a vision of the future as imagined by the famous
anthropologist. While emphasizing the importance
of anthropology as a new democratic humanism,
Lvi-Strauss inquires into the end of the Wests cultural supremacy and the connections between cultural relativism and moral judgment. When he examines the problems of what is now a global society, he
also considers economic practices, questions associated with medically assisted reproduction, and the
links between scientific and mythic thought.
Finally, Lvi-Strauss reveals in these three lectures
his anxieties about the crucial problems of a world
on the brink of the twenty-first century: the affinities
between the various ideological explosions and the
development of different forms of fundamentalism.
Lvi-Strausss world-renowned work constitutes a
laboratory of thought opening onto the future. This
book, without question the best introduction to LviStrauss, will provide students and the younger generations with an astute understanding of his world.

1
THE END OF THE W EST S
C ULTURAL SUPRE M A C Y
Let me fir st t hank the Ishizaka Foundation for

the great honor it has shown me this year, by inviting
me to deliver lectures in a series that, since 1977, has
been graced by so many eminent personalities. I also
thank the foundation for proposing the theme of
how anthropologya discipline to which I have devoted my lifeviews the fundamental problems now
facing humanity.
I shall begin by telling you how anthropology formulates these problems from its unique perspective. I shall
then try to define what anthropology is and how it can
bring a fresh eye to the problems of the contemporary world, not claiming to solve them on its own but
offering the hope of a better understanding of them.
LEARNING FROM OTHERS
For about the last two centuries, Western civilization

has defined itself as the civilization of progress. Other
1
THE END OF THE W EST S C ULTURAL SUPRE M A C Y
civilizations, having embraced the same ideal, believed they ought to take the West as their model. All
of them shared the conviction that science and technology would keep moving forward, would provide
human beings with greater power and more happiness; that the political institutions and forms of social organization that appeared in France and the
United States in the late eighteenth century, and the
philosophy that inspired them, would give all members of every society more freedom in the conduct of
their personal lives and more responsibility in the
management of public affairs; and that moral judgment, aesthetic sensibility, in a word, the love of
truth, goodness, and beauty, would spread irresistibly and reach every corner of the inhabited earth.
The events for which the world served as a theater
in the course of the present [twentieth] century have
given the lie to these optimistic forecasts. Totalitarian ideologies have spread and, in several regions of
the world, continue to spread. Human beings exterminated one another by the tens of millions; they
engaged in horrifying genocides. Even after peace was
reestablished, they no longer felt certain that science
and technology offered nothing but benefits, or that
the philosophical principles, the political institutions, and the forms of social life that originated in
2
the eighteenth century constituted definitive solutions to the great problems raised by the human condition.
Science and technology have phenomenally extended our knowledge of the physical and biological
world. They have given us a power over nature that
no one could have suspected even a century ago. We
are beginning, however, to assess the cost that had
tobe paid for that power. Increasingly, the question
arises as to whether these achievements did not have
deleterious effects. They placed the means of mass
destruction within reach of human beings, and these
means, even unused, threaten by their mere presence
the survival of our species. In a more insidious but
nonetheless real manner, that survival is also threatened by the growing scarcity or pollution of the most
essential goods: space, air, water, the wealth and diversity of natural resources.
Thanks in part to the advances of medicine, the
number of humans on earth has continued to grow,
to the point that, in several regions of the world, it is
no longer possible to satisfy the basic needs of the
population, who fall victim to famine. Elsewhere, in
regions that are able to provide for their subsistence,
an imbalance arises because, in order to provide work
for more and more individuals, it is constantly neces3
sary to produce more. We therefore have the sense

that we are being drawn into an endless race in pursuit of increased productivity. Production requires
consumption, which itself calls for even more production. Larger and larger portions of the population are, as it were, sucked up by the direct or indirect
needs of industry. They concentrate in vast urban
centers that impose an artificial and dehumanized
existence. The operation of democratic institutions
and the need for social protection give rise to an invasive bureaucracy that tends to latch onto and paralyze the social body. There is reason to wonder
whether modern societies constructed on that model
do not run the risk of becoming ungovernable in the
near future.
Long an act of faith, the belief in a material and
moral progress destined to go on forever is facing its
gravest crisis. Western-style civilization has lost sight
of the model it had set up for itself and is no longer
bold enough to offer that model to others. Is it not
therefore fitting to look elsewhere, to broaden the
traditional frameworks to which our reflections on
the human condition have been restricted? Ought we
not to integrate social experiments that are more varied, more different from our own than those within
the narrow horizon to which we have long confined
4
ourselves? Now that Western-style civilization no

longer has the resources it needs to regenerate itself
on its own and to thrive once again, can it learn some
thing about humankind in general, and about itself
in particular, from the humble societies, those long
held in contempt, which until relatively recently had
escaped its influence? Such are the questions raised
over the last few decades by thinkers, scholars, and
men of action, questions that have incited them to
consult anthropology, since the other social sciences,
more focused on the contemporary world, provide
no answers. What, therefore, is this discipline that
long remained in the shadows, and which people are
now realizing may have something to say about such
problems?
UNUSUAL AND ODD FACTS
No matter how far back in time or how distant in

space one may venture in search of examples, humanlife and human activity occur within structures
that display characteristics in common. Always and
everywhere, the human being is endowed with articulated speech. He lives in society. The reproduction of
the species is not left to chance but is subject to rules
that exclude a certain number of biologically viable
5
unions.
Humans make and use tools, which they employ in various technologies. Their social lives are
conducted within institutional entities whose content may change from one group to another but
whose form generally remains constant. By different
methods, certain functionseconomic, educational,
political, religiousare assured in a regular manner.
Understood in the broadest sense, anthropology is
the discipline devoted to the study of that human
phenomenon, which undoubtedly belongs to the set
of natural phenomena. When compared to the other
forms of animal life, however, it displays constant
and specific characteristics that justify its being studied independently.
In that sense, we can say that anthropology is as
old as humanity itself. In the eras for which we possess historical evidence, preoccupations of a kind
wewould now call anthropological were on display:
among the memorialists who accompanied Alexander the Great in Asia, in Xenophon, Herodotus, Pausanias, and, from a more philosophical angle, in Aris
totle and Lucretius.
In the Arab world of the sixteenth century, Ibn
Battuta, a great traveler, and Ibn Khaldn, a historian and philosopher, demonstrated an authentically
anthropological sensibility; so too, a few centuries
6
earlier, had the Chinese Buddhist monks who went

to India to gather information about their religion,
and the Japanese monks who visited China with the
same aim.
During that time, exchanges between Japan and
China occurred primarily through the intermediary
of Korea, and a record of anthropological curiosity
exists in that country from the seventh century on.
The half-brother of King Munmu, say the ancient
chronicles, agreed to become prime minister only on
the condition that he first travel throughout the
kingdom incognito to observe life among the common people. That can be viewed as a first ethnographic investigation, though in reality, unlike that
Korean dignitary, the ethnographer of today does not
often receive from the indigenous host who welcomes
him a ravishing concubine to share his bed! Also in
the Korean chronicles, it is said that a certain monks
son, who composed books on the popular customs
of China and Silla, was for that reason ranked among
the ten great sages of the kingdom.
In the Middle Ages, Europe discovered the East,
first during the Crusades, then through the accounts
of emissaries whom the pope and the king of France
sent among the Mongols in the thirteenth century;
and especially, in the fourteenth century, thanks to
7
Marco Polos long visit to China. In the early Renaissance, we begin to discern the very diverse sources
from which anthropological reflection would henceforth spring, for example, the literature to which the
Turkish invasions of Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean gave rise. The fantasies of medieval folklore
perpetuated those of antiquity concerning the Plinian races, so named because, in the first century c.e.,
Pliny the Elder helpfully described them in his Natural History as savage peoples, monstrous in their anatomy and their mores. Such imaginings were not unknown in Japan and, probably because that country
had intentionally cut itself off from the rest of the
world, they survived there longer in the popular
mind. During my first visit to Japan, I received as a
gift an encyclopedia published in 1789, entitled Zho
Kinm Zui. In the geographical section, exotic peoples,
gigantic or possessing disproportionately long arms
or legs, are taken to be real.
Europe was better informed during that same period, having accumulated the positive knowledge
that had begun to pour in from Africa, America, and
Oceania in the sixteenth century, as a result of the
great discoveries. Very quickly, compilations of these
travel narratives enjoyed a phenomenal vogue in Germany, Switzerland, England, and France. That vast
8
body of travel literature would spur anthropological reflection, which began in France with Rabelais
and Montaigne and by the eighteenth century had
reached all of Europe.
An echo of that concern can be found in Japan, in
travels presented as imaginary, for lack of any direct
knowledge about faraway countries. Take, for example, the fictive journey of e Bunpa to the land of
Harashirya, behind which can be discerned Brazil,
inhabited by natives who know nothing of the cultivation of cereals, feed on dried roots, have no king,
and consider noble only those most skillful at shooting with a bow. That is very close to what Montaigne
had reported two centuries earlier, after conversing
with Brazilian Indians brought back to France by a
navigator.
Although we situate the beginnings of anthropological research, as it is now practiced, in the nineteenth century, it was initially motivated by what
could be called an antiquarian curiosity. People noticed that the great classical disciplineshistory, archaeology, and philology, sciences that had their
rightful place in university curriculahad left behind
all sorts of residue or debris. Rather like ragpickers,
curiosity-seekers undertook to collect these scraps of
knowledge, these fragments of problems, these pic9
turesque details that the other sciences cast disdainfully onto their intellectual rubbish heaps.
At first, anthropology was undoubtedly nothing
but that collection of unusual and odd facts. Gradually, however, it was discovered that this debris, this
residue, was more important than had been thought.
The reason is easy to understand.
What strikes a human being at the sight of other
humans are the points they have in common with
himself. Historians, archaeologists, philosophers,
moralists, and literary writers initially sought from
the peoples recently discovered confirmation of their
own beliefs about humanitys past. That explains
why, during the great discoveries of the Renaissance,
the first travelers accounts did not elicit any surprise:
their audience believed not so much that new worlds
had been discovered as that the past of the old world
had been recovered. The ways of life of savage peoples
demonstrated that the Bible and the Greek and Latin
authors were speaking the truth when they described
the Garden of Eden, the Golden Age, the Fountain of
Youth, Atlantis, or the Fortunate Islands.
People neglected or refused to see the differences,
even though they are essential for studying human
beings. Indeed, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau would later
10
say, one must first observe the differences in order to

discover the properties.
Another discovery followed: these oddities, these
peculiarities, were organized in a much more coherent way than the phenomena judged to be the only
important ones and on which attention had focused.
Neglected or barely studied facts, such as the way different societies divide up work between the sexesin
a given society, is it men or women who devote themselves to pottery or weaving, or who work the land?
made it possible to compare and classify human soci
eties on much more solid foundations than anyone
had previously managed to do.
I mentioned the division of labor; I could also
speak of residence rules. When a marriage takes place,
where will the newlyweds live? With the husbands
parents? With the wifes? Or do they establish a separate residence?
The rules of filiation and marriage were also long
neglected because they seemed so capricious and
meaningless. Why do a large number of peoples in
the world distinguish between two kinds of cousins,
those that are the offspring of two brothers or two
sisters and those that are the children of a brother
and a sister? Why do they condemn marriage between
11
cousins of the first type and recommend it, if indeed

they do not impose it, between cousins of the second
type? And why is the Arab world practically the only
exception to that rule?
In addition, there is no people in the world that
does not seek to assert its originality by proscribing
one or another category of food: milk in China, pork
for Jews and Muslims, fish for some American tribes
and deer flesh for others, and so on.
All these peculiarities constitute so many differences among peoples. Nevertheless, these differences
can be compared, inasmuch as these aspects can be
observed among almost every people. That explains
anthropologists interest in variations that, though
trivial in appearance, make it possible to arrive at
relatively simple classifications, thus introducing into
the diversity of human societies an order comparable
to that which zoologists and botanists use to classify
natural species.
In that respect, the most effective research has
dealt with the rules of filiation and marriage. The
size of the societies that anthropologists study may
vary a great deal, from a few dozen members to several hundred or several thousand. Compared to our
own, however, these societies are very small, so that
human relationships within them are personal in na12
ture. Nothing shows that better than the tendency of

societies without writing to conceive of relations between their members on the model of kinship: every
one is a brother, sister, cousin, uncle, aunt, or other
kin to everyone else. And those who are not relations
are strangers, hence potential enemies. There is not
even any need to trace genealogies: in many of these
societies, simple rules make it possible to assign every
individual, by virtue of his or her birth, to one group
or another, and between these groups relations equivalent to kinship bonds prevail.
And there are no societies, however rudimentary
their technical and economic level, and however different they may be from one another in their social
customs and religious beliefs, that do not possess a
kinship nomenclature and rules of marriage dividing
related individuals between those one is permitted to
marry and those with whom marriage is prohibited.
Here, then, is a first means of distinguishing societies
from one another and of giving each its place within
a typology.
A COMMON DENOMINATOR
What, then, are these societies that anthropologists

study by preference and which we are accustomed by
13
long tradition to call primitive, a term that many

now challenge and that, in any case, would have to be
defined precisely?
The human groups thus designated are for the
most part those that differ from our own by virtue of
the absence of writing and mechanization. But we
must not forget a few primordial truths about them:
these societies provide the only model for under
standing how human beings lived together over a historical period undoubtedly corresponding to 99 percent of the total duration of the collective life of
humanity. Their existence lasted until recent times
(from a geological perspective) and covered three-
quarters of the surface of the inhabited earth.
What these societies offer, therefore, are not really
lessons about the phases of our distant past. They illustrate rather a general situation, a common denominator of the human condition. Seen from that
standpoint, it is the high civilizations of the West
and East that constitute exceptions.
In fact, the progress made in ethnological investigations increasingly convinces us that these societies,
considered backward, left behind by evolution, cast
aside to marginal regions, and doomed to extinction,
constitute original forms of social life. They are per-
14
fectly viable so long as they are not threatened from

the outside.
Let us therefore seek to better define their contours.
At the extreme, they consist of small groups comprising between a few dozen and a few hundred people, separated from one another by several days journey on foot, and whose demographic density is about
0.1 inhabitants per square kilometer. Their rate of
growth is very low, sharply lower than 1 percent; as a
result, population gains approximately offset losses.
The number of members, then, varies little. That
demographic stasis is assured, consciously or un
consciously, by various procedures: sexual taboos following childbirth, for example, and prolonged breastfeeding, which delays the resumption of the mothers
menses. It is striking that, in all the cases observed,
demographic growth does not impel the group to
reorganize on new foundations. Upon becoming
more numerous, it splits into two smaller societies of
the same order of magnitude as the previous one.
These small groups have a spontaneous capacity to
eliminate infectious diseases from their midst. Epidemiologists have explained the reason: the viruses that
cause these diseases survive in each individual for
15
only a limited number of days and must therefore

circulate constantly if they are to persist within the
population at large. That is possible only when the
annual number of births rises to a certain level, a
condition realized only when the population reaches
several hundred thousand.
In the complex ecological environments in which
these peoples live, plant and animal species are very
diverse. Furthermore, these groups have beliefs and
practices (which we are wrong to take for superstitions) that are intended to preserve natural resources.
Yet each species in the tropics has only a small number of individuals per unit of area. That is also the
case for infectious or parasitic species: infections can
therefore be multiple while remaining clinically insig
nificant. AIDS provides a contemporary example.
That viral disease, localized in a few spots of tropical
Africa, where it probably lived in harmonious balance with the indigenous populations for millennia,
became a major risk when, by chance, historical
events introduced it into larger societies.
Noninfectious diseases, for their part, are generally
absent from these groups, and for two reasons: their
high level of physical activity and their diet, which is
much more varied than that among farming populations. That diet relies on a hundred or so animal and
16
plant species, sometimes more; is low in fat and rich

in fiber and mineral salts; and provides an adequate
quantity of protein and calories. These factors taken
together explain the absence of obesity, hypertension,
and circulatory problems.
It is not at all surprising, therefore, that a French
traveler who visited the Indians of Brazil in the sixteenth century could admire the fact that this people,
composed of the same elements as we are, ... are not
afflicted by leprosy, palsy, lethargy, cankerous illnesses, ulcers, or other bodily defects seen on the surface and on the outside. By contrast, in the century
or century and a half that followed the discovery of
America, the populations of Mexico and Peru fell
from a hundred million to four or five million, assailed less by the blows of the conquistadores than by
imported diseases, made more virulent by the new
forms of life the colonizers imposed. These diseases
included smallpox, measles, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, malaria, influenza, mumps, yellow fever, cholera,
plague, diphtheria, and many others.
We would be wrong to underestimate these socie
ties, just because we have known them in a wretched
state. Even impoverished, they are invaluable, inasmuch as the thousands of societies that existed and
the hundreds that continue to exist on the surface of
17
the earth constitute so many readymade experiments,

the only ones available to us. For unlike our colleagues in the physical and natural sciences, we cannot manufacture our objects of study, that is, socie
ties, and set them in operation in a laboratory. These
experiments, drawn from societies chosen because
they are the most different from our own, provide us
with the means to study human beings and their collective achievements in an attempt to understand
how the human mind functions in the extremely diverse concrete situations in which history and geog
raphy have placed it.
Always and everywhere, scientific explanation rests
on what could be called useful simplifications. In this
respect, anthropology makes a virtue of necessity. As
I said, a large portion of the societies it chooses to
study are small in size, and they conceive of themselves in terms of stability.
These exotic societies are remote from the anthropologist who observes them. The distance separating
them is not only geographical but also intellectual
and moral. That remoteness reduces our perception
to a few essential outlines. I would readily say that, in
the social and human sciences as a whole, the anthropologist occupies a place comparable to that falling
to the astronomer in the physical and natural sci18
ences. Indeed, astronomy was able to constitute itself

as a science from earliest antiquity only because, in
the absence of any scientific method (which did not
yet exist), the distance of the heavenly bodies allowed
for a simplified view of them.
The phenomena we observe are extremely far away
from us, first, as I said, in the geographical sense,
since not long ago we had to travel for weeks or
months to reach our objects of study. Above all, however, they are far away in a psychological sense, inasmuch as these little details, these humble facts on
which we fix our attention, rest on motivations of
which individuals have no clear awareness, or indeed,
no awareness at all. We study languages, but those
who speak them are not conscious of the rules that
they apply to speak and to be understood. We are no
more conscious of the reasons that we adopt one
foodstuff and proscribe another. We are not conscious of the origin and real function of our rules of
courtesy or our table manners. All these facts, which
have their roots in the deepest unconscious of individuals and groups, are the very same ones we are
trying to analyze and understand, despite a psychological distance that replicates, on a different order,
the geographical remoteness.
Even in our own societies, where that physical
19
distance
between the observer and the object does
not exist, phenomena persist that are comparable to
those we travel far and wide to find. Anthropology
asserts its rights and assumes its function anywhere
that customs, ways of life, practices, and techniques
have not been swept aside by historical and economic
upheavals. Their continued existence attests that they
correspond to something profound enough in the
thought and lives of human beings to resist the forces
of destruction. It does so anywhere, therefore, that
the collective life of ordinary peoplethose your illustrious anthropologist Yanagida Kunio called jmin
still rests primarily on personal contacts, family
ties, and neighborly relations, whether in villages or
city neighborhoods: in a word, in the small, traditional environments where the oral tradition persists.
I find it typical of the symmetry in relations observed between Western Europe and Japan that, in
both places, anthropological research got its start
during the same time period: the eighteenth century.
In Western Europe, it was spurred by the great journeys that provided access to knowledge of the most
diverse cultures; by contrast, in Japan, which was isolated at the time, anthropological research probably had its roots in the Kokugaku school. Yanagida
20
Kunios monumental enterprise a century later appears still to have belonged within the tradition of
that school, at least in the eyes of the Western observer. In Korea, anthropological research also began
in the eighteenth century, with the work of the Silhak school, which was concerned with rural life and
popular customs in its own country and not, as in
Europe, among remote peoples.
By collecting a multitude of little facts that, for a
long time, historians judged unworthy of their attention, by filling in the gaps and inadequacies of the
written documents through direct observations, by
attempting to learn how people recollect the past of
their little groupor how they imagine itand how
they experience the present, we succeed in constituting archives of an original type and in setting up
what Yanagida Kunio called bunkagaku, the science
of culture, in a word, anthropology.
AUTHENTICITY AND INAUTHENTICITY
By this point, we are better able to understand what

anthropology is and what makes for its originality.
The first ambition of anthropology is to achieve
objectivity. In this case, what is at issue is not simply
an objectivity that allows the one practicing it to set
21
aside his beliefs, his preferences, and his prejudices.

That kind of objectivity characterizes all the social
sciences; otherwise, they could not lay claim to the
name of science. The type of objectivity to which anthropology lays claim goes further. It elevates objectivity not only above the values proper to the observers own society or social milieu but also above his
methods of thought, in order to achieve formulations
valid not only for an honest and objective observer
but for all observers possible. The anthropologist
therefore does not merely silence his feelings. He
fashions new mental categories, contributes toward
introducing notions of space and time, opposition
and contradiction, as alien to his traditional way of
thinking as those currently found in certain branches
of the physical and natural sciences. That relation
between how the same problems are posed in disciplines very remote from each other was admirably
perceived by the great physicist Niels Bohr, when he
wrote in 1939: The traditional differences [between
human cultures] . . . in many respects resemble the
different equivalent manners in which physical experience can be described.*
* Niels Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (New
York: Wiley, 1958), p.29.
22
The second ambition of anthropology is totality. It

sees social life as a system, all of whose aspects are
organically linked. The anthropologist readily acknowledges that, to achieve a more thorough knowledge of a certain type of phenomenon, it is indispensable that he divide up the whole, just as the jurist, the
economist, the demographer, and the political scientist do. But what the anthropologist seeks is the common form, the invariant properties that reveal themselves behind the most diverse kinds of social life.
To illustrate with an example certain considerations that may appear overly abstract, let us see how
an anthropologist apprehends a few aspects of Japanese culture.
Indeed, it does not take an anthropologist to notice that, compared to his Western colleagues, a Japanese carpenter uses his saw and plane backwards: he
saws and planes toward himself rather than pushing
the tool away from him. That made an impression on
Basil Hall Chamberlain back in the late nineteenth
century. Chamberlain, a professor at the University
of Tokyo and a shrewd observer of Japanese life and
culture, was an eminent philologist. In his famous
book Things Japanese, he recorded that fact, along with
several others, under the rubric Topsy-turvidom, as
an oddity to which he attached no particular signifi
23
cance. In short, he went no further than Herodotus,

who remarked, more than twenty-four centuries ago,
that, when compared to his Greek compatriots, the
ancient Egyptians did everything backwards.
Specialists in the Japanese language have also
noted, as a curiosity, that a Japanese person who
takes his leave for a short time (to mail a letter, to buy
a newspaper or a pack of cigarettes) will readily say
something like, Itte mairimsu, to which one replies, Itte irasshai. The emphasis is placed not on
the decision to go out, as in the Western languages
under similar circumstances, but rather on the intention to return promptly.
Similarly, a specialist in ancient Japanese literature
will point out that Japanese writers portray travel as a
painful, wrenching experience and remain haunted
by the obsession with the return home. Finally, at a
more prosaic level, the Japanese cook, it appears, does
not say, as one would in Europe, drop into the frying oil but rather lift out or pull out (ageru) of
the frying oil.
The anthropologist will refuse to consider these
minor facts independent variables or isolated peculiarities. On the contrary, he will be struck by what
they all have in common. In different realms and in
24
different modalities, what is at issue is always the action of bringing back toward oneself, or of bringing
oneself back inside. Instead of positing the I from
the start as an autonomous, already constituted entity, it is as if the Japanese person constructed his I
by beginning from the outside. The Japanese I thus
appears to be not an original given but a result toward which one moves with no certainty of reaching
it. It is therefore not at all astonishing that, as I have
been told, Descartess famous proposition: I think,
therefore I am, is strictly untranslatable into Japanese! In realms as varied as spoken language, artisanal techniques, culinary preparation, and the history
of ideas (I could add domestic architecture, thinkingof the many meanings you attribute to the word
uchi),* a difference, or more exactly, a system of invariant differences, reveals itself at a profound level
between what, to simplify, I will call the Western soul
and the Japanese soul, which can be summed up by
the opposition between a centripetal and a centrifugal movement. That pattern will serve the anthro* Uchi means at once a house as building, the interior, the
family, the intimate group, and the business in common
parlance.
25
pologist as a working hypothesis in his attempt to

better understand the relation between the two civilizations.
For the anthropologist, finally, the search for total
objectivity can be situated only at a level where phenomena retain meaning for an individual consciousness. That is an essential difference between the type
of objectivity to which anthropology aspires and that
with which the other social sciences are satisfied. The
realities to which economics or demography directs
its attention, for example, are no less objective, but
no one would think of requiring that they have meaning in the lived experience of the subject. One does
not run into objects such as value, profitability, marginal productivity, or maximum population in ones
daily life. These are abstract notions, located outside
the realm of concrete personal relationships between
individuals, which are the mark of the societies in
which anthropologists take an interest.
In modern societies, relations with the other
are only occasionally and in a fragmented manner
founded on that all-encompassing experience, that
concrete apprehension of subjects by one another.
They result for the most part from indirect reconstructions on the basis of written documents. We are
linked to our past, not by an oral tradition that pre26
sumes lived contact with people, but by books and

other documents stacked in libraries, by means of
which critics venture to reconstitute the faces of their
authors. And, at present, we communicate with the
vast majority of our contemporaries through all sorts
of intermediarieswritten documents or adminis
trative mechanismswhich enormously increase our
contacts but which at the same time confer on them
an inauthenticity. That inauthenticity now marks
with its seal relations between citizens and the public
authorities.
The loss of autonomy, the shifting of the internal
balance that has resulted from the expansion of indirect forms of communication (books, photographs,
newspapers, radio, television) have returned to the
foreground of communication theorists preoccupations. Since 1948, that concern can be found in the
writings of the great mathematician Norbert Wiener,
the creator, with von Neumann, of cybernetics, and,
with Claude Shannon, of information theory.
Reasoning on foundations completely different
from those of the anthropologist, Wiener notes, in
the last chapter of his fundamental Cybernetics, or
Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948): Small, closely knit communities have a
very considerable measure of homeostasis; and this,
27
whether they are highly literate communities in a

civilized country or villages of primitive savages.
And he continues: It is no wonder then that the
larger communities, subject to this disruptive influ
ence, contain far less communally available information than the smaller communities, to say nothing of
the human elements of which all communities are
built up.*
Modern societies are not completely inauthentic,
of course. Anthropology, having turned to the study
of these modern societies, endeavors to identify and
isolate in them levels of authenticity. What allows the
anthropologist to return to familiar ground when he
studies a village or a big city neighborhood is that
everyone knows almost everyone else there. An anthropologist feels at ease in a village of five hundred
residents, whereas he finds a large or even medium-
sized city off-putting. Why? Because fifty thousand
people do not constitute a society in the same way
that five hundred do. In the first case, communication isnot established primarily between persons or
on the model of interpersonal communications. The
* Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1961), pp.160, 162.
28
social
reality of the emitters and of the receivers(to speak the language of communication theorists) disappears behind the complexity of codes
and relays.
The future will no doubt judge that the most im
portant theoretical contribution of anthropology to
the social sciences is that key distinction between two
modalities of social existence: a way of life perceived
primarily as traditional and archaic, which is that of
authentic societies; and forms of more recent appearance, from which the first type is not absent but in
which imperfectly or incompletely authentic groups
emerge as islands strewn across the surface of a vaster
entity, itself marked by inauthenticity.
MY OWN WESTERN STANDPOINT
Anthropology, however, should not be reduced to the

study of relics to be sought close to home or far away.
What matters above all is not the archaism of these
forms of life but their differences from one another
and from those that have become our own.
The first studies devoted systematically to the customs and beliefs of savage peoples hardly date back
further than 1850, that is, to the era when Darwin
was laying the foundations for biological evolution29
ism, which corresponded, in the minds of his contemporaries, to the belief in social and cultural evolution. It was even later, in the first quarter of the
twentieth century, that so-called art ngre or primitive
objects were acknowledged as having an aesthetic
value.
It would be wrong to conclude, however, that anthropology is a brand-new science that emerged from
the curiosities of modern humans. When an effort is
made to place it in perspective, to assign it a place in
the history of ideas, anthropology appears on the
contrary as the most general expression and the culminating point of an intellectual and moral attitude
that came into being several centuries ago and which
we designate by the term humanism.
Allow me to place myself for a moment within my
own Western standpoint. When Renaissance Europeans rediscovered Greco-Roman antiquity, and when
the Jesuits made Latin the foundation for training in
their schools and universities, was that not already
ananthropological initiative? They recognized that a
civilization cannot conceive of itself unless it has at
its disposal one or several others to serve as terms of
comparison. To know and understand ones own culture, it is necessary to regard it from the point of view
of another. This can be likened to the Noh actor
30
as described by your great playwright and theorist

Zeami: to judge his performance, the actor must
learn to see himself as if he were the spectator.
In fact, when I was looking for a title for a book I
published in 1983, one that would make the reader
understand the dual essence of anthropological re
flectionwhich consists of looking a long distance
off toward cultures very different from the observers,
but also, for the observer, of looking at his own culture from afar, as if he himself belonged to a different
culturethe title I ultimately chose, The View from
Afar, was inspired by my reading of Zeami. With the
aid of my Japanese studies colleagues, I simply transposed into French the expression riken no ken, which
Zeami uses to designate the actors gaze watching
himself as if he were the audience.
In the same way, Renaissance thinkers taught us to
place our culture in perspective, to contrast our customs and beliefs to those of other times and other
places. In a word, they created the tools for what
could be called a technique of making strange.
Was that not also the case for Japan, when what is
known as the nativist school of Motoori Norinaga
undertook to isolate characteristics that in its view
were particular to Japanese culture and civilization?
Motoori succeeded at this by engaging in an impas31
sioned dialogue with China. He contrasted the two

cultures, and, in isolating certain traits of Chinese
culture that he considered typicalpompous verbosity, as he says, a penchant in Taoism for decisive
and arbitrary assertionshe managed, by way of contrast, to define the essence of Japanese culture: sobriety, concision, discretion, economy of means, a sense
of impermanence, the pathos of things (mono no
aware), and the relativity of all knowledge.
In about 1830, Kuiyoshi and Kunisada very suggestively popularized that way of seeing China, as a
means to assert the specificity of Japanese culture, in
their prints on Chinese subjectsillustrations of the
novel Suikoden and of warrior narratives drawn from
the Kanjo. These prints display a marked taste for
bombast, a flamboyant style, a baroque exaggeration,
a wealth of complicated details of dress, all very remote from the traditions of the ukiyo-e. They reflect
an interpretation of ancient China, tendentious to be
sure, but one that aspires to be ethnographic.
In Motooris time, Japan had no knowledge, direct
or indirect, of either China or Korea. In Europe as
well, the difference between classical culture and anthropological culture is determined by the dimensions of the known world during the eras in question.
32
At the start of the Renaissance, the human universe was circumscribed by the limits of the Mediterranean Basin. People had only an inkling that some
thing more existed. But they had already understood
that no portion of humanity could aspire to understand itself except with reference to others.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, humanism expanded in concert with geographical exploration. China, India, and Japan were gradually
added to the overall picture. At present, anthropology, in taking an interest in the last civilizations still
largely unknown or neglected, is ushering in a third
stage of humanism. It will undoubtedly be the last,
since after that, humankind will no longer have anything to discover about itself, at least in the world
outside us (for there is another search within us,
whose end we are not close to reaching).
There is also another aspect to the problem. The
extension of the first two kinds of humanism, one
limited to the Mediterranean world and one encompassing the Middle and Far East, was limited not only
by surface area but also by nature. Since the ancient
civilizations had disappeared, they could be reached
only through texts and monuments. Although that
difficulty did not arise for the Middle and Far East,
the method adopted was the same, because it was
33
believed that civilizations so distant and so different

from our own were worthy of interest only with regard to their most learned and refined creations.
The field of anthropology encompasses civilizations of another type, and these raise different prob
lems. Because they are without writing, such civilizations do not provide us with written documents. And
since their technical level is generally very low, most
have left no figurative monuments. It was therefore
necessary to equip humanism with new tools of investigation.
The means available to anthropology are at once
more external and more internal (we could also say,
both cruder and more refined) than those of its predecessors, philology and history. To penetrate soci
eties that are not easily accessible, the anthropologistmust place himself very much on the outside, as
physical anthropology, prehistory, and technology
do. But, by virtue of the ethnologists identification
with the group, whose existence he shares, and by the
importance he will attachfor lack of other means of
informationto the slightest nuances of the indigenous peoples mental life, he also places himself very
much on the inside.
Anthropology, always falling short of or overshooting traditional humanism, ventures outside it in ev
34
ery direction. Its field encompasses the totality of the

inhabited earth, while its method combines procedures that originated in every discipline of the human and social sciences.
These three forms of humanism, having appeared
in succession, have now been integrated and have advanced the knowledge of humankind in three directions. Progress has come about in surface area, of
course, but that is the most superficial aspect, in
both the literal and the figural sense. This progress
also lies in the richness of the means of investigation,
since it gradually becomes clear that, though anthropology was obliged to forge new modes of knowledgeas a function of the particular characteristics of
the residual societies it inherited, these modes of
knowledge can be fruitfully applied to the study of
all societies, including our own.
But there is more: classical humanism was limited
not only as to its object but also as to its beneficiaries,
those who constituted the privileged class.
Nineteenth-century exotic humanism became
linked to the industrial and commercial interests
that supported it and to which it was beholden for
itsexistence. Anthropology, following on the aristocratic humanism of the Renaissance and the bourgeois humanism of the nineteenth century, thus
35
marked the advent, for the finite world that our

planet had become, of a doubly universal humanism.
In seeking its inspiration within the most humble
societies, long held in contempt, anthropology proclaims that nothing human can be alien to humankind. It thus founds a democratic humanism that
goes further than those that preceded it, those, that
is, that were created for the privileged and on the basis of privileged civilizations. And in putting into operation methods and techniques borrowed from all
the sciences to serve in the understanding of humankind, it calls for the reconciliation of humankind and
nature within a generalized humanism.
If I understand the theme you asked me to address
in these lectures, the question is whether this third
form of humanism, constituted by anthropology, will
prove better able than previous forms to provide solutions to the great problems now confronting humanity. For three centuries, humanist thought has
nourished and inspired Westerners reflections and
actions. We have come to see that it has been powerless to avoid massacres on a global scale: the world
wars, extreme poverty, and malnutrition that have
chronically ravaged a large part of the inhabited
earth, the pollution of air and water, and the plundering of resources and of natural beauty.
36
Will anthropological humanism be better able to

provide answers to the questions that assail us?
In the following lectures, I shall try to define and
focus on a few large questions to which, I believe, anthropology can help us respond. To conclude today, I
should like to indicate one contribution of anthropology that, though modest, at least has the advantage of being definite. Indeed, one of the benefits of
anthropologyperhaps, in the end, its essential bene
fitis to inspire in us, the members of rich and powerful civilizations, a certain humility, to teach us a
kind of wisdom.
Anthropologists exist to attest that the way we live,
the values we believe in, are not the only ones possible, that other ways of life, other systems of values
have allowed and continue to allow human communities to find happiness. Anthropology invites us
therefore to temper our misplaced vanity, to respect
other ways of life, to call ourselves into question
through knowledge of other customs that astonish
us, shock us, or repel ussomewhat like Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, who preferred to believe that gorillas, recently described by the travelers of his time, were
men, rather than run the risk of denying the humanity of beings who, perhaps, revealed an as-yet unknown aspect of human nature.
37
The societies that anthropologists study deliver

lessons that deserve to be heeded, especially since
these societies were able to establish a balance between humankind and the natural environment, using all sorts of rules that, as I said, we would be wrong
to see as mere superstitions. We, conversely, no longer
know how to secure that balance. Let me take a moment to consider this point.
AN OPTIMAL DIVERSITY
In nineteenth-century France, the philosopher Auguste Comte formulated a law of human evolution
known as the three stages, according to which humanity has passed through two successive phases, religious and metaphysical, and is on the verge of entering a third state, positive and scientific.
Perhaps anthropology reveals an evolution of the
same type, though the content and meaning of each
stage differs from those conceived by Comte.
We now know that peoples called primitive, who
know nothing of agriculture and stock breeding or
who practice only a rudimentary agriculture, who
sometimes lack a knowledge of pottery and weaving,
and who live primarily on hunting, fishing, and the
gathering of wild plants, do not have a gnawing fear
38
of starving to death or anxiety about being unable to

survive in a hostile environment.
Their small numbers and their phenomenal knowledge of natural resources allow them to live in what
we, no doubt, would hesitate to call abundance. And
yet, as meticulous studies have demonstrated in Australia, South America, Melanesia, and Africa, two to
four hours of work a day by their active members are
amply sufficient to assure the subsistence of all families, including children and the elderly, those who do
not yet participate in food production and those who
no longer do so. What a contrast to the amount of
time our contemporaries spend at the factory or the
office!
It would therefore be wrong to believe that these
peoples are slaves to the rigors of the environment.
On the contrary, they enjoy vis--vis the environment
a much greater independence than farmers and stock
breeders. They have more leisure time, which allows
them to make a large place for the imagination, to
insert between themselves and the external world,
asshock absorbers, beliefs, reveries, rites, in a word,
all the forms of activity we would call religious and
artistic.
Let us suppose that, in this respect, humanity lived
in a comparable state for hundreds of millennia.
39
Wewould then observe that, with agriculture, stock

breeding, then industrialization, it had to increasingly engage the real (in the sense that one engages
the clutch of a vehicle). And from the nineteenth century to the present, that engagement came about indirectly, through the intermediary of philosophical
and ideological conceptions.
The world we are entering at present is completely
different: a world where humanity finds itself abruptly
facing harsher determining factors. These are the result of its huge population, its increasingly limited
quantities of the free space, pure air, and unpolluted
water required to satisfy its biological and psychological needs.
In that sense, we may wonder whether the ideological explosions that have been occurring for nearly
a century and which continue to occurthose of
communism, Marxism, totalitarianism, which have
not lost their force in the Third World, and more recently, of Islamic fundamentalismdo not constitute
reactions of revolt against conditions of existence
that have brutally broken with those of the past.
A divorce has occurred, a rift is opening, between
the data of the senseswhich no longer have any general meaning for us, apart from the limited and rudimentary meaning they provide us about the state of
40
our organismand an abstract mode of thought in

which all our efforts to know and understand the
universe are concentrated. There is nothing that distances us more than that from the peoples that anthropologists study, for whom every color, every texture, ever odor, every flavor has a meaning.
Is this divorce irrevocable? Our world may be moving toward a demographic cataclysm or an atomic
war that will exterminate three-quarters of humanity.
In that case, the remaining quarter will rediscover
conditions of existence not so different from those of
the vanishing societies of which I have spoken.
Even setting aside such terrifying hypotheses, we
may wonder whether societies that are becoming
enormous, each on its own behalf, and which are
tending to become identical to one another, will not
inevitably recreate within themselves differences situated along lines other than those where the similarities are developing. Perhaps there is an optimal diversity that, everywhere and always, imposes itself on
humanity, so that it may remain viable. That optimum would vary by the number of societies, their
size, their geographical distance from one another,
and the means of communication at their disposal.
In fact, that problem of diversity does not arise only
for cultures considered in their relationships with
41
one another. It arises within every society, which includes groups or subgroups that are not homogenous: castes, classes, professional or religious milieus.
These groups develop differences from one another
to which each attaches a great importance; and it
may well be that this internal diversification tends to
increase when a society becomes vaster and more homogenous in other respects.
Human beings undoubtedly developed different
cultures because of geographical distance, the particular characteristics of the environment in which they
found themselves, and their ignorance about other
types of societies. But, alongside the differences attributable to isolation, there are equally important
ones attributable to proximity: a desire to set oneself
apart, to distinguish oneself, to be oneself. Many customs came into being not from some internal necessity or favorable accident but solely from the desire
not to be outdone by a neighboring group, one that
subjected to precise norms a realm of thought or an
activity about which the first group had not thought
to promulgate rules.
The attention and respect that the anthropologist
grants to the differences between cultures and to
those proper to each culture constitute the essential
aspect of his approach. The anthropologist therefore
42
does not seek to draw up a list of recipes that every

society could consult depending on its mood, every
time it perceived an imperfection or a gap within itself. The formulas proper to each society cannot simply be transposed to any other.
The anthropologist simply invites each society not
to believe that its institutions, its customs, and its
beliefs are the only ones possible. He dissuades it
from imagining that, because it believes them good,
these institutions, customs, and beliefs belong to the
nature of things and that one can with impunity impose them on other societies, whose system of values
is incompatible with its own.
I said that the loftiest ambition of anthropology is
to inspire a certain wisdom in individuals and governments. I can offer you no better example than the
testimony of an American anthropologist who was
public affairs officer for General MacArthur duringthe occupation of Japan. I read an interview with
him in which he recounts how the publication of
Ruth Benedicts famous book The Chrysanthemum and
the Sword in 1946 dissuaded the American occupiers
from imposing on Japan the abolition of imperial
rule, contrary to their first intention. Ruth Benedict,
whom I knew well, had never gone to Japan before
writing her book; and, as far as I know, she worked
43
in very different fields. But she was an anthropologist, and we may therefore credit the anthropological
state of mind, its inspiration and its methods (even
when considering a culture from afar and without
prior experience) with having been able to penetrate
its structure and to avert its collapse, whose consequences might have been even more tragic than those
of the military defeat.
As a first lesson, anthropology teaches us that ev
ery custom, every belief, however shocking or irra
tional it may appear to us when we compare it to
ourown, is part of a system whose internal balance
has been established over the course of centuries; it
teaches us that one cannot eliminate an element from
that whole without running the risk of destroying all
the rest. Even if it offered no other lessons, that one
would be sufficient to justify the increasingly impor
tant place that anthropology occupies among the
human and social sciences.
44
2
THREE G REAT
C ONTE M PORARY PROBLE M S
Sexuality, Economic Development, and Mythic Thought
In m y fir st lectur e, I said I would try to define

and focus on a few problems that arise for modern
humankind, and for which the study of societies
without writing can contribute part of the solution.
To do so, I shall have to consider these societies from
three angles: their familial and social organization,
their economic life, and their religious thought.
On considering from a very general standpoint the
characteristics common to the societies that anthropologists study, we are led to observe that these soci
eties rely on kinship much more systematically than
is the case in our own societies.
In the first place, they use kinship and marriage
relations to determine whether a person belongs to
the group. Many of these societies deny foreign peoples their humanity. And even as humanity ends at
45
THREE G REAT C ONTE M PORARY PROBLE M S
the groups boundaries, inside that group it is reinforced by an additional quality. Indeed, the members
of the group are not just the only true humans, the
only excellent ones; they are not only fellow citizens,
they are relations, de facto and de jure.
In the second place, these societies hold kinship
and the notions connected to it to be prior and external to biological relationships, filiation by blood, to
which we ourselves tend to reduce them. Biological
ties provide the model on which kinship relations
areconceived, but these relations also provide a logical classification system, a mental framework. That
framework, once conceived, makes it possible to sort
individuals into preestablished categories, assigning to each his or her place within the family and
society.
And finally, these relations and notions pervade
the entire field of life and social activities. Real, postulated, or inferred, they entail rights and duties that
are well defined and different for each type of related
individual. More generally, we can say that, in these
societies, kinship and marriage constitute a common
language capable of expressing every social relationship: not only familial but also economic, political,
religious, and so forth.
46
SPERM DONORS, SURROGATE MOTHERS,

AND SOCIAL FILIATION
The first imperative of a human society is to reproduce itself, in other words, to maintain itself over
time. Every society therefore possesses a rule of filiation defining how each new member belongs to the
group; a kinship system determining the way that
relations will be classified, as kin by blood or by marriage; and finally, rules that define the modalities of
matrimonial alliance by stipulating whom a person
can and cannot marry. Every society must also possess mechanisms to remedy sterility.
It is the problem of remedying sterility that has
become a pressing issue in Western societies, ever
since the invention of artificial methods to assist in
reproduction. I do not know how it is in Japan, but
the subject has become an obsession in Europe, the
United States, and Australia. In these places, commissions have been officially constituted to debate it, and
parliamentary assemblies, the press, and public opinion largely echo these debates.
What exactly is at issue? It is now possibleor, for
certain procedures, it will be possible in the near futurefor a couple, one or both of whose members are
47
infertile, to have children through the use of various

methods: artificial insemination, egg donation, the
use of surrogate mothers for hire or free of cost, the
freezing of embryos, in vitro fertilization with sperm
from the husband or from another man and with an
egg from the wife or another woman.
Depending on the case, the child born of such procedures may have one father and one mother as usual,
or one mother and two fathers, two mothers and one
father, two mothers and two fathers, three mothers
and one father, or even three mothers and two fathers, when the sperm donor is not the father and
when three women participate: the one donating an
egg, the one providing her uterus, and the one who
will be the childs legal mother.
That is not all, since we are also faced with situations where a woman asks to be inseminated with the
frozen sperm of her deceased husband, or where two
lesbians have a child together by taking the egg of
one, artificially fertilized by an anonymous donor,
and immediately implanting it in the other womans
uterus. There is also no reason, it seems, why the frozen sperm of a great-grandfather could not be used a
century later to fertilize a great-granddaughter. The
child would then be his mothers great-uncle and his
own great-grandfathers brother.
48
The problems that have arisen are of two orders,

one legal in nature, the other psychological and
moral.
In terms of the first aspect, the laws of European
countries are contradictory. In English law, social paternity does not exist, not even as a legal fiction, and
the sperm donor could legally claim the child or be
obliged to support it. In France, by contrast, the Napoleonic Code, true to the old adage Pater is est quem
nuptiae demonstrant, stipulates that the mothers husband is the childs legal father. But French law is itself contradictory, since a 1972 law allows paternity
suits to be pursued. We therefore no longer know
whether the social or the biological relationship takes
precedence.
The fact is, in contemporary societies, the idea that
filiation results from a biological connection tends to
prevail over the notion of filiation as a social bond.
But then how are we to solve the problems raised
by assisted reproduction, where, precisely, the legal
father is no longer the childs biological father, or
where the mother, in the social and moral sense of
the term, has not herself provided the egg, or perhaps
the uterus in which gestation occurs?
Furthermore, what will the respective rights and
duties of the social and the biological parents be,
49
now that they are different people? How should a

court decide in a case where the surrogate mother
delivers a disabled child and the couple that employed her services rejects it? Or conversely, if a
woman inseminated by anothers husband changes
her mind and decides to keep the child as her own?
Finally, can any of these practices, once they become possible, be freely employed, or must the law
authorize some and prohibit others? In England, the
Warnock Commission (named after its chair) has recommended prohibiting surrogacy, based on distinctions among genetic maternity, physiological maternity, and social maternity, maintaining that, of the
three, it is physiological maternity that creates the
most intimate bond between the mother and child.
Although, in the main, French public opinion approves of medical assistance when it allows a married
couple to solve a fertility problem, the French are undecided in the case of an unmarried couple or a
woman wishing to be inseminated with the frozen
sperm of her deceased husband. And they become
downright disapproving for a couple who wants to
have a child after the woman has reached menopause,
for a single woman, or for a homosexual couple wishing to have a child.
From a psychological and moral point of view, it
50
seems that the essential question is one of transparency. Must sperm donors, egg donors, and surrogates
be anonymous, or can the social parents, and possibly the child herself, know the identity of those involved? Sweden has opted against anonymity and
England is tending in the same direction, whereas in
France, public opinion and the law are taking the opposite tack. But even countries that allow transparency seem to agree on the need to separate repro
duction from sexuality, and even, as it were, from
sensuality. To limit ourselves to the most simple case,
that of sperm donation, public opinion judges it allowable only if it takes place in a laboratory and
through the intervention of a doctor, an artificial
method that excludes any personal contact, any sharing of emotions or eroticism between the donor and
the receiver. And yet, for both sperm donation and
egg donation, this preoccupation with having things
take place anonymously seems to run counter to the
universal situation, even in our own societies, where
that type of service is rendered close to homealbeit discreetlymore often than one would think. By
way of example, let me cite an unfinished novel by
Balzac that he began in 1843, a time when social prejudices were much stronger than they are in present-
day France. Significantly titled The Petty Bourgeois, this
51
very documentary novel recounts how two couples,

one fertile, the other infertile, make an agreement:
the fertile woman produces a child with the infertile
womans husband. The daughter resulting from that
union is surrounded by equal affection from both
couples, who live in the same building, and everyone
around them knows the situation.
It is therefore the new reproductive technologies,
made possible by the progress of biology, that have
caused the recent confusion. In a realm essential to
the maintenance of social order, our legal notions
and our moral and philosophical beliefs prove to be
incapable of finding ways to respond to new situations. How are we to define the relationship between
biological kinship and social filiation, which have
now become separated? What will the moral and social consequences of the dissociation between reproduction and sexuality be? Must we recognize the individuals right to reproduce alone, so to speak?
Does a child have the right to gain access to essential
information concerning his sperm donors ethnic
origin and general health? To what extent and within
what limits can one violate the biological rules that
the followers of most religious faiths continue to
consider divinely instituted?
52
ASSISTED REPRODUCTION: SINGLE WOMEN

AND HOMOSEXUAL COUPLES
On all these questions, anthropologists have a great

deal to say, because these problems have arisen in the
societies they study, and these societies offer solutions. Of course, they know nothing of the modern
techniques for in vitro fertilization or for the removal,
implantation, or freezing of eggs or embryos. But
they have imagined and put into practice what are
equivalent options, at least in legal and psychological
terms. Allow me to give a few examples.
Insemination by donor sperm has its equivalent in
Africa, among the Samo of Burkina Faso, who have
been studied by Franoise Hritier-Aug, my colleague and my successor at the Collge de France. In
that society, every girl is married off very early; but
before going to live with her husband, she must have
a lover of her choice, officially acknowledged as such,
for a period of at least three years. She brings her
husband the first child produced by her lovers good
offices, and it will be considered the firstborn of the
legitimate union. A man, for his part, can have several
legitimate wives, but if they leave him, he will remain
the legal father of all the children they bring into the
53
world subsequently. In other African populations,

the husband also has a right to all the children to
come, provided that this right is reinstated after each
birth by the first postpartum sexual relations. That
act determines who will be the legal father of the
nextchild. A married man whose wife is infertile can
therefore, in exchange for payment, reach an under
standing with a fertile woman, who will designate
him as the father. In that case, the infertile womans
legal husband is the biological father, and the other
woman rents her womb to a man or a childless couple. The burning question in France, as to whether
the surrogate mother must provide her services free
of cost or whether she may receive remuneration,
therefore does not arise.
Among the Tupi-Kawahib Indians of Brazil, whom
I visited in 1938, a man may marry, simultaneously
orin succession, several sisters or a mother and her
daughter from a previous union. These women raise
their children in common, showing little concern, it
seemed to me, whether the child for whom a woman
is caring is her own or that of another of her husbands wives. The reverse situation prevails in Tibet,
where several husbands share a single wife. All the
children are attributed to the eldest, whom they call
father; the other men they call uncles. In such
54
cases, individual paternity and maternity are unknown or are not taken into account.
Let us return to Africa, where the Nuer of Sudan
make an infertile woman the equivalent of a man. In
her capacity as paternal uncle, she therefore receives
the livestock representing the bride price paid for
the marriage of her nieces, and she uses it to purchase a wife, who will provide her with children
thanks to the remunerated services of a man, often
a stranger. Among the Yoruba of Nigeria as well,
richwomen can acquire wives, whom they impel to
pair off with men. When the children are born, the
woman, the legal husband, claims them, and the
biological parents must pay her handsomely in order
to keep them.
In all these cases, couples composed of two women,
whomliterally speakingwe would call homosex
ual, practice assisted reproduction in order to have
children; one of the women will be their legal father,
the other their biological mother.
Societies without writing also have the equivalent
of postmortem insemination, which is prohibited by
the French courts. In England, meanwhile, the Warnock Commission has proposed that a law should
exclude from the fathers succession and inheritance
any child who was not yet a fetus in its mothers
55
uterus at the time of the fathers death. And yet, the

levirate, an institution that has been employed for
millennia (having already existed among the ancient
Hebrews), allowed and sometimes obliged the youn
ger brother to father a child in the name of his dead
sibling. Among the Sudanese Nuer, if a man died
a bachelor or without descendants, a close relation
could take from the deceaseds livestock the means to
purchase a wife. That ghost marriage, as the Nuer
call it, allowed him to father children in the name
ofthe deceased, who had provided the matrimonial
compensation that creates filiation.
In all the examples I have given, although the
childs familial and social status is determined as a
function of the legal father (even if that father is a
woman), the child nonetheless knows the identity of
its biological father and is attached to him by bonds
of affection. Despite our fears, transparency does not
cause the child to feel any conflict about the fact that
its biological father and its social father are different
individuals.
These societies also do not experience the sort of
anxieties raised in our own by insemination with the
frozen sperm of a deceased husband or even, theoretically, of a distant ancestor. For many of these peoples, a child is supposed to be the reincarnation of an
56
ancestor, who chooses to live again in that descendant. And the ghost marriage of the Nuer allows
for a further refinement in cases where the brother,
asa substitute for the deceased, does not father children on his own behalf. The son fathered in the name
of the deceased (and whom the biological father considers his nephew) will be able to render the same
service to his biological father. Since the biological
father is then the brother of his legal father, the children he will bring into the world will legally be his
own cousins.
All these options provide metaphorical images that
anticipate modern technologies. We therefore see
that the conflict we find so troubling, between biological reproduction and social paternity, does not
exist in the societies anthropologists study. They unhesitatingly give primacy to the social, and the two
aspects do not clash in the ideology of the group or
in the minds of individuals.
I have dwelt at length on these problems only because it seems to me that they show very well the
kind of contribution contemporary society can hope
for from anthropological research. The anthropologist does not propose that his contemporaries adopt
the ideas and customs of one or another exotic population. Our contribution is much more modest, and
57
it is made in two directions. First, anthropology reveals that what we consider natural, founded on
the order of things, actually amounts to constraints
and mental habits specific to our own culture. It
therefore helps us rid ourselves of our blinders, so as
to understand how and why other societies can consider simple and self-evident certain practices that we
find inconceivable or even scandalous.
Second, the facts we gather represent a very vast
human experience, since they come from thousands
of societies that have succeeded one another over the
course of centuries, sometimes millennia, and which
are distributed over the entire expanse of the inhabited earth. We therefore contribute toward drawing
out what can be considered universals of human
nature, and we are able to suggest within what frameworks as-yet uncertain changes will come about,
changes we would be wrong to denounce in advance
as deviations or perversions.
The great debate currently unfolding on the subject of assisted reproduction is whether one ought to
make laws about these matters, and if so, in what
areas and in what direction. In several countries, representatives of public opinion, jurists, doctors, sociologists, and sometimes anthropologists sit on commissions and other organizations established by the
58
government authorities. It is striking that anthropologists everywhere take the same tack: they oppose
undue haste in making laws, in authorizing this and
prohibiting that.
In answer to overly impatient jurists and moralists,
anthropologists advise liberality and caution. They
point out that even the practices and aspirations that
most shock public opinionassisted reproduction in
the service of single women, bachelors, widows, or
homosexual coupleshave their equivalents in other
societies, which are none the worse for it.
Anthropologists therefore wish to let things be.
They want all individuals to submit to the internal
logic of their own societies, in order to create the familial and social structures that will prove viable, and
to eliminate those that produce contradictions that
only custom will prove to be insurmountable.
FROM PREHISTORIC FLINTS TO THE
MODERNASSEMBLY LINE
I now move on to my second topic: economic life.

In that sector as well, the concern of anthropological research is to reveal models very different from
our own and thereby incite us to reflect on them, and
possibly to call them into question.
59
A debate has been raging in recent years on the

borderline between anthropology and economics: Are
the great laws of economics applicable to all societies
or only to those that, like our own, operate under a
market economy?
In ancient societies, in recent and contemporary
peasant societies, and also in those that anthropologists study, it is usually impossible to separate aspects
we call economic from all other aspects. The economic activity of members of these societies cannot
be reduced to a rational calculation whose sole object
would be to maximize gains and minimize losses. In
these societies, labor serves not only to make a profit
but alsoperhaps we should say especiallyto acquire prestige and to contribute to the good of the
community. Acts that for us would have a purely economic character express preoccupations that are at
once technical, cultural, social, and religious.
To a lesser extent, is that not also the case in our
societies? If all the activities of market societies were
governed by economic laws, economics would be a
true science, on the basis of which it would be pos
sible to predict and to act, which is obviously not
the case. That can be considered proof that even in
modes of conduct that seem purely economic to us,
other factors intervene and show up the shortcom60
ings of economics. But for us, these factors remain

veiled behind a screen of supposed rationality, and
the study of different societies, which grant them
more importance, helps bring these factors to light.
What, then, do they reveal to us? First, despite
what we might believe, these societies show an astonishing capacity to solve problems of production. Even
in remote prehistoric times, human beings knew how
to engage in large-scale industrial activities. We know
of sites in France, Belgium, Holland, and England
covering several tens of hectares, pocked with mine
shafts for the extraction of flint, where workers, probably organized into teams, toiled by the hundreds.
The flint nodules passed through workshops as specialized as the stations of a modern assembly line.
In some workshops, the raw material was roughed
out; in others, the pieces of flint were produced; in
still others, they were fashioned into their definitive
shape, whether pickaxes, hammers, or hatchets. These
mining and industrial centers exported their products several hundred kilometers in every direction,
which would have required a powerful commercial
operation.
Anthropology provides indications of the same order. It was long wondered how the large populations
whose labor was required to build the Maya cities
61
and the monuments of Mexico and Central America

could have lived on site, drawing their subsistence
from small dispersed family agriculture, as it is practiced by present-day Maya peasants.
Thanks to aerial and satellite photographs, we
have recently learned that very sophisticated agricultural systems existed in Maya country and in various
other regions of South AmericaVenezuela, Colombia, Bolivia. One of them, in Colombia, dates back to
a time extending from the beginning of the Christian
era to the seventh century. At the end of that period,it covered over 200,000 hectares of flood lands
drained by thousands of canals, along which land
was cultivated on embankments. Combined with
fishing in the canals, that intensive agriculture was
able to feed more than a thousand inhabitants per
square kilometer.
Anthropology nevertheless reveals a paradox.
Alongside these great achievements, attesting to what
in our language we would call a productivist mentality, there are others that point in the opposite direction. These same peoples, or others, knew to limit
their productivity through negative techniques. In
Africa, Australia, Polynesia, and America, chiefs or
specialized priests, or police corps organized for that
62
purpose, possessed absolute power to fix the beginning and the duration of the seasons for hunting,
fishing, and collecting wild plants. There was a widespread belief in supernatural masters of each animal or plant species, who punished the guilty for
taking too much, and this belief encouraged moderation. Similarly, all sorts of ritual prescriptions and
taboos made hunting, fishing, and gathering serious
activities laden with consequences and required that
those engaged in them be circumspect and reflective.
At very different levels and in various realms, human societies thus display heterogeneous attitudes in
economic matters. There is not one model of economic activity but several. The modes of production
studied by anthropologistshunting and gathering,
horticulture, agriculture, artisanship, and so on
represent so many different types. It is difficult to reduce them, as some believed possible, to the successive phases of development of a single model, all
leading to the most evolved stage, namely, our own.
Nothing shows this better than the discussions
under way on the origin, role, and consequences
of agriculture. In several respects, agriculture represented progress: it provided more food for a given
space and time, allowed more rapid demographic ex-
63
pansion, denser settlements, and societies that covered a larger expanse and that were also larger in
size.
But in other respects, agriculture constitutes a regression. As I noted in my first lecture, it produces a
less adequate diet, limited to a few products rich in
calories but relatively poor in nutrients. Agriculture
is also less reliable, since it takes only one bad harvest
for food shortages to result. And farming requires
more labor. It may even have been responsible for the
propagation of infectious diseases, as is suggested in
Africa by the remarkable coincidence in time and
space of the spread of agriculture and of malaria.
The first lesson of anthropology in economic matters is therefore that there is not a single form of
economic activity but several, and they cannot all be
placed on a single continuum. Rather, they represent
choices among possible solutions. Each has advantages, but a price must always be paid.
We have some difficulty placing ourselves within
that perspective because, in considering the so-called
backward or underdeveloped societies as they appeared when we established contact with them in
thenineteenth century, we neglect one obvious fact:
those societies were nothing but relics, mutilated ves-
64
tiges, after the upheavals that we ourselves had produced, directly or indirectly. Indeed, it was the greedy
exploitation of exotic regions and of their populations between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries that made possible the Western worlds rapid
development. The feeling of strangeness that industrial civilization experiences toward the so-called underdeveloped societies consists primarily in the fact
that it rediscovers in these societies what it has itself
produced, but in a negative form that it is unable to
recognize.
The apparent simplicity or passivity of these socie
ties is not intrinsic to them but is rather the result of
our early development, which plundered them so
that it could grow up on their debris, only to return
later to impose itself from the outside.
In attacking the problems of industrialization in
underdeveloped countries, industrial civilization initially encounters the deformed image, as if fixed in
place by the centuries, of the destruction it had to
accomplish in order to exist. Diseases introduced
by whites into populations that had no immunity
against them struck entire societies from the map.
Even in the most remote regions of the planet, where
one might imagine that societies would survive in-
65
tact, pathogenic germs wreaked havoc, traveling with

surprising speed, sometimes several dozen years before contact proper occurred.
The same can be said for raw materials and technologies. There are societies in Australia where the
introduction of iron axes, while facilitating and simplifying labor and economic activity, led to the ruin
of traditional culture. For complex reasons that I
cannot enter into for lack of time, the adoption of
metal tools brought on the collapse of economic,
social, and religious institutions associated with the
possession and transmission of stone axes. And in
the form of worn-out or damaged tools, or sometimes even as debris that defies description, iron travels farther and faster than human beings, thanks to
wars, marriages, and commercial exchanges.
THE AMBIGUOUS CHARACTER OF NATURE
Having defined the historical frameworks within

which cultural discontinuities arise, I can now attempt, with fewer risks of error, to identify the deep-
seated causes of the resistance these societies often
mount against development. First, most so-called
primitive societies tend to prefer unity over internal
conflicts; second, they demonstrate respect for natu66
ral forces; and third, they are loath to take the path of
historical change.
The noncompetitive character of some of these so
cieties has often been invoked to explain their resistance to development and industrialization. Let us
not forget, however, that the passivity and indifference for which they are criticized may be a consequence of the trauma resulting from contact with
industrial civilization, not a condition present from
the start. In addition, what appears to us to be a flaw
and a lack may correspond to an original way of
conceiving the relations of human beings with one
another and with the world. Let me clarify with an
example. When peoples from the interior of New
Guinea learned from the missionaries how to play
soccer, they enthusiastically adopted that game. But
instead of pursuing the victory of one of the two
teams, they increased the number of matches until
the victories and defeats on each side balanced out.
The game ended not, as for us, when there was a winner, but rather when everyone was assured there
would be no loser.
Observations made in other societies appear to
suggest the opposite; yet these societies as well lack a
real spirit of competition. For example, when traditional games are played between two sides that repre67
sent, respectively, the living and the dead, they must

necessarily end with the victory of the living.
Finally, it is striking that almost all so-called primitive societies reject the idea of majority rule. Since
they consider social cohesion and harmonious relations within the group to be preferable to any innovation, the question put to a vote is resubmitted as
many times as necessary to reach a unanimous decision. Sometimes, simulated battles precede the deliberations. Old quarrels are settled, and the voting can
proceed only when the group, refreshed and restored,
has created within it the conditions for that indispensable unanimity.
The idea many of these societies have of the relation between nature and culture also explains why
they resist development. Development requires that
culture take precedence over nature. This priority
granted to culture is almost never allowed as such
except in industrial civilizations, though all societies
undoubtedly recognize that a separation exists between the two realms.
No society, however humble it may be, fails to grant
a preeminent value to the arts of civilizationthe
cooking of food, pottery, weavingby which the human condition moves away from the condition of
animals. Nevertheless, among so-called primitive
68
peoples, the notion of nature is always ambiguous:

nature is preculture, and it is also subculture; but
it constitutes the domain in which human beings
hope to meet ancestors, spirits, the gods. The notion
of nature thus includes a supernatural component,
and that supernature is as far above culture as nature
is beneath it.
We should therefore not be surprised that technologies, manufactured objects, are devalorized by
indigenous thought whenever the essential is at issue, namely, the relations between humans and the
supernatural world. In both the classical world and
the ancient Middle and Far East, as well as in European folklore and contemporary indigenous socie
ties, many cases exist where the use of manufactured
objects, whether made locally or imported, is proscribed for all acts of ceremonial life or at various
moments in the ritual. Only natural objects left in
their original state or archaic tools are allowed. As
with the proscription on lending with interest by the
church fathers of early Christianity and by Islam, the
use of things, whether money or other instruments,
must conserve a primordial purity.
The aversion to real estate transactions must be
interpreted in the same way. Destitute indigenous
communities in North America and Australia long
69
refusedand still refuse in some casesto cede territories in exchange for sometimes enormous compensation because, in the words of the interested parties
themselves, they view the ancestral soil as a mother.
Pushing that reasoning even further, the Menomini
Indians of the Great Lakes region of North America,
though perfectly well versed in the agricultural techniques of their Iroquois neighbors, refused to apply
them to the production of wild ricethe staple of
their diet, which is in fact very suitable for cultivationbecause they were forbidden to wound their
mother the earth.
The same opposition between nature and culture
often lies at the foundation of the division of labor
between the sexes. However variable the rules may appear when we compare societies, they include constant elements, which are interpreted differently or
which differ only in their application. Many societies
consider the opposition between nature and culture
and that between woman and man to be homologous. They therefore set aside for women the forms
of activity conceived as being on the order of nature,
such as gardening, or those that place the artisan
in direct contact with the material, such as pottery
modeled by hand. Men assume the same tasks when
practiced with the aid of instruments or machines
70
whose manufacture reaches a certain degree of com

plexity, which in fact varies by society.
OUR SOCIETIES ARE MEANT TO CHANGE
From that dual perspective, we see how pointless it is

to speak of people without history. The societies we
call primitive have a history like all the others; but,
unlike what occurs in our societies, they reject his
tory and strive to sterilize everything within their so
cieties that could constitute the barest hint of historical change. Our societies are meant to change;
that is the principle of their structure and of their
operation. So-called primitive societies appear primitive to us primarily because they are intended by their
members to endure. Their openness to the outside
world is very limited; what we call in French the esprit
de clocher (parochialism) dominates. By contrast, their
internal social structure is more richly textured, more
ornate, than that of complex societies. In addition,
societies of a very low technical and economic level
may possess a sense of well-being and plenitude: each
one believes it is offering its members the only life
worth living.
About thirty years ago, I illustrated the difference
between so-called primitive societies and our own by
71
means of an image that has elicited a great deal of

criticism, but I believe that is because it was mis
understood. I proposed to compare societies to machines, of which, as we know, there are two types:
mechanistic and thermodynamic.
The first type of machine uses energy that is provided to it from the start. If it were perfectly constructed, producing no friction and never overheating, it could in theory run indefinitely. By contrast,
thermodynamic machines, such as the steam engine,
are powered by a difference in temperature between
the boiler and the condenser. They produce much
more labor than the others, but they do so by consuming their energy and gradually destroying it.
I therefore said that the societies that anthropologists study, compared to our larger and more compli
cated societies, are somewhat like cold societies in
contrast to hot ones: clocks compared to steam engines. They are societies that produce little disorder
physicists would say little entropyand which tend
to persist indefinitely in their initial state (or what
they imagine to be an initial state). That explains
why, seen from the outside, they appear to be without history and without progress.
Our own societies not only make great use of thermodynamic machines but also resemble steam en72
gines in terms of their internal structure. Antagonisms comparable to what can be observed in a steam
engine, between the source of heat and the source of
cooling, must exist in these societies. They operate
ona difference in potential, a social hierarchy, which
throughout history has gone by the names slavery,
serfdom, class divisions, and so on. Such societies
create and maintain imbalances within themselves,
which they then use to produce both much more orderindustrial civilizationand, at the level of interpersonal relationships, much more entropy.
The societies anthropologists study can thus be
considered systems of weak entropy, running at a historical temperature near absolute zero. That is what
we express in saying that these societies have no his
tory. Historical societies like our own possess a
greater differential in their internal temperatures, a
differential attributable to economic and social inequalities.
Every society, of course, always entails both aspects, like the yin and yang of Chinese philosophy:
these two principles are opposed and complementary, but there is also always yin in the yang and yang
in the yin. A society is both a machine and the labor
provided by that machine. Like a steam engine, it
manufactures entropy; like a motor, it manufactures
73
order. These two aspectsorder and disordercorrespond to the two ways a civilization can be considered: culture on one hand, society on the other.
Culture consists of the set of relations that the human beings of a given civilization maintain with the
world; society consists more particularly of the relations that these same human beings maintain with
one another.
Culture makes order: we cultivate the earth, construct houses, produce manufactured goods. By contrast, our societies make a great deal of entropy. They
dissipate their strength and exhaust themselves in
the social conflicts, political struggles, and psychological tensions they produce in individuals. And the
values on which they rested at the start inevitably
wear thin. One could almost say that our societies
gradually lose their underlying structure and tend to
shatter, to reduce the individuals that compose them
to the condition of interchangeable and anonymous
atoms.
Those we call primitive peoples or peoples without writing make little order in their culture; for that
reason, we call them underdeveloped. By contrast,
they make very little entropy in their society. These
societies are largely mechanistic in their egalitarian-
74
ism, governed by the rule of unanimity I have already

described.
By contrast, the civilized, or those who claim to be
so, make a great deal of order in their culture, as
shown by mechanization and the countless applications of science; but they also make a great deal of
entropy in their society.
The ideal would likely be a third path, one that
would lead to making ever more order in culture
without having to pay for it through an increase in
entropy in society. In other words, and as the comte
de Saint-Simon recommended in early nineteenth-
century France, it would know how to move from
the governance of men to the administration of
things. In formulating that program, Saint-Simon
was anticipating both the anthropological distinction between culture and society, and the revolution
occurring before our eyes at this moment with advances in electronics. Perhaps that revolution allows
us to glimpse the possibility of one day moving from
a civilization that inaugurated historical change, but
only by reducing human beings to the condition of
machines, to a wiser civilization that would succeed
as we have begun to do with robotsin transforming
machines into humans. Then, when culture had fully
75
accepted the obligation to produce progress, society

would be liberated from a millennial curse that constrained it to subjugate human beings for progresss
sake. Henceforth, history would come to pass on its
own, and society, placed outside and above history,
could again enjoy the transparency and internal equilibrium by which the least damaged of the so-called
primitive societies attest that such things are not incompatible with the human condition.
Within that perspective, however utopian, anthropology would find its highest justification, since the
forms of life and thought it studies would no longer
have merely a historical and comparative interest:
they would make humanitys permanent opportunity
more available to us. The observations and analyses
of anthropology have the mission of safeguarding
that opportunity.
More immediate and more practical lessons follow
from that comparison between the two types of soci
eties.
As a first consequence, modes of economic activity
that constitute archaic vestiges, obstacles to development, in the eyes of the modern industrialist and financier deserve to be considered with respect and
treated with a great deal of regard.
Efforts are being made to establish gene banks in
76
which what remains of original plant species, those

created over the course of millennia by modes of production totally different from our own, will be preserved. The hope is that we will thereby palliate the
dangers of a form of agriculture reduced to a few
high-yield species, reliant on chemical fertilizers and
increasingly vulnerable to pathogenic agents.
But should we not go even further? Not content to
preserve the results of these archaic modes of production, ought we not to make sure that the irreplaceable know-how by virtue of which the results were
obtained will not disappear without hope of return?
We may also wonder whether our economic future
does not demand that we preserve or restore the psychological, social, and moral factors of the production process. Specialists in industrial sociology denounce the contradiction between, on one hand,
objective productivitywhich requires parceling up
and reducing tasks to their essentials, undercutting
labor initiatives, and distancing the producer from
the productand, on the other, subjective productivity, which allows the worker to express his or her personality and desire for creation. To limit myself to
one example, a Melanesian whose social rules oblige
him to ostentatiously maintain his sisters household, or who seeks, by the size of the yams produced
77
in his garden, to prove that he has a good relationship with the agricultural deities, is motivated by
concerns that are at once technical, cultural, social,
and religious.
Anthropology reminds the economist, in case he
might forget, that human beings are not motivated
purely and simply to always produce more. In their
work, they also seek to satisfy aspirations rooted in
their deepest nature: to find fulfillment as individuals, to leave their stamp on matter, to give an objective expression to their subjectivity through their
work.
The example of so-called primitive societies can
instruct us in all these aspects. Such societies are
founded on principles that have the effect of converting the volume of wealth produced into moral and
social values: personal accomplishment in ones work,
the respect of loved ones and neighbors, moral and
social prestige, a harmony achieved between human
beings and the natural and supernatural worlds. Anthropological investigations help us to better understand the necessity of finding a balance among these
various components of human nature. And every
where that industrial civilization tends to destroy
that harmony, anthropology can alert us to some of
the avenues we might take to restore it.
78
WHAT AFFINITIES EXIST BET WEEN SCIENTIFIC,

HISTORICAL, AND MYTHIC THOUGHT?
The hour grows late: I shall therefore be brief on the

third subject included in my program, the lessons to
be drawn from the most common religious conceptions among the peoples anthropologists study.
For the anthropologist, religions constitute a vast
repertoire of representations in the form of myths
and rites, arranged in various combinations. Except in the eyes of believers, these schemes seem at
first glance irrational and arbitrary. The question
that arises is whether we must remain at that point
and simply describe what cannot be explained, or
whether, behind the apparent disorder of beliefs,
practices, and customs, it is possible to discover a coherence.
Taking as my starting point the myths of the indigenous populations of central Brazil I have known,
I was able to ascertain that, though each myth has
the appearance of a bizarre narrative devoid of all
logic, the relations existing between these myths are
simpler and more intelligible than the stories that
each myth in particular tells.
But where philosophical or scientific thought reasons by formulating concepts and linking them to79
gether, mythic thought operates with the aid of images borrowed from the sensible world. Instead of
establishing relationships between ideas, it contrasts
earth and sky, land and water, light and darkness,
man and woman, the raw and the cooked, the fresh
and the decayed. It thus elaborates a logic of sensory qualities: colors, textures, flavors, odors, noises
and sounds. It chooses, combines, or contrasts these
qualities to transmit a somewhat coded message.
Here is an example, taken from the hundreds of
others I attempted to analyze in four large volumes
entitled Mythologiques (Introduction to the Study of Mythology), published between 1964 and 1971.
Two lovers, incestuous or forbidden from being together by social conventions, succeed in uniting only
in death, which will form them into a single body:
we easily accept that story, because our literary tra
ditions have made it familiar to us. The West has
themedieval romance of Tristram and Isolde and the
Wagner opera. And I believe the Japanese tradition
also includes that sort of narrative.
By contrast, we would be astonished by another
story, in which a grandmother glues together a newborn brother and sister and makes a single child of
them. That child grows up; one day, it shoots an arrow into the air. When the arrow falls back to earth,
80
it splits the child down the middle, thus separating

the brother and sister, who eagerly become incestuous lovers.
That second story seems absurd and incoherent to
us. Yet it exists alongside the other one among the
Indians of North America, and we have only to compare them episode by episode to be convinced that
the second story exactly reproduces the first: it simply tells it backwards. Would we thus not have in the
two instances a single myth, which neighboring populations illustrate by symmetrical and inverted nar
ratives?
There can be no doubt about it when, going a step
further, we observe that in North America the first
narrative claims to explain the origin of a constel
lation, into which the incestuous lovers are transformed after their death (somewhat like the Cowherd
and the Weaver in the Chinese tradition, still celebrated by the festival of Tanabata in Japan), while the
second narrative claims to explain the origin of sunspots. In one case, points of light stand out against a
dark background; in the other, dark points stand out
against a light background. To account for contrary
heavenly configurations, the same story is told, backward or forward, like a film shown from the beginning or from the end, which in the second case would
81
show a locomotive running backward, as the smoke

goes back into the smokestack and gradually condenses into water.
The result of such an analysis is that, instead of
two different myths, there would now be only one.
Through that step-by-step process, a multitude of
meaningless narratives make way for fewer and fewer
objects, but these objects shed light on one another.
The meaning of the myths does not lie in each one
taken separately; it appears only when they are placed
side by side.
You may wonder what such research can contrib
ute toward shedding light on present-day problems.
Our societies no longer have myths. To solve the
problems raised by the human condition and by natural phenomena, they turn to science; or, more precisely, for each type of problem they turn to a specialized scientific discipline.
Is that always the case? What peoples without writing ask of myths, what humanity as a whole has asked
of them for the hundreds of thousands of years
perhaps millions of yearsof human history, is to
explain the order of the world that surrounds us and
the structure of the society into which one is born.
The aim of myths is to demonstrate the soundness of
the world as a whole and that of the particular soci82
ety to which one belongs, to inspire the absolute con

fidence that they will remain the same as when they
were created at the beginning of time.
Now, when we inquire into our own social order,
we ourselves rely on history to explain, justify, or condemn it. The manner of interpreting the past varies,
depending on the milieu to which we belong, our po
litical convictions, our moral attitudes. For a French
citizen, the 1789 revolution explains the configu
ration of present-day society. And, depending on
whether we judge that configuration to be good or
bad, we conceive the revolution differently and aspire
to different futures. In other words, the image we
have of our near or distant past largely belongs to the
nature of myth.
It would be bold on my part to extend these re
flections to Japan. But based on the little I know
about the history of your country, I readily imagine
that the same might have been true, on the threshold
of the Meiji period, for the defenders of shogunal
power versus those who advocated the restoration of
imperial rule. At a symposium held in Osaka in 1980
and sponsored by the Suntory Foundation, it even
seemed to me that the Japanese participants continued to have diverging interpretations of the Meiji
Restoration: some saw it as a desire for an openness
83
to international life and wished for that path to

bepursued ever furtherwithout a second thought,
without nostalgia or regretothers, by contrast, saw
that openness as a way of borrowing the Wests own
weapons from it, in order, possibly, to resist it and
to preserve the specific characteristics of Japanese
culture.
We are thus led to wonder whether an objective
and scientific history is possible or whether, in our
modern societies, history does not occupy a role comparable to that of myths. The role that myths play for
societies without writingthey legitimate a social order and a conception of the world, explain what
things are by what they were, find the justification for
their present state in a past state, and conceive of the
future as a function of both that present and that
pastis also the role that our civilizations attribute
to history.
There is one difference, however: as I tried to show
with my example, each myth seems to tell a different
story, yet we discover that a number of myths often
tell the same story, whose episodes are arranged differently. Conversely, we readily believe that there is
only one History, whereas in reality every political
party, every social milieu, at times every individual
recounts a different history for itself. Each of them
84
uses it (and this runs counter to the use of myth) to

give itself reason to hope, not that the present will
reproduce the past and that the future will perpetuate the present, but that the future will differ from
the present in the same way that the present itself
differs from the past.
The rapid comparison I have just made between
the beliefs of peoples called primitive and our own
gives us to understand that History, as our civilizations employ it, expresses not so much objective
truths as prejudices and aspirations. In that case as
well, anthropology teaches us a lesson in critical
thinking. It leads us to understand that the past of
our own society, and that of other societies, does not
have only one possible meaning. There is no absolute
interpretation of the historical past; all the interpretations are relative.
To conclude this lecture, allow me an even bolder
reflection. Even with respect to the order of the world,
science is now shifting from a timeless perspective to
a historical perspective. The cosmos no longer appears to us, as it did in Newtons time, to be governed
by eternal laws such as gravity. For modern astrophysics, the cosmos has a history. It began fifteen or
twenty billion years ago with a unique event, the Big
Bang; it grew, continued its expansion, anddepend85
ing on the hypothesiswill continue indefinitely in

the same direction or will alternate between cycles of
expansion and contraction.
Even as science progresses, however, it convinces us
that we are becoming less and less capable of mastering by means of thought phenomena that, by their
spatial and temporal orders of magnitude, escape our
mental capacities. In that sense, the history of the
cosmos is becoming a kind of great myth for the ordinary mortal: it consists of the unfolding of unique
events whose reality, because the events occurred only
once, can never be proven.
It has been possible since the seventeenth century
to believe that scientific thought stands in radical opposition to mythic thought and that one would soon
eliminate the other. We may now wonder, however,
whether we are not observing the beginning of a
movement in the other direction. Does not the very
progress of scientific thought push it toward his
tory?That was already the case in nineteenth-century
biology with the theory of evolution, and modern
cosmology is also oriented in that direction. I have
attempted to show that, even for us, historical knowledge preserves affinities with myths. And if, as it
seems, science itself is tending toward a history of life
and of the world, we cannot rule out the possibility
86
that, after long following diverging paths, scientific

thought and mythic thought will one day move closer
together. In terms of that hypothesis, the interest anthropology takes in the study of mythic thought
would be even more justified, because of the contribution it makes to the knowledge of ever-present
constraints inherent in how the mind functions.
87
3
RE C O G NI Z IN G C ULTURAL
DIVERSITY
What We Can Learn from Japanese Civilization
Ev eryt hing I said in my last two lectures invites

us to reduce the distance that, in view of their low
technical and economic level, we are tempted to place
between societies without writing and our own.
ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND GENETICISTS
To explain that distance, some in the past have resortedand still sometimes resortto two types of
argument. According to them, that gap is insurmountable because it results from the fact that human groups differ in their genetic inheritance. The
inequality supposedly existing between these inheritances would have an impact on intellectual capacities and moral dispositions. Such is the racist thesis.
According to evolutionist theory, by contrast, the inequality of cultures has not a biological but rather a
88
RE C O G NI Z IN G C ULTURAL DIVERSITY
historical origin: on the single path that all societies

must necessarily follow, some took the lead, others
fell behind, others may perhaps have gone backwards.
The only problems would then be to understand the
contingent reasons for the delay by some cultures
and to help them catch up.
We are thus confronted with the last two problems
to whose solution anthropology hopes to contribute:
first, the problem of race; and second, the meaning to
be given to the notion of progress.
Throughout the nineteenth century and during
the first half of the twentieth, many wondered
whether race influenced culture and, if so, in what
way. Because peoples who do not have the same physical appearance also have different ways of life, customs, and beliefs, it was concluded that physical differences and cultural differences were linked. As the
preamble to the second UNESCO statement on the
problem of race (1951) commonsensically acknowledges, what convinces the man in the street that races
exist is the immediate evidence of his senses when
he sees an African, a European, an Asiatic and an
American Indian together.*
* Statement on the Nature of Race and Race Differen
ces (Paris: UNESCO, 1951), n.p. <http://honestthinking.
org/en/unesco/UNESCO.1951.Statement_on_Race.htm>
89
Anthropology has long put forward two arguments against the idea that race and culture are
linked. In the first place, the number of cultures that
exist on the earths surface, and above all, the number that still existed two or three centuries ago vastly
surpass the number of races that even the most meticulous investigators have wanted to distinguish:
several thousand versus a dozen or two. And two cultures developed by human beings who supposedly
belong to the same race may differ from each other
as much or more than two cultures coming from racially different groups.
In the second place, cultural inheritances evolve
much faster than genetic inheritances. There is a
world between our great-grandparents culture and
our own. We could go so far as to say that there is
lessdifference between the way of life of the ancient
Greeks and Romans and that of our eighteenth-
century ancestors than between these ancestors way
of life and our own. Nevertheless, with a few exceptions, we have the same genetic inheritance as they.
These two reasons explain why, nearly a hundred
years ago, a divorce occurred between so-called cultural or social anthropologists, who study technologies, customs, institutions, and beliefs, and old-school
physical anthropologists, who stubbornly persisted
90
in measuring and calibrating skulls, skeletons, and

living beings. No correlation could be established between these two types of investigations. If you will
allow me to invoke an image, the physical anthropologists sieve had mesh too coarse to capture any of
the differences between the cultures to which we cultural or social anthropologists attach a meaning.
By contrast, in the last thirty or forty years, collaboration has occurred between anthropology and the
new biological discipline called population genetics.
By means of biological arguments, this discipline has
confirmed anthropologists traditional distrust of
any effort to reestablish a connection or causal relationship between racial and cultural differences.
The traditional notion of race rested entirely on
external and visible characteristics: size, skin and eye
color, shape of skull, type of hair, and so on. Even
supposing that the variations observable in these
different realms are concordant, which seems very
doubtful, there is no proof that they also accord with
the differences geneticists have revealed and whose
importance they have demonstrated, but which are
not immediately perceptible to the senses: blood
groups, plasma proteins, immunity factors, and so
on. Yet one set of characteristics is no less real than
the other, and it is possible to conceiveit has even
91
been established in certain casesthat the second set

has a completely different geographical distribution
than the first. Depending on the characteristic chosen, invisible races will thus make their appearance
within the traditional races or will spill over the already weak boundaries assigned to them.
Confirming the positions of anthropologists, geneticists have thus replaced the notion of race with
that of genetic stock. A genetic stock, rather than
encompassing supposedly immutable characteristics
with well-defined boundaries, is composed of mixtures, whose relative proportions vary from one place
to another and have varied continually over time. The
limits placed on them are arbitrary. The proportion
of a particular factor rises or falls in imperceptible
gradations, and the thresholds set for them depend
on the type of phenomenon that interests the inves
tigator and which he chooses as a means of classifi
cation.
The new alliance, shall I say, using an expression
in vogue, between anthropologists and geneticists
has led to a remarkable change in attitude toward socalled primitive peoples. That change of attitude,
based on different arguments, moves in the direction
that, until now, only anthropologists were taking.
92
For centuries, the customs that consist of bizarre

marriage rules, arbitrary prohibitions (such as those
on sexual relations between husband and wife so long
as the wife is nursing her youngest child), polygamous privileges for chiefs or elders, or even practices
that revolt us, such as infanticide, appeared absurd
and even scandalous. It was not until population genetics emerged as a field in about 1950 that we perceived the reasons behind these practices.
We have a tendency to consider the races most remote from our own as being the most homogenous
as well: for a white person, all Asians look alike, and
the stereotypical representations of whites in what is
called Namban art suggests that the reverse is also
true. Yet considerable differences have been detected
among primitive tribes living in the same geographical area; and these differences are almost as large between the villages of a single tribe as between tribes
distinct in their language and culture. As a result,
even an isolated tribe does not constitute a biological
unit. That can be explained by the way new villages
form: a family group separates from its genealogical
lineage and settles at a distance from it. Later, blocks
of individuals related to one another join that group
and come to share the new settlement. The genetic
93
stocks that form thus differ a great deal more from

one another than they would if they were the effect of
groupings that happen by chance.
This has the following consequence: if the villages
of a single tribe include genetic formations that are
differentiated from the start, with each of them living in relative isolation and competing with one another (since they have different reproduction rates),
they reconstitute a set of conditions that biologists
know to be favorable to an incomparably more rapid
evolution than that generally observed in animal species. And we know that the evolution that led from
the fossil hominoids to present-day human beings
came about very quickly, relatively speaking.
If we can agree that the conditions observable in
our own time in certain remote populations provide
an approximate picture, at least in certain respects, of
those experienced by humanity in the distant past,
we will have to acknowledge that these conditions,
which we judge to be miserable, were the most suitable for making us what we have become; and also,
that they remain the most suitable for keeping human evolution moving in the same direction and at
the same rate. By contrast, enormous contemporary
societies, where genetic exchanges come about in a
94
different way, tend to slow evolution or change its

orientation.
Our knowledge had to evolve, and we had to become aware of these new problems, before we could
recognize the objective value and moral meaning of
modes of life, practices, and beliefs that we had previously mocked or, at best, had looked on with condescending curiosity. But with the entry of population
genetics on the anthropological scene, another turnabout occurred, one whose theoretical implications
may be even greater.
I mentioned facts that lie within the sphere of culture: so-called primitive societies maintain low demo
graphic growth by continuing to breastfeed children
for as long as three or four years, by observing various sexual prohibitions, and, if need be, by practicingabortion and infanticide. The highly variable rate
of reproduction on the part of men, depending on
whether they have one wife or several, favors certain
forms of natural selection. All of this has to do with
the way human groups divide themselves up and re-
form, with the customs imposed on individuals of
both sexes to unite and reproduce, with the ways prescribed to bring children into the world and to rear
themor to refuse to do soand with law, magic, re-
95
ligion, and cosmology. Directly or indirectly, these

factors shape natural selection and orient its course.
RACE, A MISNOMER
As a result, the relationship between the notion of

race and that of culture is turned upside down.
Throughout the nineteenth century and in the first
half of the twentieth, people wondered whether race
influenced culture and, if so, in what way. Having already observed that the problem thus posed is insoluble, we now perceive that things occur in the opposite direction. It is the forms of culture that human
beings adopt in one place or another, their ways of
living, past and present, that to a large extent determine the rate and orientation of their biological evolution. Far from having to wonder whether culture is
or is not a function of race, we discover that raceor
what is generally understood by that misnomeris
one function among others of culture.
How could it be otherwise? It is a groups culture
that determines the geographical boundaries of the
territory it occupies, the relations of friendship or
hostility it maintains with neighboring peoples and,
as a result, the relative extent to which genetic ex-
96
changes, intermarriagespermitted, encouraged, or

prohibitedwill be able to occur among them.
Even in our own societies, we know that marriages
do not occur completely by chance. Conscious or unconscious factors come into play: the distance between the family residences of the future spouses,
questions of ethnic origin, religion, level of education, family resources. If I may extrapolate from practices and customs that until recently were extremely
widespread, we will have to admit that, since the earliest beginnings of life in society, our ancestors must
have known and applied rules of marriage allowing
or proscribing certain types of relatives. I have given
a few examples in my previous lectures. How could
such rules, applied for generations, not act differentially on the transmission of genetic inheritances?
But that is not all. The rules of hygiene practiced
by every society, the relative intensity and effectiveness of treatment for this or that disease or deficiency,
allow or prevent to varying degrees the survival of
certain individuals and the spread of genetic material
that would otherwise have disappeared more quickly.
The same can be said for cultural attitudes toward
hereditary anomalies, and for certain practices, those
targeting both sexes indiscriminatelyin the case of
97
so-called abnormal births, twins, and so onand

those, like infanticide, that are applied particularly to
girls. Finally, the relative age of the spouses and the
different levels of fertility based on standard of living
and social position are, at least in part, directly or indirectly subject to rules whose ultimate origin is not
biological but social.
Human evolution is therefore not a by-product of
biological evolution, nor is it completely distinct
from it. It is possible to form a synthesis of these two
traditional attitudes, provided that biologists and anthropologists become aware of the aid they can offer
one another and of their respective limitations.
At the origin of humanity, biological evolution
may have selected precultural traits such as upright
posture, manual dexterity, sociability, symbolic
thought, and the ability to vocalize and communicate. Once culture exists, however, it consolidates
these traits and propagates them. When cultures diverge, they consolidate and favor different traits, such
as resistance to cold or heat (for societies that, by
choice or by necessity, had to adapt to extreme climates), or to oxygen-deficient atmospheres (for those
living at high altitudes). And who knows whether aggressive or contemplative dispositions, technical ingenuity, and so on, are not partly linked to genetic
98
factors? None of these traits, as we apprehend them

at the cultural level, can be clearly linked to a genetic
foundation, but we cannot rule out a priori the distant effects of intermediate links. If such effects are
real, it would be true to say that every culture selects genetic abilities that, by retroaction, influence
the culture and reinforce its orientation.
The genetic approach and the cultural approach
are partly analogous and partly complementary. They
are analogous in that, in several ways, cultures are
comparable to the irregular mixes of genetic traits
that were formerly designated by the word race. A
culture consists of a multiplicity of traits, some of
which are shared with nearby or distant cultures,
whereas others serve to distinguish the cultures more
or less markedly from one another. These traits
achieve a balance within a system that must be viable; otherwise, there is the risk that other systems
better able to propagate and reproduce themselves
will gradually eliminate it. The conditions needed
to develop differences, to define adequately the distinction between one culture and its neighbors, are
roughly the same as those that favor biological differences among populations: relative isolation over a
prolonged period of time and limited cultural and
genetic exchanges. Cultural barriers play the same
99
role as genetic barriers: only the order of magnitude

differs. Cultural barriers prefigure genetic ones, es
pecially since all cultures leave their imprint on the
body. Through costumes, hairstyles, and ornaments,
through bodily mutilations and body language, they
mimic differences comparable to those that can exist
among the races. In preferring certain physical types
over others, they consolidate and possibly spread particular traits.
Thirty-four years ago, in a leaflet entitled Race and
History, written at the request of UNESCO, I relied on
the notion of coalition to explain why isolated cultures cannot on their own create the conditions for
atruly cumulative history. For that, I said, it takes a
variety of cultures, intentionally or unintentionally
combining their respective wagers and thus providing themselves with a chance to realize, in the great
gamble of history, the winning streaks that permit
history to advance.
At present, geneticists propose fairly similar views
about biological evolution. They demonstrate that a
genome actually constitutes a system in which some
genes play a regulatory role and others act in unison
on a single characteristic; conversely, several characteristics may turn out to depend on a single gene.
What is true for the individual genome is also true
100
for a population, which (through its combination of

several genetic inheritances) must always be able to
achieve an optimal balance and improve its chances
for survival. In that sense, we can say that, in the his
tory of populations, genetic recombination plays a
role comparable to that played by cultural recombination in the evolution of ways of life, technologies,
knowledge, customs, and beliefs. Indeed, individuals
predestined by their genetic inheritance to acquire
only one particular culture would have singularly disadvantaged descendants: the cultural variations to
which these descendants would be exposed would
come to pass more quickly than their genetic inheritance could evolve in response to the demands of the
new situations.
Anthropologists and biologists now agree that life
in general and that of humans in particular cannot
develop uniformly. Always and everywhere, life requires and engenders diversity. That intellectual, social, aesthetic, and philosophical diversity is not connected by any causal relationship to that which exists
at the biological level between the great human families. It is merely parallel to that diversity, but in a different domain.
But what precisely does that diversity consist of? It
would be pointless to convince the man on the street
101
that there is no intellectual or moral meaning in the

fact that someone has black or white skin, smooth
or kinky hair, if we remained silent about another
question, which that man on the street immediately
latches onto. If there are no innate racial aptitudes,
how can we explain why Western-type civilization has
made the enormous progress it has, while the civilizations of peoples of color have remained behind,
some halfway along the road, others delayed by what
amounts to thousands or tens of thousands of years?
We cannot claim to have disproved the inequality of
the human races if we do not also examine the inequalityor diversityof human cultures, which is
closely linked to it in the publics mind.
THE SCANDAL OF DIVERSITY
The diversity of cultures has rarely appeared to human beings for what it is: a natural phenomenon resulting from direct or indirect relations among socie
ties. It has rather been seen as a sort of monstrosity
or scandal. Since the most remote times, a tendency,
so solidly rooted that we might believe it to be instinctual, has impelled human beings to quite simply
repudiate the customs, beliefs, practices, and values
most alien to those in force in their own society. The
102
ancient Greeks and the ancient Chinese called the

peoples who did not participate in their culture by
terms that we would translate as barbarian. Etymologically, both terms seem to connote the chirping of
birds. They thus categorized these peoples as animals. And the term savage, which we have long employed and which means of the forest, also evokes a
kind of animal life, in opposition to human culture.
Human beings thus reject the very fact of cultural
diversity, preferring to cast outside culture, into natureas the German term Naturvlker indicatesev
erything that is remote from the norms under which
they themselves live.
There is no doubt that the great religious and philosophical systemswhether Buddhism, Christianity,
or Islam; Stoic, Kantian, or Marxist doctrines; or fi
nally, various declarations of human rightshave
constantly militated against that attitude. These systems, however, forget that human beings do not realize their nature in an abstract humanity but within
traditional cultures, which differ from one another
as a function of time and place. Caught between the
dual temptation to condemn experiences that offend
them morally and to deny differences they do not
understand intellectually, moderns have ventured to
reach compromises that will allow them to take into
103
account the diversity of cultures and, at the same

time, to suppress what they find scandalous and
shocking.
Evolutionism, which has long dominated Western
thought, thus constitutes an attempt to reduce the
diversity of cultures, even while pretending to acknowledge it fully. For if you treat the different states
in which human societiesboth ancient in time and
remote in spacehappen to be as phases or stages of
a single development that is pushing them all in the
same direction, the diversity observed among them is
only apparent. Humanity becomes unified and identical to itself. It is simply that this unity and identity
are realized only gradually and not everywhere at the
same rate.
The evolutionist solution is appealing, but it over
simplifies the facts. Every society, from its own perspective, can divide societies different from itself into
two categories: those that are contemporary to it
but geographically remote; and those that have existed in nearly the same space but that have preceded
it in time.
When we consider societies of the first type, there
is a temptation to establish between them relations
equivalent to an order of succession in time. How
cancontemporary societies where electricity and the
104
steam engine are unknown fail to evoke archaic

phases of Western civilization? How can one not
compare indigenous tribes, without writing and
without metallurgybut who draw figures on rock
faces and make stone toolsto the unknown peoples
who engaged in similar activities in France and Spain
fifteen or twenty thousand years ago? How many
Western travelers have not rediscovered the Middle
Ages in the East, the seventeenth century in pre
World War I Beijing, the stone age in the aborigines
of Australia or New Guinea?
That false evolutionism seems extremely pernicious to me. We know only certain aspects of vanished civilizationsfewer and fewer the more ancient
the civilization considered, since the known aspects
are only those that were able to survive the assaults of
time. The procedure thus consists of taking the part
for the whole and of concluding, based on the fact
that certain aspects of two civilizations (one present-
day, the other vanished) resemble each other, that
they are identical in every respect. Not only is that
mode of reasoning logically unsustainable, in most
cases it is also contradicted by the facts.
By way of example, let me recall the ideas about
Japan that were long prevalent in the West. In almost
all works written about your country until World
105
War II, we read that, in the mid-nineteenth century,

Japan remained under a feudal regime identical to
that of Europe in the Middle Ages; and that only in
the second half of the nineteenth century, that is,
with a delay of two or three centuries, did it enter the
capitalist era and become open to industrialization.
We now know all that is false. In the first place, what
is called Japanese feudalismmilitary in its orientation, pervaded by dynamism and pragmatismdisplayed only superficial resemblances to European
feudalism. It represented a perfectly original form of
social organization. Second and above all, by the sixteenth century Japan was already an industrial nation that manufactured and exported to China suits
of armor and sabers by the tens of thousands; somewhat later, it also exported similar numbers of harquebuses and cannons. During the same period,
Japan had more inhabitants than any country in Europe, more universities, and a higher literacy rate.
And finally, a form of commodity and financial cap
italism that owed nothing to the West was in full
swing well before the Meiji Restoration.
The two societies, therefore, were far from occupying successive positions on a single line of development. Rather, they followed parallel paths; and, at
every moment in history, they made choices that did
106
not necessarily coincide with each other. It is somewhat as if, having the same cards in hand, each had
decided to play them in a different order. Like many
other comparisons possible, that between Europe
and Japan challenges the notion that progress occurs
in a single direction.
Is all that true not only of societies that have coexisted in time, far away from one another, but also of
societies of the second type, those that, in a determined place, historically preceded the society of today? The hypothesis of a unilinear evolution, so fragile when evoked to place societies remote in space
along a continuum, seems in this case difficult to
avoid. We know by the concordant evidence of paleontology, prehistory, and archaeology that the territories occupied by the great present-day civilizations
were first inhabited by various species of the genus
Homo, who carved crude flints. With time, these stone
tools were refined and perfected; carved stone made
way for polished stone, bone, and ivory; pottery, weaving, and agriculture followed, gradually combined
with metallurgy, whose phases can also be distinguished. In that case, can we not speak of a true evolution?
Yet it is not as easy as some believe to organize this
indisputable progress into a regular and continuous
107
series. For a long time, successive phases were distinguished: the era of carved stone (Paleolithic), the era
of polished stone (Neolithic), the Copper Age, the
Bronze Age, then the Iron Age. But that was too simple. We now know that carved and polished stone
sometimes existed side by side; and, when polished
stone prevailed, it was not as the result of technical
progresssince polishing is much more costly in raw
materials than carving. Rather, it was an attempt to
copy in stone the copper or bronze weapons possessed by more advanced civilizations, ones that
were, however, contemporary to and neighbors of
their imitators. Depending on the region of the world
considered, sometimes pottery appears simultaneously with polished stone, sometimes prior to it.
It was formerly believed that the different carved-
stone technologiescore industries, flake industries, and blade industriesreflected a historical
progress in three stages, which were called the Lower
Paleolithic, Middle Paleolithic, and Upper Paleolithic.
It is now acknowledged that these three forms may
have coexisted, that they do not represent stages of a
progress in a single direction but aspects or, as they
say, facies of a very complex reality. Hundreds of
thousandsperhaps more than a millionyears ago,
stone industries were the work of an ancestor of
108
Homo sapiens called Homo erectus. Yet these industries

attest to a complication and refinement that were not
surpassed until the end of the Neolithic period.
There is no denying the reality of the progress
achieved by humanity. We simply need to take a more
nuanced view of it. The development of our knowledge invites us to spread out over space forms of civilization that we were inclined to spread out over
time.
Progress is neither necessary nor continuous. It
proceeds by leaps, bounds, or, as the biologists would
say, mutations. These leaps and bounds do not always move forward or in the same direction. They are
accompanied by changes in orientation, somewhat
like the knight in a chess game, who always has several moves at his disposal but in different directions.
The progress of humanity is not like someone climbing a staircase step by step. It rather brings to mind
the player whose chances are distributed over several
dice and who, every time he throws them, sees them
disperse on the table. What he wins with one, he always risks losing with another, and it is only by a
stroke of luck that history becomes cumulative, in
other words, that the numbers add up to a favorable
combination.
But what might our attitude be toward a civili
109
zation that obtains favorable combinations from its

own point of view, but without offering anything of
interest to the civilization to which the observer belongs? Would the observer not be inclined to call that
civilization stationary? In other words, is not the distinction between cumulative history (one that accumulates discoveries and inventions) and stationary
history (which may be equally eventful but in which
each innovation would ebb and flow, never moving
forward in a lasting manner) the result of the ethnocentric perspective we always adopt in evaluating a
different culture? We would thus consider cumulative any culture that develops in a direction similar to
our own, whereas other cultures would appear sta
tionary to us, not necessarily because they are so, but
because their line of development means nothing to
us and is not measurable by the standards we use.
THE ART OF THE IMPERFECT
To better convey this point, which I believe is essential, I have in the past used several comparisons,
which I ask for your permission to repeat.
In the first place, the attitude I denounce resembles in many respects the one we observe in our own
societies, where elderly people and the young do not
110
react to events in the same way. The elderly generally

consider the history unfolding during their old age
to be stationary, in opposition to the cumulative his
tory they witnessed in their youth. An era in which
they are no longer actively involved, where they no
longer play a role, no longer has any meaning. Nothing is happening, or what is happening has only negative characteristics in their eyes. By contrast, their
grandchildren experience that period with all the fervor their elders have lost.
Also in our own societies, the opponents of a po
litical regime do not readily acknowledge that it is
evolving. They condemn it en bloc, cast it outside his
tory as a sort of entracte, believing that normal life
will resume its course only after the regime ends. The
view of the militants is completely different, especially, let us note, when they occupy an important
place in the apparatus of the party in power.
The opposition between progressive cultures and
immobile cultures thus seems to result from what I
shall call a difference in focus. To someone observing
through a microscope, who has focused on a body
located at a certain distance from the lens, the bodies
located closer or farther away by even a tiny increment appear indistinct and blurred, or do not appear
at all: the observer sees right through them.
111
Similarly, for a traveler on a train, the apparent

speed and length of the other trains he perceives
through the window vary depending on whether they
are moving in the same direction or in the opposite
one. Every member of a culture is as closely bound up
with the culture as that ideal traveler is with his train.
From birth, our familial and social environment imprints in our minds a complex system of references,
consisting of value judgments, motivations, and focuses of interest, including the ideas inculcated in
usabout our civilizations past and future. Over the
course of our lives, we literally move with that systemof references, while the systems of other cultures,
other societies, are perceived only through the distortions that our own system imposes on them, when it
does not make us incapable of seeing anything at all.
Every time we are inclined to call a culture inert or
stationary, we must therefore ask ourselves if that apparent immobility does not stem from our ignorance
of its true interests, and if, with its own criteria
which are different from our ownthat culture is not
a victim of the same illusion with respect to us. In
other words, these two cultures have no interest in
each other, simply because they do not resemble each
other.
For the past two or three centuries, Western civili112
zation has devoted itself primarily to scientific knowledge and its applications. If we adopt that criterion,
we will make the quantity of energy available per cap
ita the index of the degree of development in human
societies. If the criterion had been the ability to prevail over particularly hostile geographical environments, the Eskimos and the Bedouins would win first
prize. India was better able than any other civilization to elaborate a philosophical and religious systemcapable of reducing the psychological risks of a
demographic imbalance. Islam formulated a theory
of the solidarity of all forms of human activity (technical, economic, social, and spiritual), and we know
the preeminent place that this vision of humankind
and of the world allowed the Arabs to occupy in the
intellectual life of the Middle Ages. The Middle and
Far East are in advance of the West by several millennia in everything having to do with the relations between the physical and the moral, and in the use of
the resources of that supreme machine, the human
body. The Australian aborigines, backward at the
technical and economic level, elaborated social and
familial systems of such complexity that, to understand them, we must rely on certain forms of modern
mathematics. They can be acknowledged as the first
theorists of kinship.
113
The contribution of Africa is more complex but

also more obscure, since we are only beginning tounderstand the role it played as melting pot of the ancient world. Egyptian civilization is intelligible only
as the joint achievement of Asia and Africa. And the
great political systems of ancient Africa, its legal contributions, its philosophical thoughtlong hidden
from Westernersits plastic arts, and its music, are
so many aspects of a very fertile past. Think, finally,
of the many contributions of pre-Columbian America to the material culture of the Old World: first, the
potato, rubber, tobacco, and coca (the foundation of
modern anesthesia), which in various capacities constitute four pillars of Western civilization; second,
corn and groundnuts, which revolutionized the African economy before becoming known in Europe and,
in the case of corn, before spreading there; and third,
cocoa, vanilla, tomatoes, pineapples, peppers, several
species of beans, cotton, and cucurbits. Finally, the
number zero, the foundation of arithmetic, and indirectly of modern mathematics, was known and used
by the Mayas at least half a millennium before its
discovery by the Indians, who transmitted it to Europe via the Arabs. For that reason, perhaps, the Maya
calendar was more accurate than that of the Old
World during the same period.
114
Let us return for a moment to the case of Europe

and Japan. In the mid-nineteenth century, Europe
and the United States were certainly more advanced
in terms of industrialization and mechanization. The
West was better able to develop scientific knowledge
and to draw from it all sorts of applications, which
made it possible to increase immensely human beings power over nature. But that is not equally true
in all domains, for example, that of steel metallurgy
and organic chemistry. The Japanese were experts
at tempering and fermentation technologies, which
may explain why they have now taken the lead in biotechnology. If we turn to literature, it was not until
the eighteenth century that works appeared in Europe that were comparable to the Genji monogatari in
their subtlety and psychological depth; and, to find
amemorialist whose flights of poetry and poignant
melancholy matched those of your thirteenth-century
chroniclers, we had to wait until Chateaubriand.
In my first lecture, I recalled that interest in the socalled primitive arts dates back less than a century in
Europe. Such an interest goes back to the sixteenth
century in Japan, with the passion your aesthetes displayed for rustic pottery, the works of humble Korean peasants. It was then that your country developed a taste for materials left in their crude state, for
115
rough textures, accidents of manufacture, irregular

or asymmetrical forms, in a word, for what Yanagi
Setsu, the great theorist of these archaic styles,
called the art of the imperfect. In Japan, that art of
the imperfect, produced without conscious intention
by its first practitioners, would inspire raku ceramics,
the bold simplifications of a master potter such
as Ketsu and, at the graphic and plastic levels, the
work of painters and decorators such as Statsu and
Krin.
Nowand this is the point I want to makethat
aspect of Japanese art, illustrated by the Rimpa
school, is the very same that, in the second half of the
nineteenth century, fascinated Europe and advanced
its aesthetic sensibility. Thanks to it, European curiosity gradually broadened to include the so-called
primitive arts. But make no mistake: Japanese art
prepared the West for that craze without the West being aware of it, since the Japanese artists I mentioned
had been inspired several centuries earlier by arts
comparable in their archaism and had assimilated
the lessons of these arts at that time.
This is a minor example, but I find it telling. We
believe that ideas and tastes move forward, when in
fact they often merely go in circles. What we take
116
for bold progress may be a return to the starting

point.
But it is not scattered contributions that ought to
hold our attention. Too much heed has been given to
priority: that of the Phoenicians, for writing in the
West; that of the Chinese, for paper, gunpowder, and
the compass; that of the Indians, for glass and steel.
These elements are less important than the way every
culture combines them, adopts them, or excludes
them. What constitutes the originality of each culture is its particular way of solving problems, of put
ting into perspective values that are roughly the same
for all human beings: for all without exception possess a language, technologies, art, positive knowledge,
religious beliefs, and a social and political organiza
tion. But the mix is never exactly the same for each
culture, and anthropology is intent on understand
ing the secret reasons for these choices rather than
on drawing up inventories of isolated facts.
CULTURAL RELATIVISM AND MORAL JUDGMENT
The doctrine whose main lines I have just outlined

bears a name: cultural relativism. It does not deny
that progress is real or that certain cultures can be
117
ordered in relation to one another, provided that only

one particular aspect is considered. Nevertheless, cultural relativism asserts that that possibility, even in
its restricted form, runs up against three limits.
First, although the reality of progress is indisputable when one considers the evolution of humanity
in a casual manner, progress manifests itself only in
particular sectors and, even there, it is discontinuous,
with local points of stagnation and regression.
Second, when the anthropologist examines and
compares in detail the preindustrial societies that are
his primary object of study, he is incapable of identifying criteria that would allow him to order all of
them along a continuum.
Finally, the anthropologist declares he is powerless
to make an intellectual or moral judgment about the
respective values of one system of beliefs or another,
or of one form of social organization or another. The
anthropologists hypothesis, in fact, is that moral criteria are a function of the particular society that has
adopted them.
It is out of respect for the peoples they study that
anthropologists abstain from formulating judgments
on the comparative value of one or another culture.
Every culture, they say, is by its very essence powerless
to make a true judgment about another culture, since
118
a culture cannot escape itself, and its evaluation thus

remains prisoner to a relativism against which there
is no recourse.
And yetand this is one of the major problems
arising for anthropology at presentfor about a century, have not all societies recognized, one after another, the superiority of the Western model? Do we
not see the whole world gradually borrowing its technologies, its way of life, its clothing, even its entertainment?
From the vast Asian populations to the tribes
lost in the South American or Melanesian jungle,
a unanimous assembly, unprecedented in history,
proclaimed until recently that one form of civilization was superior to all the others. At a time when
Western-style civilization is beginning to doubt itself,
the people who have achieved independence in the
course of the last half a century continue to champion it, at least through the mouths of their leaders.
These leaders sometimes even accuse anthropologists
of insidiously prolonging colonial domination. They
say that anthropologists contribute toward perpetuating antiquated practices that constitute an obstacle
to development by virtue of the exclusive attention
they grant them. If I may evoke a personal memory,
in 1981, when I was traveling through South Korea in
119
the company of colleagues and students, I was told

that the students were making fun of me: That LviStrauss, they would say to one another, hes only
interested in things that no longer exist. The dogma
of cultural relativism is thus called into question by
the very people for whose moral benefit anthropologists deemed it imperative to decree it.
That situation poses a serious problem for anthropology and for humanity as a whole. In the course of
these three lectures, I have emphasized several times
that the gradual fusion of populations, previously
separated by geographical distance and by linguistic
and cultural barriers, marked the end of a world that
human beings had lived in for hundreds of millennia,
perhaps a million or two million years. At the time,
they lived in groups long separated from one another,
each of which had evolved differently at both the biological and the cultural level. The upheavals brought
about by burgeoning industrial civilization, the increased speed of the means of transportation and of
communication, have knocked down these barriers.
At the same time, the opportunities they offered for
the development and testing of new genetic combinations and cultural experiences have disappeared.
No doubt we are deluding ourselves with the dream
that equality and fraternity will one day reign among
120
human beings without their diversity being compromised. But we must have no illusions. The great creative eras were those in which communication had
advanced enough that distant partners could stimulate one another, but without being so frequent and
rapid that the ease of exchanges reduced the indispensable obstacles between individuals and between
groups to such a point as to obliterate diversity.
It is true that for human beings to progress, they
must collaborate. During that collaboration, however, the contributions, whose initial diversity was
precisely what made the collaboration fruitful and
necessary, come to be identical. Teamwork is the
source of all progress; but, after a more or less brief
interval, it necessarily leads to a homogenization of
the resources of each of the players. If diversity is an
initial condition, we must recognize that the chances
of winning diminish the longer the game goes on.
In the eyes of anthropologists, that is the dilemma
modern humanity is now facing. Everything seems to
show that we are moving toward a global civilization.
But is not that notion itself contradictory if, as I have
attempted to show, the idea of civilization implies
and requires the coexistence of cultures diverse from
one another?
The fascination Japan now exerts both in Europe
121
and the United States does not lie solely in its technological progress and economic success. It can be
explained in large part by the vague sense that, of all
the modern nations, yours has proved the most capable of navigating between those two pitfalls, of
elaborating your own formulas for living and thinking, in order to overcome the contradictions to which
humanity has fallen prey in the twentieth century.
Japan has resolutely entered global civilization.
But until now, it has been able to do so without abjuring its specific characteristics. At the time of the
Meiji Restoration, when Japan resolved to be open to
the world, it was convinced that it had to equal the
West at the technical level if it wanted to safeguard its
own values. Unlike so many so-called underdeveloped
peoples, it did not deliver itself to a foreign model
bound hand and foot. It momentarily departed from
its spiritual center of gravity only to better ensure it
by securing its perimeter.
For centuries, Japan maintained a balance between
two attitudes: sometimes open to external influences
and quick to absorb them; sometimes withdrawn
into itself, as if to give itself the time to assimilate
these foreign contributions and to put its own stamp
on them. That astonishing capacity on the part of
122
Japan to alternate between two modes of conduct, to

share its allegiance between national deities and what
you yourselves call invited gods, is no doubt familiar to you, and I make no claim to teach you anything. I would simply like to make you more aware,
by means of a few examples, of how they strike the
Western observer.
In my second lecture, I pointed to the urgency of
safeguarding traditional know-how. You have provided a solution to that problem by instituting what
is called the living national treasures system, ningen
kokuh. I do not think I am betraying a state secret in
confiding that the public authorities in my country
are currently preparing measures aimed at establishing a system in France directly inspired by your own.
Another aspect of your history that is particularly
instructive for the French lies in the different waysI
would even say the opposite waysthat our two countries entered the industrial age. In France, a bourgeoisie of lawyers and bureaucrats, allied to a peasantry
hungry for property, started a revolution that simultaneously abolished outdated privileges and stifled
nascent capitalism. Japan, for its part, proceeded to a
restoration that, in returning to the source, also had
the aim of integrating the common people into the
123
national community. But it capitalized on the past

instead of destroying it. Japan was thus able to place
the available human resources in the service of the
new order. The critical spirit did not have the leisure
to wreak its devastation. The entire apparatus of
symbolic representationsdating back to the time of
prerice-growing production and already integrated
into rice-growing productionwas still solid enough
to provide an ideological foundation to imperial
power and then to industrial society.
In short, what the gaze we Westerners cast on Japan confirms to us is that each particular culture,
and the set of cultures of which all humanity is composed, can survive and prosper only by operating in
accordance with a dual rhythm: opening up and closing itself off. Sometimes the two movements are out
of sync, sometimes they coexist over the long term.
To be original and to maintain a distance from other
cultures, one that allows for mutual enrichment, ev
ery culture must be true to itself. The price to be paid
is a certain imperviousness, total or partial, to values
different from its own.
You have done me the honor of inviting me to deliver these lectures, perhaps with the notion that anthropology can teach Japan something. And yet, the
reason I came to your country for the fourth time,
124
with my curiosity, empathy, and interest keener than

ever, is that (and each of my visits has convinced
me more of this) Japan, through its unique way of
posing the problems of modern humankind and by
the solutions it offers, can teach anthropology a
greatdeal.
125
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Claude Lvi-Str auss was born on November 28,

1908, in Brussels. He held the chair of social anthropology at the Collge de France from 1959 to 1982 and
was elected a member of the Acadmie Franaise in
1973. He died in Paris on October 30, 2009.
Among his works:
La vie familiale et sociale des Indiens Nambikwara. Paris: Socit des Amricanistes, 1948. [Family and Social Life of the
Nambikwara Indians. Translated by Eileen Sittler. New
Haven, Conn.: Human Relations Area Files, 197?]
Les structures lmentaires de la parent. Paris: PUF, 1949; The
Hague: Mouton, 1967. [The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Translated by James Harle Bell, John Richard von
Sturmer, and Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon, 1969.]
Race et histoire. Paris: UNESCO, 1952. [Race and History.
Paris: UNESCO, 1952.]
Tristes tropiques. Paris: Plon, 1955. [Tristes Tropiques. Translated by John Russell. New York: Atheneum, 1961.]
Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Plon, 1958. [Structural Anthro127
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
pology. Translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke

Grundefest Schoepf. New York: Basic, 1963.]
Le totmisme aujourdhui. Paris: PUF, 1962. [Totemism. Translated by Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon, 1963.]
La pense sauvage. Paris: Plon, 1962. [The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.]
Mythologiques. Paris: Plon, 19641971. Vol. 1, Le cru et le cuit.
Vol. 2, Du miel aux cendres. Vol. 3, Lorigine des manires de
table. Vol. 4, Lhomme nu. [Introduction to the Study of Mythology. Translated by John Weightman and Doreen
Weightman. New York: Harper & Row, 19691981. Vol. 1,
The Raw and the Cooked. Vol. 2, From Honey to Ashes. Vol. 3,
The Origin of Table Manners. Vol. 4, The Naked Man.]
Anthropologie structurale II. Paris: Plon, 1973. [Structural Anthropology II. Translated by Monique Layton. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1973.]
La voie des masques. Geneva: Albert Skira, 2 vols. 1975; revised, augmented edition followed by Trois excursions.
Paris: Plon, 1979. [The Way of the Masks. Translated by
Sylvia Modelsky. Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1982.]
Le regard loign. Paris: Plon, 1983. [The View from Afar.
Translated by Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss.
New York: Basic, 1985.]
Paroles donnes. Paris: Plon, 1984. [Anthropology and Myth:
Lectures, 19511982. Translated by Roy Willis. New York:
Blackwell, 1987.]
La potire jalouse. Paris: Plon, 1985. [The Jealous Potter. Trans128
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
lated by Bndicte Chorier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.]

Histoire des lynx. Paris: Plon, 1991. [The Story of Lynx. Translated by Catherine Tihanyi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.]
Regarder couter lire. Paris: Plon, 1993. [Look, Listen, Read.
Translated by Brian C.J. Singer. New York: Basic, 1997.]
Oeuvres. Paris: Gallimard, 2008.
129

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jane Marie Todd, Maurice Olender-Anthropology Confronts The Problems of The Modern World-Belknap Press (2013)

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Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jane Marie Todd, Maurice Olender-Anthropology Confronts The Problems of The Modern World-Belknap Press (2013)

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Anthropology Confronts the Problems

of the Modern World

Translated by Jane Marie Todd

Anthropology Confronts the

Anthropology Confronts the

Claude Lvi-Str auss

the belknap press of harvard

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

First published as Anthropologie face aux problmes du monde moderne,

My thanks to Monique Lvi-Strauss,

Foreword by Maurice Olender

1. The End of the Wests

2. Three Great Contemporary Problems:

3. Recognizing Cultural Diversity:

About the Author

In spr ing 1986, on the occasion of his fourth visit

cover in this volume the questions underpinning his

Anthropology Confronts the

Let me fir st t hank the Ishizaka Foundation for

For about the last two centuries, Western civilization

THE END OF THE W EST S C ULTURAL SUPRE M A C Y

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sary to produce more. We therefore have the sense

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ourselves? Now that Western-style civilization no

No matter how far back in time or how distant in

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earlier, had the Chinese Buddhist monks who went

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say, one must first observe the differences in order to

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cousins of the first type and recommend it, if indeed

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ture. Nothing shows that better than the tendency of

What, then, are these societies that anthropologists

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long tradition to call primitive, a term that many

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fectly viable so long as they are not threatened from

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only a limited number of days and must therefore

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plant species, sometimes more; is low in fat and rich

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the earth constitute so many readymade experiments,

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ences. Indeed, astronomy was able to constitute itself

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By this point, we are better able to understand what

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aside his beliefs, his preferences, and his prejudices.

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The second ambition of anthropology is totality. It

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cance. In short, he went no further than Herodotus,

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