Adam Kuper

Commentary: A Darwin family concern

‘I’m not quite sure that it’s a good thing for cousins to marry’, remarks Dr Crofts in Trollope’s The Small House of Allington, published in 1863. ‘They do, you know, very often’, he is reminded, ‘and it suits some family arrangements’. 1 To be sure, the doctor had a personal interest in the matter. A young woman he hoped to marry had just become engaged to her cousin. However, Dr Crofts was talking as a responsible medical man. The British medical press was raising questions about the risks to offspring of cousin marriages, 2,3 and a bright young doctor would have been familiar with the professional debates. (And in the end he gets his girl.) Charles Darwin had picked up on these concerns very early. He was worried about heredity and also about the consequences of cousin marriage. Shortly before his own marriage to his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, he had consulted a new book, Alexander Walker’s Intermarriage: Or the Mode in Which, and the Causes Why, Beauty, Health, and Intellect Result from Certain Unions, and Deformity, Disease and Insanity from Others (1838). It touched a sensitive nerve. His Darwin grandmother, the wife of Erasmus Darwin, was addicted to gin and suffered from bouts of madness. Charles Darwin’s own mother, unwell throughout his childhood, had died from an agonizing stomach ailment, probably peritonitis, at the age of 52 years. Charles was 8 years old when she died, and as an adult he was obsessively concerned with his own ill-health, particularly the recurrent stomach complaints that recalled his mother’s fatal illness. Both his mother and Emma were Wedgwoods, and the Wedgwoods were notorious for their ill-health. 4 Whenever one of his children fell ill, Charles was inclined to see the same symptoms in himself, and to worry that it exposed a family propensity. Or were the frequent illnesses of his children, and the health problems of the Wedgwoods, perhaps the consequence of cousin marriages? 5 This was a growing concern in scientific circles in Britain in the 1860s. ‘In many families, marriages between cousins are discouraged and checked’, Francis Galton noted in 1865. 6 Charles Darwin’s son George published an early paper recommending that cousin marriage should be avoided. 7

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009): Obituary

Claude Lévi-Strauss had only the slightest experience of ethnographic fieldwork, and had no formal training in anthropology. Nevertheless, his ideas transformed the discipline, and profoundly influenced the other human sciences. He died on 31 October. The son of an artist father, and the grandson of a rabbi in Strasbourg, France, Lévi-Strauss was educated in law and philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1935, he joined a French contingent at the new University of São Paulo in Brazil. He embraced the opportunity, because he had a very particular ambition. Jean-Jacques Rousseau once suggested that an expedition should be sent to the Americas to study human nature in its essential state, uncorrupted by civilization. A devotee of Rousseau’s philosophy, Lévi-Strauss was determined to execute the master’s plan. During his university holidays, Lévi-Strauss made expeditions to study remote Amerindian settlements, but almost all of this work was done at telegraph posts where Indians were in contact with government agencies and traders. Only towards the end of his travels did he make brief contact with an isolated band living in the old style, but naturally enough they spoke no Portuguese. “Alas! They were only too savage,” Lévi-Strauss reported. “They were as close to me as a reflection in a mirror; I could touch them, but I could not understand them.” This adventure might have been no more than an interlude. But shortly after Lévi-Strauss returned to France, the German army invaded the country and he became an exile in New York. At a loose end, he wrote up his Brazilian field notes, became an informal member of the anthropology circle at Columbia University and spent long days combing the anthropology shelves in the New York Public Library. “What I know of anthropology I learned during those years,” he later remarked. Although his American colleagues were steeped in regional ethnography, they were notoriously suspicious of theoretical abstractions. Lévi-Strauss, however, was determined to use observations of huntergatherers as the basis for a theory of human nature, like a more empirical Rousseau. Such a soaring ambition required a new theoretical framework. Inspiration came from a fellow exile in New York, the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson. Following the path-breaking contributions of Ferdinand de Saussure, linguistics was in the throes of a theoretical revolution. Lévi-Strauss concluded that it would show the way to a new, generalizing, structural anthropology. Jakobson was particularly interested in phonemics, the branch of linguistics that deals with the communication of meaning through sounds. He claimed to have split the atom of linguistics, the phoneme. The phoneme had been viewed as the smallest significant unit of sound in speech, but according to Jakobson it was itself a bundle of features made up of pairs of contrasting elements. So, for instance, English speakers invest the contrasting b and p sounds with meaning (the words ‘bill’ and ‘pill’ are obviously different to our ears), whereas in other languages the distinction may be unmarked and unheard. Lévi-Strauss argued that systems of classification are constructed on a similar pattern of binary oppositions. Returning to Paris in 1949, Lévi-Strauss found employment at the Museum of Man and then the École Pratique des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne. His massive doctoral thesis, published that year, argued that the imposition of a taboo on incest marked the break between a natural and a cultural order, obliging men to exchange sisters with other men, and so creating family and kinship networks. In the simplest (and implicitly oldest) systems, these networks are structured by a binary classification of relatives into two classes: unmarriageable kin and marriageable affines. In 1959, Lévi-Strauss was appointed to a chair at the College of France in Paris. He now began to publish his most influential studies, which dealt with systems of thought. The Savage Mind (1962) argued that Native Americans, and other hunter-gatherers from Australia to Africa, operate a “logic of the concrete” — they order images taken from the world around them in a series of binary oppositions. This home-made natural science provides metaphors for social relationships. In many languages, for example, the Sun and the Moon are associated with male and female characteristics. Paired species of birds and animals are contrasted in terms of colouring, feeding habits, or some other defining features, and are then associated with other paired objects (Australian Aboriginals, for instance, associate the Sun with the crow and the eaglehawk with the Moon). Such categorizations symbolize the social contrasts between men and women, or between pairs of human clans or occupations. In his masterpiece — a collection of four volumes on American mythology, beginning with the The Raw and the Cooked in 1964 and culminating with The Naked Man in 1971 — Lévi-Strauss demonstrated how systems of classification are put to work in myths that are at once epics, moral treatises and accounts of the world. He proposed that the initial premises of myths (say, that women are lunar, men solar) are played with in subsequent versions to yield new premises. These transformations follow implicit rules that allow only a sort of logical progression, in the form of the inversion of the initial terms, or a series of substitutions by which one binary pair replaces another. As he put it: “The kind of logic in mythical thought is as rigorous as that of modern science, and ... the difference lies, not in the quality of the intellectual process, but in the nature of things to which it is applied.” Lévi-Strauss notoriously claimed that he had a neolithic intelligence, that his thought was intuitively sympathetic to that of huntergatherers. His grand theory rested on a binary opposition between nature and culture (taken, of course, from Rousseau), and so between the small-scale, technically simple societies that existed during the first 150,000 years of human history and modern civilization, which rendered the simpler societies obsolete. He believed that humanity in its natural condition was adapted to the environment, whereas civilized societies endanger the environment and obliterate cultural variation. This deeply pessimistic view was conditioned by the Amazonian idyll of his youth, and the European catastrophe of the Second World War that followed. But he also believed that people everywhere ultimately thought in the same way, although about different things, and that the clash of cultures is necessary for human adaptation. Adam Kuper Adam Kuper is visiting professor at the Department of Anthropology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520, USA. e-mail: adam.kuper@googlemail.com J. RO BI N E/ A FP /G ET TY IM A G ES

Obituary: Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009)

Claude Lévi-Strauss had only the slightest experience of ethnographic fieldwork, and had no formal training in anthropology. Nevertheless, his ideas transformed the discipline, and profoundly influenced the other human sciences. He died on 31 October. The son of an artist father, and the grandson of a rabbi in Strasbourg, France, Lévi-Strauss was educated in law and philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1935, he joined a French contingent at the new University of São Paulo in Brazil. He embraced the opportunity, because he had a very particular ambition. Jean-Jacques Rousseau once suggested that an expedition should be sent to the Americas to study human nature in its essential state, uncorrupted by civilization. A devotee of Rousseau’s philosophy, Lévi-Strauss was determined to execute the master’s plan. During his university holidays, Lévi-Strauss made expeditions to study remote Amerindian settlements, but almost all of this work was done at telegraph posts where Indians were in contact with government agencies and traders. Only towards the end of his travels did he make brief contact with an isolated band living in the old style, but naturally enough they spoke no Portuguese. “Alas! They were only too savage,” Lévi-Strauss reported. “They were as close to me as a reflection in a mirror; I could touch them, but I could not understand them.” This adventure might have been no more than an interlude. But shortly after Lévi-Strauss returned to France, the German army invaded the country and he became an exile in New York. At a loose end, he wrote up his Brazilian field notes, became an informal member of the anthropology circle at Columbia University and spent long days combing the anthropology shelves in the New York Public Library. “What I know of anthropology I learned during those years,” he later remarked. Although his American colleagues were steeped in regional ethnography, they were notoriously suspicious of theoretical abstractions. Lévi-Strauss, however, was determined to use observations of huntergatherers as the basis for a theory of human nature, like a more empirical Rousseau. Such a soaring ambition required a new theoretical framework. Inspiration came from a fellow exile in New York, the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson. Following the path-breaking contributions of Ferdinand de Saussure, linguistics was in the throes of a theoretical revolution. Lévi-Strauss concluded that it would show the way to a new, generalizing, structural anthropology. Jakobson was particularly interested in phonemics, the branch of linguistics that deals with the communication of meaning through sounds. He claimed to have split the atom of linguistics, the phoneme. The phoneme had been viewed as the smallest significant unit of sound in speech, but according to Jakobson it was itself a bundle of features made up of pairs of contrasting elements. So, for instance, English speakers invest the contrasting b and p sounds with meaning (the words ‘bill’ and ‘pill’ are obviously different to our ears), whereas in other languages the distinction may be unmarked and unheard. Lévi-Strauss argued that systems of classification are constructed on a similar pattern of binary oppositions. Returning to Paris in 1949, Lévi-Strauss found employment at the Museum of Man and then the École Pratique des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne. His massive doctoral thesis, published that year, argued that the imposition of a taboo on incest marked the break between a natural and a cultural order, obliging men to exchange sisters with other men, and so creating family and kinship networks. In the simplest (and implicitly oldest) systems, these networks are structured by a binary classification of relatives into two classes: unmarriageable kin and marriageable affines. In 1959, Lévi-Strauss was appointed to a chair at the College of France in Paris. He now began to publish his most influential studies, which dealt with systems of thought. The Savage Mind (1962) argued that Native Americans, and other hunter-gatherers from Australia to Africa, operate a “logic of the concrete” — they order images taken from the world around them in a series of binary oppositions. This home-made natural science provides metaphors for social relationships. In many languages, for example, the Sun and the Moon are associated with male and female characteristics. Paired species of birds and animals are contrasted in terms of colouring, feeding habits, or some other defining features, and are then associated with other paired objects (Australian Aboriginals, for instance, associate the Sun with the crow and the eaglehawk with the Moon). Such categorizations symbolize the social contrasts between men and women, or between pairs of human clans or occupations. In his masterpiece — a collection of four volumes on American mythology, beginning with the The Raw and the Cooked in 1964 and culminating with The Naked Man in 1971 — Lévi-Strauss demonstrated how systems of classification are put to work in myths that are at once epics, moral treatises and accounts of the world. He proposed that the initial premises of myths (say, that women are lunar, men solar) are played with in subsequent versions to yield new premises. These transformations follow implicit rules that allow only a sort of logical progression, in the form of the inversion of the initial terms, or a series of substitutions by which one binary pair replaces another. As he put it: “The kind of logic in mythical thought is as rigorous as that of modern science, and ... the difference lies, not in the quality of the intellectual process, but in the nature of things to which it is applied.” Lévi-Strauss notoriously claimed that he had a neolithic intelligence, that his thought was intuitively sympathetic to that of huntergatherers. His grand theory rested on a binary opposition between nature and culture (taken, of course, from Rousseau), and so between the small-scale, technically simple societies that existed during the first 150,000 years of human history and modern civilization, which rendered the simpler societies obsolete. He believed that humanity in its natural condition was adapted to the environment, whereas civilized societies endanger the environment and obliterate cultural variation. This deeply pessimistic view was conditioned by the Amazonian idyll of his youth, and the European catastrophe of the Second World War that followed. But he also believed that people everywhere ultimately thought in the same way, although about different things, and that the clash of cultures is necessary for human adaptation. Adam Kuper Adam Kuper is visiting professor at the Department of Anthropology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520, USA. e-mail: adam.kuper@googlemail.com J. RO BI N E/ A FP /G ET TY IM A G ES

Obituary: Claude L|[eacute]|vi-Strauss (1908|[ndash]|2009)

Claude Lévi-Strauss had only the slightest experience of ethnographic fieldwork, and had no formal training in anthropology. Nevertheless, his ideas transformed the discipline, and profoundly influenced the other human sciences. He died on 31 October. The son of an artist father, and the grandson of a rabbi in Strasbourg, France, Lévi-Strauss was educated in law and philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1935, he joined a French contingent at the new University of São Paulo in Brazil. He embraced the opportunity, because he had a very particular ambition. Jean-Jacques Rousseau once suggested that an expedition should be sent to the Americas to study human nature in its essential state, uncorrupted by civilization. A devotee of Rousseau’s philosophy, Lévi-Strauss was determined to execute the master’s plan. During his university holidays, Lévi-Strauss made expeditions to study remote Amerindian settlements, but almost all of this work was done at telegraph posts where Indians were in contact with government agencies and traders. Only towards the end of his travels did he make brief contact with an isolated band living in the old style, but naturally enough they spoke no Portuguese. “Alas! They were only too savage,” Lévi-Strauss reported. “They were as close to me as a reflection in a mirror; I could touch them, but I could not understand them.” This adventure might have been no more than an interlude. But shortly after Lévi-Strauss returned to France, the German army invaded the country and he became an exile in New York. At a loose end, he wrote up his Brazilian field notes, became an informal member of the anthropology circle at Columbia University and spent long days combing the anthropology shelves in the New York Public Library. “What I know of anthropology I learned during those years,” he later remarked. Although his American colleagues were steeped in regional ethnography, they were notoriously suspicious of theoretical abstractions. Lévi-Strauss, however, was determined to use observations of huntergatherers as the basis for a theory of human nature, like a more empirical Rousseau. Such a soaring ambition required a new theoretical framework. Inspiration came from a fellow exile in New York, the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson. Following the path-breaking contributions of Ferdinand de Saussure, linguistics was in the throes of a theoretical revolution. Lévi-Strauss concluded that it would show the way to a new, generalizing, structural anthropology. Jakobson was particularly interested in phonemics, the branch of linguistics that deals with the communication of meaning through sounds. He claimed to have split the atom of linguistics, the phoneme. The phoneme had been viewed as the smallest significant unit of sound in speech, but according to Jakobson it was itself a bundle of features made up of pairs of contrasting elements. So, for instance, English speakers invest the contrasting b and p sounds with meaning (the words ‘bill’ and ‘pill’ are obviously different to our ears), whereas in other languages the distinction may be unmarked and unheard. Lévi-Strauss argued that systems of classification are constructed on a similar pattern of binary oppositions. Returning to Paris in 1949, Lévi-Strauss found employment at the Museum of Man and then the École Pratique des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne. His massive doctoral thesis, published that year, argued that the imposition of a taboo on incest marked the break between a natural and a cultural order, obliging men to exchange sisters with other men, and so creating family and kinship networks. In the simplest (and implicitly oldest) systems, these networks are structured by a binary classification of relatives into two classes: unmarriageable kin and marriageable affines. In 1959, Lévi-Strauss was appointed to a chair at the College of France in Paris. He now began to publish his most influential studies, which dealt with systems of thought. The Savage Mind (1962) argued that Native Americans, and other hunter-gatherers from Australia to Africa, operate a “logic of the concrete” — they order images taken from the world around them in a series of binary oppositions. This home-made natural science provides metaphors for social relationships. In many languages, for example, the Sun and the Moon are associated with male and female characteristics. Paired species of birds and animals are contrasted in terms of colouring, feeding habits, or some other defining features, and are then associated with other paired objects (Australian Aboriginals, for instance, associate the Sun with the crow and the eaglehawk with the Moon). Such categorizations symbolize the social contrasts between men and women, or between pairs of human clans or occupations. In his masterpiece — a collection of four volumes on American mythology, beginning with the The Raw and the Cooked in 1964 and culminating with The Naked Man in 1971 — Lévi-Strauss demonstrated how systems of classification are put to work in myths that are at once epics, moral treatises and accounts of the world. He proposed that the initial premises of myths (say, that women are lunar, men solar) are played with in subsequent versions to yield new premises. These transformations follow implicit rules that allow only a sort of logical progression, in the form of the inversion of the initial terms, or a series of substitutions by which one binary pair replaces another. As he put it: “The kind of logic in mythical thought is as rigorous as that of modern science, and ... the difference lies, not in the quality of the intellectual process, but in the nature of things to which it is applied.” Lévi-Strauss notoriously claimed that he had a neolithic intelligence, that his thought was intuitively sympathetic to that of huntergatherers. His grand theory rested on a binary opposition between nature and culture (taken, of course, from Rousseau), and so between the small-scale, technically simple societies that existed during the first 150,000 years of human history and modern civilization, which rendered the simpler societies obsolete. He believed that humanity in its natural condition was adapted to the environment, whereas civilized societies endanger the environment and obliterate cultural variation. This deeply pessimistic view was conditioned by the Amazonian idyll of his youth, and the European catastrophe of the Second World War that followed. But he also believed that people everywhere ultimately thought in the same way, although about different things, and that the clash of cultures is necessary for human adaptation. Adam Kuper Adam Kuper is visiting professor at the Department of Anthropology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520, USA. e-mail: adam.kuper@googlemail.com J. RO BI N E/ A FP /G ET TY IM A G ES

The Bambi syndrome

A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History.By Matt Cartmill. Harvard University Press: 1993. Pp. 331.

Coming of age in anthropology

29.95, £23.95.