Antropology and The Problems of Modern Civilization

Anthropology Confronts the Problems
of the Modern World m

C L AU D E L É V I - S T R AU S S
Foreword by Maurice Olender Translated by Jane Marie Todd
Anthropology Confronts the
ProbÂ�lems of the Modern World
Claude Lévi-Â�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, EngÂ�land

2013
First published as Anthropologie face aux problèmes du monde moderne,
copyright © 2011 Éditions du Seuil
Collection La Librairie du XXIe siècle,
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-Â�in-Â�Publication Data
Lévi-Â�Strauss, Claude
[L’Anthropologie face aux problèmes du monde moderne. EngÂ�lish]
Anthropology confronts the probÂ�lems of the
modern world / Claude Lévi-Â�Strauss with a
foreword by Maurice Olender ; translated by Jane Marie Todd.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-Â�0-Â�674-Â�07290-Â�9 (alk. paper)
1. Anthropology. 2. Japan—Civilization. I. Title.
GN29.L4813 2013
301—dc23â•…â•… 2012031550
My thanks to Monique Lévi-Â�Strauss,
who followed evÂ�ery stage in the publication
of this volume with equal parts attention
and generosity
M.Â€O.
C ONTENTS
Foreword by Maurice Olender ix
1. The End of the West’s

Cultural Supremacy 1
2. Three Great Contemporary ProbÂ�lems:

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 Lévi-Â�Strauss wrote the three chap-
ters 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 ProbÂ�lems of the Modern
World.
Lévi-Â�Strauss draws freely from his earlier writings
to identify the major themes of his work, and to cri-
tique and update them. He rereads some of the texts
that made him famous, reconsidering the main so-
cial issues that never ceased to trouble him, especially
the relationships between race, hisÂ�tory, and culture.
He also meditates on the possible future of new
forms of humanism in a world undergoing transfor-
mation.
Those readers familiar with Lévi-Â�Strauss will redis-
ix
FORE W ORD
cover in this volume the questions underpinning his

work as a whole, and the younÂ�ger 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,”
Lévi-Â�Strauss inquires into “the end of the West’s cul-
tural supremacy” and the connections between cul-
tural relativism and moral judgment. When he exam-
ines the probÂ�lems of what is now a global society, he
also considers economic practices, questions associ-
ated with medically assisted reproduction, and the
links between sciÂ�enÂ�tific and mythic thought.
FiÂ�nally, Lévi-Â�Strauss reveals in these three lectures
his anxieties about the crucial probÂ�lems of a world
on the brink of the twenty-Â�first century: the affinities
between the various “ideological explosions” and the
development of different forms of fundamentalism.
Lévi-Â�Strauss’s world-Â�renowned work constitutes a
labÂ�oÂ�raÂ�tory of thought opening onto the future. This
book, without question the best introduction to Lévi-
Â�Strauss, will provide students and the younÂ�ger gen-
erations with an astute unÂ�derÂ�standÂ�ing of his world.
x
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 anthropology—a discipline to which I have de-
voted my life—views the fundamental probÂ�lems now
facing humanity.
I shall begin by telling you how anthropology formu-
lates these probÂ�lems from its unique perspective. I shall
then try to deÂ�fine what anthropology is and how it can
bring a fresh eye to the probÂ�lems of the contempo-
rary world, not claiming to solve them on its own but
offering the hope of a better unÂ�derÂ�standÂ�ing of them.
LEARNING FROM OTHERS
For about the last two centuries, Western civilization

has deÂ�fined itself as the civilization of progÂ�ress. Other
1
THE END OF THE W EST ’ S C ULTURAL SUPRE M A C Y
civilizations, having embraced the same ideal, be-

lieved they ought to take the West as their model. All
of them shared the conviction that science and tech-
nology would keep moving forward, would provide
human beings with greater power and more happi-
ness; that the poÂ�litÂ�iÂ�cal institutions and forms of so-
cial orÂ�gaÂ�niÂ�zaÂ�tion that appeared in France and the
United States in the late eighÂ�teenth century, and the
philosophy that inspired them, would give all mem-
bers of evÂ�ery society more freedom in the conduct of
their personal lives and more responsibility in the
management of public affairs; and that moral judg-
ment, aesthetic sensibility, in a word, the love of
truth, goodness, and beauty, would spread irresist-
ibly and reach evÂ�ery 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. Totalitar-
ian ideologies have spread and, in several regions of
the world, continue to spread. Human beings exter-
minated one another by the tens of millions; they
engaged in horrifying genocides. Even after peace was
reestablished, they no Â�longer felt certain that science
and technology offered nothing but beneÂ�fits, or that
the philosophical principles, the poÂ�litÂ�iÂ�cal institu-
tions, and the forms of social life that originated in
2
the eighÂ�teenth century constituted definitive solu-

tions to the great probÂ�lems raised by the human con-
dition.
Science and technology have phenomenally ex-
tended 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
toÂ€be 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 threat-
ened by the growing scarcity or pollution of the most
essential goods: space, air, water, the wealth and di-
versity 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 Â�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 neces-
3
sary to produce more. We therefore have the sense

that we are being drawn into an endless race in pur-
suit of increased productivity. Production requires
consumption, which itself calls for even more pro-
duction. Larger and larger portions of the popula-
tion are, as it were, sucked up by the direct or indirect
needs of industry. They concentrate in vast urban
centers that impose an arÂ�tiÂ�fiÂ�cial and dehumanized
existence. The operation of democratic institutions
and the need for social protection give rise to an inva-
sive buÂ�reauÂ�cracy that tends to latch onto and para-
lyze the social body. There is reason to wonder
whether modern soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties 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 progÂ�ress destined to go on forever is facing its
gravest crisis. Western-Â�style civilization has lost sight
of the model it had set up for itself and is no Â�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 reÂ�flections on
the human condition have been restricted? Ought we
not to integrate social experiments that are more var-
ied, more different from our own than those within
the narrow horizon to which we have long conÂ�fined
4
ourselves? Now that Western-Â�style civilization no

Â�longer has the resources it needs to regenerate itself
on its own and to thrive once again, can it learn someÂ�
thing about humankind in general, and about itself
in particular, from the humble soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, those long
held in contempt, which until relatively recently had
escaped its inÂ�fluÂ�ence? Such are the questions raised
over the last few deÂ�cades 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
noÂ€ answers. What, therefore, is this discipline that
long remained in the shadows, and which people are
now realizing may have someÂ�thing to say about such
probÂ�lems?
UNUSUAL AND ODD FACTS
No matter how far back in time or how distant in

space one may venture in search of examples, hu-
manÂ€life and human activity occur within structures
that display characteristics in common. Always and
evÂ�erywhere, the human being is endowed with articu-
lated 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
Â�
unions. Humans make and use tools, which they em-
ploy in various technologies. Their social lives are
conducted within institutional entities whose con-
tent may change from one group to another but
whose form generally remains constant. By different
methods, certain functions—economic, educational,
poÂ�litÂ�iÂ�cal, religious—are 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 speÂ�cific characteristics that justify its being stud-
ied inÂ�deÂ�penÂ�dently.
In that sense, we can say that anthropology is as
old as humanity itself. In the eras for which we pos-
sess historical evidence, preoccupations of a kind
weÂ€would now call anthropological were on display:
among the memorialists who accompanied Alexan-
der the Great in Asia, in Xenophon, Herodotus, Pau-
sanias, and, from a more philosophical angle, in ArÂ�isÂ�
totle and Lucretius.
In the Arab world of the sixteenth century, Ibn
Battuta, a great traveler, and Ibn KhaldÉn, a histo-
rian 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 recÂ�ord of anthropological curiosity
exists in that country from the seventh century on.
The half-Â�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 com-
mon people. That can be viewed as a first ethno-
graphic investigation, though in reality, unlike that
Korean dignitary, the ethnographer of today does not
often receive from the indigenous host who welÂ�comes
him a ravishing concubine to share his bed! Also in
the Korean chronicles, it is said that a certain monk’s
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 Polo’s long visit to China. In the early Renais-

sance, we begin to discern the very diverse sources
from which anthropological reÂ�flection would hence-
forth spring, for example, the literature to which the
Turkish invasions of Eastern Europe and the Medi-
terranean gave rise. The fantasies of medieval folklore
perpetuated those of antiquity concerning the “Plin-
ian races,” so named because, in the first century c.e.,
Pliny the Elder helpfully deÂ�scribed them in his Natu-
ral HisÂ�tory as savage peoples, monstrous in their anat-
omy and their mores. Such imaginings were not un-
known in Japan and, probably because that country
had intentionally cut itself off from the rest of the
world, they survived there Â�longer in the popular
mind. During my first visit to Japan, I received as a
gift an encyclopedia published in 1789, enÂ�tiÂ�tled ZÇho
KinmÇ 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 pe-
riod, 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 Ger-
many, Switzerland, EngÂ�land, and France. That vast
8
body of travel literature would spur anthropologi-

calÂ€ reÂ�flection, which began in France with Rabelais
and Montaigne and by the eighÂ�teenth 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 exam-
ple, the fictive journey of Æe Bunpa to the land of
Harashirya, behind which can be discerned Brazil,
inhabited by natives “who know nothing of the culti-
vation of cereals, feed on dried roots, have no king,
and consider noble only those most skillful at shoot-
ing 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 anthropo-
logical research, as it is now practiced, in the nine-
teenth century, it was initially motivated by what
could be called an antiquarian curiosity. People no-
ticed that the great classical disciplines—hisÂ�tory, ar-
chaeology, and philology, sciences that had their
rightful place in university curricula—had left behind
all sorts of residue or debris. Rather like ragpickers,
curiosity-Â�seekers undertook to collect these scraps of
knowledge, these fragments of probÂ�lems, these pic-
9
turesque details that the other sciences cast disdain-

fully onto their intellectual rubbish heaps.
At first, anthropology was undoubtedly nothing
but that collection of unusual and odd facts. Gradu-
ally, however, it was discovered that this debris, this
residue, was more imÂ�porÂ�tant 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 conÂ�firÂ�maÂ�tion of their
own beliefs about humanity’s 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 deÂ�scribed
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-Â�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 orÂ�gaÂ�nized in a much more coher-
ent way than the phenomena judged to be the only
imÂ�porÂ�tant ones and on which attention had focused.
Neglected or barely studied facts, such as the way dif-
ferent soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties divide up work between the sexes—in
a given society, is it men or Â�women who devote them-
selves to pottery or weaving, or who work the land?—
made it possible to compare and clasÂ�sify human soÂ�ciÂ�
eÂ�ties 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 husband’s
parents? With the wife’s? Or do they establish a sepa-
rate 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 differ-
ences among peoples. Nevertheless, these differences
can be compared, inasmuch as these aspects can be
observed among almost evÂ�ery people. That explains
anthropologists’ interest in variations that, though
trivial in appearance, make it possible to arrive at
relatively simple clasÂ�siÂ�fiÂ�caÂ�tions, thus introducing into
the diversity of human soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties an order comparable
to that which zoologists and botanists use to clasÂ�sify
natural species.
In that respect, the most effective research has
dealt with the rules of filiation and marriage. The
size of the soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties that anthropologists study may
vary a great deal, from a few dozen members to sev-
eral hundred or several thousand. Compared to our
own, however, these soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties are very small, so that
human relationships within them are personal in na-
12
ture. Nothing shows that better than the tendency of

soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties without writing to conceive of relations be-
tween their members on the model of kinship: evÂ�eryÂ�
one is a brother, sister, cousin, uncle, aunt, or other
kin to evÂ�eryÂ�one 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
soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, simple rules make it possible to assign evÂ�ery
individual, by virtue of his or her birth, to one group
or another, and between these groups relations equiv-
alent to kinship bonds prevail.
And there are no soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, however rudimentary
their technical and economic level, and however dif-
ferent 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 soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties
from one another and of giving each its place within
a typology.
A COMMON DENOMINATOR
What, then, are these soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties 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
deÂ�fined 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 soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties provide the only model for unÂ�derÂ�
standÂ�ing how human beings lived together over a his-
torical period undoubtedly corresponding to 99 per-
cent of the total duration of the collective life of
humanity. Their existence lasted until recent times
(from a geological perspective) and covered three-Â�
quarters of the surface of the inhabited earth.
What these soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties offer, therefore, are not really
lessons about the phases of our distant past. They il-
lustrate rather a general situation, a common de-
nominator of the human condition. Seen from that
standpoint, it is the high civilizations of the West
and East that constitute exceptions.
In fact, the progÂ�ress made in ethnological investi-
gations increasingly convinces us that these soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties,
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 deÂ�fine their con-
tours.
At the extreme, they consist of small groups com-
prising between a few dozen and a few hundred peo-
ple, separated from one another by several days’ jour-
ney on foot, and whose deÂ�moÂ�graphic density is about
0.1 inÂ�habÂ�iÂ�tants per square kiÂ�loÂ�meÂ�ter. 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
Â�deÂ�moÂ�graphic stasis is assured, consciously or unÂ�
consciously, by various procedures: sexual taboos fol-
lowing childbirth, for example, and prolonged breast-
feeding, which delays the resumption of the mother’s
menses. It is striking that, in all the cases observed,
deÂ�moÂ�graphic growth does not impel the group to
reorÂ�gaÂ�nize on new foundations. Upon becoming
more numerous, it splits into two smaller soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties of
the same order of magnitude as the previous one.
These small groups have a spontaneous capacity to
eliminate infectious diseases from their midst. Epide-
miologists 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 supersti-
tions) that are intended to preserve natural resources.
Yet each species in the tropics has only a small num-
ber of individuals per unit of area. That is also the
case for infectious or parasitic species: infections can
therefore be multiple while remaining clinically insigÂ�
nifiÂ�cant. AIDS provides a contemporary example.
That viral disease, localized in a few spots of tropical
Africa, where it probably lived in harmonious bal-
ance with the indigenous populations for millennia,
became a major risk when, by chance, historical
events introduced it into larger soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties.
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 popula-
tions. 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 probÂ�lems.
It is not at all surprising, therefore, that a French
traveler who visited the Indians of Brazil in the six-
teenth century could admire the fact that this people,
“composed of the same elements as we are, .Â€.Â€. are not
afflicted by leprosy, palsy, lethargy, cankerous ill-
nesses, ulcers, or other bodily defects seen on the sur-
face 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, as-
sailed 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, tuberculo-
sis, malaria, inÂ�fluÂ�enza, mumps, yellow fever, cholera,
plague, diphtheria, and many others.
We would be wrong to underestimate these soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�
ties, just because we have known them in a wretched
state. Even impoverished, they are invaluable, inas-
much as the thousands of soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties 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 col-
leagues in the physical and natural sciences, we can-
not manufacture our objects of study, that is, soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�
ties, and set them in operation in a labÂ�oÂ�raÂ�tory. These
experiments, drawn from soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties chosen because
they are the most different from our own, provide us
with the means to study human beings and their col-
lective achievements in an attempt to understand
how the human mind functions in the extremely di-
verse concrete situations in which hisÂ�tory and geÂ�ogÂ�
raÂ�phy have placed it.
Always and evÂ�erywhere, sciÂ�enÂ�tific explanation rests
on what could be called useful simÂ�pliÂ�fiÂ�caÂ�tions. In this
respect, anthropology makes a virtue of necessity. As
I said, a large portion of the soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties it chooses to
study are small in size, and they conceive of them-
selves in terms of stability.
These exotic soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties are remote from the anthro-
pologist 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 anthro-
pologist occupies a place comparable to that falling
to the astronomer in the physical and natural sci-
18
ences. Indeed, astronomy was able to constitute itself

as a science from earliest antiquity only because, in
the absence of any sciÂ�enÂ�tific method (which did not
yet exist), the distance of the heavenly bodies allowed
for a simÂ�pliÂ�fied 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, how-
ever, they are far away in a psychological sense, inas-
much 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 Â�adopt one
foodstuff and proscribe another. We are not con-
scious 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 indi-
viduals and groups, are the very same ones we are
trying to analyze and understand, despite a psycho-
logical distance that replicates, on a different order,
the geographical remoteness.
Even in our own soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, where that physical
19
Â�
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 someÂ�thing 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 people—those your il-
lustrious anthropologist Yanagida Kunio called jÇminâ•‰
—still rests primarily on personal contacts, family
ties, and neighborly relations, whether in villages or
city neighborhoods: in a word, in the small, tradi-
tional environments where the oral tradition per-
sists.
I find it typical of the symmetry in relations ob-
served between Western Europe and Japan that, in
both places, anthropological research got its start
during the same time period: the eighÂ�teenth century.
In Western Europe, it was spurred by the great jour-
neys that provided access to knowledge of the most
diverse cultures; by contrast, in Japan, which was iso-
lated at the time, anthropological research proba-
blyÂ€ had its roots in the Kokugaku school. Yanagida
20
Kunio’s monumental enterprise a century later ap-

pears still to have belonged within the tradition of
that school, at least in the eyes of the Western ob-
server. In Korea, anthropological research also began
in the eighÂ�teenth century, with the work of the Sil-
hak 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 atten-
tion, by fillÂ�ing in the gaps and inadequacies of the
written documents through direct observations, by
attempting to learn how people recollect the past of
their little group—or how they imagine it—and how
they experience the present, we succeed in constitut-
ing 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 an-
thropology lays claim goes further. It elevates objec-
tivity not only above the values proper to the observ-
er’s 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, conÂ�tribÂ�utes 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 probÂ�lems are posed in disci-
plines 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] .Â€ .Â€ . in many respects resemble the
different equivalent manners in which physical expe-
rience can be deÂ�scribed.”*
* Niels Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (New

York: Wiley, 1958), p.Â€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 ac-
knowledges that, to achieve a more thorough knowl-
edge of a certain type of phenomenon, it is indispens-
able that he divide up the whole, just as the jurist, the
economist, the demographer, and the poÂ�litÂ�iÂ�cal scien-
tist do. But what the anthropologist seeks is the com-
mon form, the invariant properties that reveal them-
selves behind the most diverse kinds of social life.
To illustrate with an example certain consider-
ations that may appear overly abstract, let us see how
an anthropologist apprehends a few aspects of Japa-
nese culture.
Indeed, it does not take an anthropologist to no-
tice that, compared to his Western colleagues, a Japa-
nese 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 recÂ�orded that fact, along with
several others, under the rubric “Topsy-Â�turvidom,” as
an oddity to which he attached no particular sigÂ�nifiÂ�
23
cance. In short, he went no further than Herodotus,

who remarked, more than twenty-Â�four centuries ago,
that, when compared to his Greek compaÂ�triÂ�ots, the
ancient Egyptians did evÂ�eryÂ�thing 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 newsÂ�paper or a pack of cigarettes) will readily say
someÂ�thing like, “Itte mairimásu,” to which one re-
plies, “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 inten-
tion 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. FiÂ�nally, at a
more prosaic level, the Japanese cook, it appears, does
not say, as one would in Europe, “drop into the fry-
ing oil” but rather “lift out” or “pull out” (ageru) of
the frying oil.
The anthropologist will refuse to consider these
minor facts inÂ�deÂ�penÂ�dent variables or isolated pecu-
liarities. 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 ac-

tion of bringing back toward oneself, or of bringing
oneself back inside. Instead of positing the “I” from
the start as an autonomous, already constituted en-
tity, 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 to-
ward which one moves with no certainty of reaching
it. It is therefore not at all astonishing that, as I have
been told, Descartes’s famous proposition: “I think,
therefore I am,” is strictly untranslatable into Japa-
nese! In realms as varied as spoken language, artisa-
nal techniques, culinary preparation, and the hisÂ�tory
of ideas (I could add domestic architecture, think-
ingÂ€of the many meanings you atÂ�tribÂ�ute to the word
uchi),* a difference, or more exactly, a system of in-
variant 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 centrifu-
gal 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 civili-
zations.
For the anthropologist, fiÂ�nally, the search for total
objectivity can be situated only at a level where phe-
nomena retain meaning for an individual conscious-
ness. That is an essential difference between the type
of objectivity to which anthropology aspires and that
with which the other social sciences are satÂ�isÂ�fied. 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 mean-
ing in the lived experience of the subject. One does
not run into objects such as value, profitÂ�abilÂ�ity, mar-
ginal productivity, or maximum population in one’s
daily life. These are abstract notions, located outside
the realm of concrete personal relationships between
individuals, which are the mark of the soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties in
which anthropologists take an interest.
In modern soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, relations with the other
areÂ€ only occasionally and in a fragmented manner
founded on that all-Â�encompassing experience, that
concrete apprehension of subjects by one another.
They result for the most part from indirect recon-
structions on the basis of written documents. We are
linked to our past, not by an oral tradition that pre-
26
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 intermediaries—written documents or adminisÂ�
trative mechanisms—which 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 indi-
rect forms of communication (books, photographs,
newsÂ�papers, radio, television) have returned to the
foreground of communication theorists’ preoccupa-
tions. 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 Ma-
chine (1948): “Small, closely knit communities have a
very considerable meaÂ�sure 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 inÂ�fluÂ�
ence, contain far less communally available informa-
tion than the smaller communities, to say nothing of
the human elements of which all communities are
built up.”*
Modern soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties are not completely inauthentic,
of course. Anthropology, having turned to the study
of these modern soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, 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
everyÂ�one knows almost evÂ�eryÂ�one else there. An an-
thropologist feels at ease in a village of five hundred
residents, whereas he finds a large or even medium-Â�
sized city off-Â�putÂ�ting. Why? Because fifty thousand
peopleÂ€ do not constitute a society in the same way
that five hundred do. In the first case, communica-
tion isÂ€not established primarily between persons or
on the model of interpersonal communications. The
* Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communica-

tion in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1961), pp.Â€160, 162.
28
Â�
social reality of the “emitters” and of the “receiv-
ers”Â€(to speak the language of communication theo-
rists) disappears behind the comÂ�plexÂ�ity of “codes”
and “relays.”
The future will no doubt judge that the most imÂ�
porÂ�tant 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 soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties; and forms of more recent appear-
ance, 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 cus-
toms and beliefs of “savage” peoples hardly date back
further than 1850, that is, to the era when Darwin
was laying the foundations for biological evolution-
29
ism, which corresponded, in the minds of his con-

temporaries, to the belief in social and cultural evolu-
tion. It was even later, in the first quarter of the
twentieth century, that so-Â�called art nègre or primitive
objects were acknowledged as having an aesthetic
value.
It would be wrong to conclude, however, that an-
thropology is a brand-Â�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 hisÂ�tory of ideas, anthropology appears on the
contrary as the most general expression and the cul-
minating 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 Europe-
ans rediscovered Greco-Â�Roman antiquity, and when
the JeÂ�suÂ�its made Latin the foundation for training in
their schools and universities, was that not already
anÂ€anthropological 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 one’s own cul-
ture, it is necessary to regard it from the point of view
of another. This can be likened to the Noh actor
30
asÂ€ deÂ�scribed 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 reÂ�
flection—which consists of looking a long distance
off toward cultures very different from the observer’s,
but also, for the observer, of looking at his own cul-
ture from afar, as if he himself belonged to a different
culture—the 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 trans-
posed into French the expression riken no ken, which
Zeami uses to designate the actor’s 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 cus-
toms 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 impas-
31
sioned dialogue with China. He contrasted the two

cultures, and, in isolating certain traits of Chinese
culture that he considered typical—“pompous ver-
bosity,” as he says, a penchant in Taoism for decisive
and arbitrary assertions—he managed, by way of con-
trast, to deÂ�fine the essence of Japanese culture: sobri-
ety, 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 sugges-
tively popularized that way of seeing China, as a
means to assert the speÂ�cificity of Japanese culture, in
their prints on Chinese subjects—illustrations 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 comÂ�pliÂ�cated details of dress, all very re-
mote from the traditions of the ukiyo-Â�e. They reÂ�flect
an interpretation of ancient China, tendentious to be
sure, but one that aspires to be ethnographic.
In Motoori’s time, Japan had no knowledge, direct
or indirect, of either China or Korea. In Europe as
well, the difference between classical culture and an-
thropological culture is determined by the dimen-
sions of the known world during the eras in ques-
tion.
32
At the start of the Renaissance, the human uni-

verse was circumscribed by the limits of the Mediter-
ranean BaÂ�sin. People had only an inkling that someÂ�
thing more existed. But they had already understood
that no portion of humanity could aspire to under-
stand itself except with reference to others.
In the eighÂ�teenth and nineteenth centuries, hu-
manism expanded in concert with geographical ex-
ploration. China, India, and Japan were gradually
added to the overall picture. At present, anthropol-
ogy, 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 Â�longer have any-
thing 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 probÂ�lem. The
extension of the first two kinds of humanism, one
limited to the Mediterranean world and one encom-
passing 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
difÂ�fiÂ�culty did not arise for the Middle and Far East,
the method Â�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 re-
gard to their most learned and reÂ�fined creations.
The field of anthropology encompasses civiliza-
tions of another type, and these raise different probÂ�
lems. Because they are without writing, such civiliza-
tions 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 in-
vestigation.
The means available to anthropology are at once
more external and more internal (we could also say,
both cruder and more reÂ�fined) than those of its pre-
decessors, philology and hisÂ�tory. To penetrate soÂ�ciÂ�
eties that are not easily accessible, the anthropolo-
gistÂ€must place himself very much on the outside, as
physical anthropology, prehisÂ�tory, and technology
do. But, by virtue of the ethnologist’s idenÂ�tiÂ�fiÂ�caÂ�tion
with the group, whose existence he shares, and by the
importance he will attach—for lack of other means of
information—to the slightest nuances of the indige-
nous people’s mental life, he also places himself very
much on the inside.
Anthropology, always falling short of or overshoot-
ing traditional humanism, ventures outside it in evÂ�
34
ery direction. Its field encompasses the totality of the

inhabited earth, while its method combines proce-
dures that originated in evÂ�ery discipline of the hu-
man and social sciences.
These three forms of humanism, having appeared
in succession, have now been integrated and have ad-
vanced the knowledge of humankind in three direc-
tions. ProgÂ�ress has come about in surface area, of
course, but that is the most “superficial” aspect, in
both the literal and the figural sense. This progÂ�ress
also lies in the richness of the means of investigation,
since it gradually beÂ�comes clear that, though anthro-
pology was obliged to forge new Â�modes of knowl-
edgeÂ€as a function of the particular characteristics of
the “residual” soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties it inherited, these Â�modes of
knowledge can be fruitfully applied to the study of
all soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, 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-Â�century “exotic” humanism became
linked to the industrial and commercial interests
that supported it and to which it was beholden for
itsÂ€existence. Anthropology, following on the aristo-
cratic humanism of the Renaissance and the bour-
geois 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
soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, long held in contempt, anthropology pro-
claims that nothing human can be alien to human-
kind. 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 ba-
sis of privileged civilizations. And in putÂ�ting into op-
eration methods and techniques borrowed from all
the sciences to serve in the unÂ�derÂ�standÂ�ing of human-
kind, 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 so-
lutions to the great probÂ�lems now confronting hu-
manity. For three centuries, humanist thought has
nourished and inspired Westerners’ reÂ�flections and
actions. We have come to see that it has been power-
less 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 plun-
dering 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 deÂ�fine and
focus on a few large questions to which, I believe, an-
thropology can help us respond. To conclude today, I
should like to indicate one contribution of anthro-
pology that, though Â�modest, at least has the advan-
tage of being defiÂ�nite. Indeed, one of the beneÂ�fits of
anthropology—perhaps, in the end, its essential beneÂ�
fit—is to inspire in us, the members of rich and pow-
erful 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 possi-
ble, that other ways of life, other systems of values
have allowed and continue to allow human commu-
nities 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 us—somewhat like Jean-Â�Jacques
Rousseau, who preferred to believe that gorillas, re-
cently deÂ�scribed by the travelers of his time, were
men, rather than run the risk of denying the human-
ity of beings who, perhaps, revealed an as-Â�yet un-
known aspect of human nature.
37
The soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties that anthropologists study deliver

lessons that deserve to be heeded, especially since
these soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties were able to establish a balance be-
tween humankind and the natural environment, us-
ing all sorts of rules that, as I said, we would be wrong
to see as mere superstitions. We, conversely, no Â�longer
know how to secure that balance. Let me take a mo-
ment to consider this point.
AN OPTIMAL DIVERSITY
In nineteenth-Â�century France, the philosopher Au-

guste Comte formulated a law of human evolution
known as the three stages, according to which human-
ity has passed through two successive phases, reli-
gious and metaÂ�physÂ�iÂ�cal, and is on the verge of enter-
ing a third state, positive and sciÂ�enÂ�tific.
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 knowl-
edge 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 Aus-
tralia, South America, Melanesia, and Africa, two to
four hours of work a day by their active members are
amply sufÂ�fiÂ�cient to assure the subsistence of all fami-
lies, including children and the elderly, those who do
not yet parÂ�ticÂ�iÂ�pate in food production and those who
no Â�longer do so. What a contrast to the amount of
time our contemporaries spend at the factory or the
ofÂ�fice!
It would therefore be wrong to believe that these
peoples are slaves to the rigors of the environment.
On the contrary, they enjoy vis-Â�à-Â�vis the environment
a much greater inÂ�deÂ�penÂ�dence 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,
asÂ€shock 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
WeÂ€would then observe that, with agriculture, stock

breeding, then industrialization, it had to increas-
ingly “engage” the real (in the sense that one engages
the clutch of a vehicle). And from the nineteenth cen-
tury to the present, that engagement came about in-
directly, 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 re-
sult of its huge population, its increasingly limited
quantities of the free space, pure air, and unpolluted
water required to satisfy its biological and psycho-
logical needs.
In that sense, we may wonder whether the ideo-
logical explosions that have been occurring for nearly
a century and which continue to occur—those of
communism, Marxism, totalitarianism, which have
not lost their force in the Third World, and more re-
cently, of Islamic fundamentalism—do 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 senses—which no Â�longer have any gen-
eral meaning for us, apart from the limited and rudi-
mentary meaning they provide us about the state of
40
our organism—and an abstract mode of thought in

which all our efforts to know and understand the
universe are concentrated. There is nothing that dis-
tances us more than that from the peoples that an-
thropologists study, for whom evÂ�ery color, evÂ�ery tex-
ture, ever odor, evÂ�ery flavor has a meaning.
Is this divorce irrevocable? Our world may be mov-
ing toward a deÂ�moÂ�graphic cataclysm or an atomic
war that will exterminate three-Â�quarters of humanity.
In that case, the remaining quarter will rediscover
conditions of existence not so different from those of
the vanishing soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties of which I have spoken.
Even setting aside such terrifying hypotheses, we
may wonder whether soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties 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 situ-
ated along lines other than those where the similari-
ties are developing. Perhaps there is an optimal diver-
sity that, evÂ�erywhere and always, imposes itself on
humanity, so that it may remain viable. That opti-
mum would vary by the number of soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, their
size, their geographical distance from one another,
and the means of communication at their disposal.
In fact, that probÂ�lem of diversity does not arise only
for cultures considered in their relationships with
41
one another. It arises within evÂ�ery society, which in-

cludes groups or subgroups that are not homoge-
nous: 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 diÂ�verÂ�siÂ�fiÂ�caÂ�tion tends to
increase when a society beÂ�comes vaster and more ho-
mogenous in other respects.
Human beings undoubtedly developed different
cultures because of geographical distance, the partic-
ular characteristics of the environment in which they
found themselves, and their ignorance about other
types of soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties. But, alongside the differences at-
tributable to isolation, there are equally imÂ�porÂ�tant
ones attributable to proximity: a desire to set oneself
apart, to distinguish oneself, to be oneself. Many cus-
toms came into being not from some internal neces-
sity 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 evÂ�ery

society could consult depending on its mood, evÂ�ery
time it perceived an imperfection or a gap within it-
self. The formulas proper to each society cannot sim-
ply 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 im-
pose them on other soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, 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 gov-
ernments. I can offer you no better example than the
testimony of an American anthropologist who was
public affairs ofÂ�fiÂ�cer for General MacArthur dur-
ingÂ€the occupation of Japan. I read an interview with
him in which he recounts how the publication of
Ruth Benedict’s 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
inÂ€ very different fields. But she was an anthropolo-

gist, 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 conse-
quences might have been even more tragic than those
of the military defeat.
As a first lesson, anthropology teaches us that evÂ�
ery custom, evÂ�ery belief, however shocking or irraÂ�
tional it may appear to us when we compare it to
ourÂ€own, 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 sufÂ�fiÂ�cient to justify the increasingly imÂ�porÂ�
tant place that anthropology occupies among the
human and social sciences.
44
2
THREE G REAT
C ONTE M PORARY PROBÂ�LE M S
Sexuality, Economic Development, and Mythic Thought
In m y fir st lectur e, I said I would try to deÂ�fine

and focus on a few probÂ�lems that arise for modern
humankind, and for which the study of soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties
without writing can conÂ�tribÂ�ute part of the solution.
To do so, I shall have to consider these soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties from
three angles: their familial and social orÂ�gaÂ�niÂ�zaÂ�tion,
their economic life, and their religious thought.
On considering from a very general standpoint the
characteristics common to the soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties that anthro-
pologists study, we are led to observe that these soÂ�ciÂ�
eÂ�ties rely on kinship much more systematically than
is the case in our own soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties.
In the first place, they use kinship and marriage
relations to determine whether a person belongs to
the group. Many of these soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties deny foreign peo-
ples their humanity. And even as humanity ends at
45
THREE G REAT C ONTE M PORARY PROBLE M S
the group’s boundaries, inside that group it is rein-

forced 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 soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties hold kinship
and the notions connected to it to be prior and exter-
nal to biological relationships, filiation by blood, to
which we ourselves tend to reduce them. Biological
ties provide the model on which kinship relations
areÂ€conceived, but these relations also provide a logi-
cal clasÂ�siÂ�fiÂ�caÂ�tion system, a mental framework. That
framework, once conceived, makes it possible to sort
individuals into preestablished categories, assign-
ingÂ€ to each his or her place within the family and
Â�society.
And fiÂ�nally, these relations and notions pervade
the entire field of life and social activities. Real, pos-
tulated, or inferred, they entail rights and duties that
are well deÂ�fined and different for each type of related
individual. More generally, we can say that, in these
soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, kinship and marriage constitute a common
language capable of expressing evÂ�ery social relation-
ship: not only familial but also economic, poÂ�litÂ�iÂ�cal,
religious, and so forth.
46
SPERM DONORS, SURROGATE MOTHERS,

AND SOCIAL FILIATION
The first imperative of a human society is to repro-

duce itself, in other words, to maintain itself over
time. EvÂ�ery society therefore possesses a rule of filia-
tion deÂ�finÂ�ing how each new member belongs to the
group; a kinship system determining the way that
relations will be clasÂ�siÂ�fied, as kin by blood or by mar-
riage; and fiÂ�nally, rules that deÂ�fine the modalities of
matrimonial alliance by stipulating whom a person
can and cannot marry. EvÂ�ery society must also pos-
sess mechanisms to remedy sterility.
It is the probÂ�lem of remedying sterility that has
become a pressing issue in Western soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, ever
since the invention of arÂ�tiÂ�fiÂ�cial 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, commis-
sions have been ofÂ�fiÂ�cially constituted to debate it, and
parliamentary assemblies, the press, and public opin-
ion largely echo these debates.
What exactly is at issue? It is now possible—or, for
certain procedures, it will be possible in the near fu-
ture—for a couple, one or both of whose members are
47
infertile, to have children through the use of various

methods: arÂ�tiÂ�fiÂ�cial 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 pro-
cedures 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 fa-
thers, when the sperm donor is not the father and
when three Â�women parÂ�ticÂ�iÂ�pate: the one donating an
egg, the one providing her uterus, and the one who
will be the child’s legal mother.
That is not all, since we are also faced with situa-
tions 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, arÂ�tiÂ�fiÂ�cially fertilized by an anonymous donor,
and immediately implanting it in the other woman’s
uterus. There is also no reason, it seems, why the fro-
zen sperm of a great-Â�grandfather could not be used a
century later to fertilize a great-Â�granddaughter. The
child would then be his mother’s great-Â�uncle and his
own great-Â�grandfather’s brother.
48
The probÂ�lems 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 EngÂ�lish law, social pa-
ternity 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 Na-
poleonic Code, true to the old adage Pater is est quem
nuptiae demonstrant, stipulates that the mother’s hus-
band is the child’s legal father. But French law is it-
self contradictory, since a 1972 law allows paternity
suits to be pursued. We therefore no Â�longer know
whether the social or the biological relationship takes
precedence.
The fact is, in contemporary soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, 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 probÂ�lems raised
byÂ€ assisted reproduction, where, precisely, the legal
father is no Â�longer the child’s 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 em-
ployed her serÂ�vices rejects it? Or conversely, if a
woman inseminated by another’s husband changes
her mind and decides to keep the child as her own?
FiÂ�nally, can any of these practices, once they be-
come possible, be freely employed, or must the law
authorize some and prohibit others? In EngÂ�land, the
Warnock Commission (named after its chair) has rec-
ommended prohibiting surrogacy, based on distinc-
tions among genetic maternity, physiological mater-
nity, 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 ap-
proves of medical assistance when it allows a married
couple to solve a fertility probÂ�lem, the French are un-
decided 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 hoÂ�moÂ�sexÂ�ual couple wish-
ing to have a child.
From a psychological and moral point of view, it
50
seems that the essential question is one of transpar-

ency. Must sperm donors, egg donors, and surrogates
be anonymous, or can the social parents, and possi-
bly the child herself, know the identity of those in-
volved? Sweden has opted against anonymity and
EngÂ�land is tending in the same direction, whereas in
France, public opinion and the law are taking the op-
posite tack. But even countries that allow transpar-
ency seem to agree on the need to separate reproÂ�
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 al-
lowable only if it takes place in a labÂ�oÂ�raÂ�tory and
through the intervention of a doctor, an arÂ�tiÂ�fiÂ�cial
method that excludes any personal contact, any shar-
ing 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 soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, where
that type of serÂ�vice is rendered “close to home”—al-
beit discreetly—more often than one would think. By
way of example, let me cite an unfinÂ�ished novel by
Balzac that he began in 1843, a time when social prej-
udices were much stronÂ�ger than they are in present-Â�
day France. SigÂ�nifiÂ�cantly 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
woman’s husband. The daughter resulting from that
Â�union is surrounded by equal affection from both
couples, who live in the same building, and evÂ�eryÂ�one
around them knows the situation.
It is therefore the new reproductive technologies,
made possible by the progÂ�ress 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 findÂ�ing ways to respond to new situa-
tions. How are we to deÂ�fine the relationship between
biological kinship and social filiation, which have
now become separated? What will the moral and so-
cial consequences of the dissociation between repro-
duction and sexuality be? Must we recognize the in-
dividual’s right to reproduce “alone,” so to speak?
Does a child have the right to gain access to essential
information concerning his sperm donor’s 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 Â�WOMEN

AND HOÂ�MOÂ�SEXÂ�UAL COUPLES
On all these questions, anthropologists have a great

deal to say, because these probÂ�lems have arisen in the
soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties they study, and these soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties offer solu-
tions. 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 Françoise Héritier-Â�Augé, my col-
league and my successor at the Collège de France. In
that society, evÂ�ery girl is married off very early; but
before going to live with her husband, she must have
a lover of her choice, ofÂ�fiÂ�cially acknowledged as such,
for a period of at least three years. She brings her
husband the first child produced by her lover’s good
ofÂ�fices, and it will be considered the firstborn of the
legitimate Â�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
nextÂ€child. A married man whose wife is infertile can
therefore, in exchange for payment, reach an unÂ�derÂ�
standÂ�ing with a fertile woman, who will designate
him as the father. In that case, the infertile woman’s
legal husband is the biological father, and the other
woman rents her womb to a man or a childless cou-
ple. The burning question in France, as to whether
the surrogate mother must provide her serÂ�vices free
of cost or whether she may receive remuneration,
therefore does not arise.
Among the Tupi-Â�Kawahib Indians of Brazil, whom
I visited in 1938, a man may marry, simultaneously
orÂ€in succession, several sisters or a mother and her
daughter from a previous Â�union. These Â�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 hus-
band’s wives. The reverse situation prevails in Tibet,
where several husbands share a single wife. All the
children are atÂ�tribÂ�uted to the eldest, whom they call
“father”; the other men they call “uncles.” In such
54
cases, individual paternity and maternity are un-

known 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 pur-
chase a wife, who will provide her with children
thanks to the remunerated serÂ�vices of a man, often
aÂ€ stranger. Among the Yoruba of Nigeria as well,
richÂ€Â�women 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 Â�women,
whom—literally speaking—we would call hoÂ�moÂ�sexÂ�
ual, practice assisted reproduction in order to have
children; one of the Â�women will be their legal father,
the other their biological mother.
SoÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties without writing also have the equivalent
of postmortem insemination, which is prohibited by
the French courts. In EngÂ�land, meanwhile, the War-
nock Commission has proposed that a law should
exclude from the father’s succession and inheritance
any child who was not yet a fetus in its mother’s
55
uterus at the time of the father’s 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 younÂ�
ger brother to father a child in the name of his dead
sibling. Among the Sudanese Nuer, if a man died
aÂ€ bachelor or without descendants, a close relation
could take from the deceased’s livestock the means to
purchase a wife. That “ghost marriage,” as the Nuer
call it, allowed him to father children in the name
ofÂ€the deceased, who had provided the matrimonial
compensation that creates filiation.
In all the examples I have given, although the
child’s familial and social staÂ�tus 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 conÂ�flict about the fact that
its biological father and its social father are different
individuals.
These soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties also do not experience the sort of
anxieties raised in our own by insemination with the
frozen sperm of a deceased husband or even, theo-
retically, of a distant ancestor. For many of these peo-
ples, a child is supposed to be the reincarnation of an
56
ancestor, who chooses to live again in that descen-

dant. And the “ghost marriage” of the Nuer allows
for a further reÂ�finement in cases where the brother,
asÂ€a substitute for the deceased, does not father chil-
dren on his own behalf. The son fathered in the name
of the deceased (and whom the biological father con-
siders his nephew) will be able to render the same
serÂ�vice to his biological father. Since the biological
father is then the brother of his legal father, the chil-
dren 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 conÂ�flict we find so troubling, between bio-
logical reproduction and social paternity, does not
exist in the soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties anthropologists study. They un-
hesitatingly 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 probÂ�lems only be-
cause it seems to me that they show very well the
kind of contribution contemporary society can hope
for from anthropological research. The anthropolo-
gist does not propose that his contemporaries Â�adopt
the ideas and customs of one or another exotic popu-
lation. Our contribution is much more Â�modest, and
57
it is made in two directions. First, anthropology re-

veals that what we consider “natural,” founded on
the order of things, acÂ�tually amounts to constraints
and mental habits speÂ�cific to our own culture. It
therefore helps us rid ourselves of our blinders, so as
to understand how and why other soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties can con-
sider simple and self-Â�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 soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties that have succeeded one another over the
course of centuries, sometimes millennia, and which
are distributed over the entire expanse of the inhab-
ited earth. We therefore conÂ�tribÂ�ute toward drawing
out what can be considered “universals” of human
nature, and we are able to suggest within what frame-
works as-Â�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 sub-
ject of assisted reproduction is whether one ought to
make laws about these matters, and if so, in what
Â�areas and in what direction. In several countries, rep-
resentatives of public opinion, jurists, doctors, soci-
ologists, and sometimes anthropologists sit on com-
missions and other orÂ�gaÂ�niÂ�zaÂ�tions established by the
58
government authorities. It is striking that anthro-

pologists evÂ�erywhere 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 opinion—assisted reproduction in
the serÂ�vice of single Â�women, bachelors, widows, or
hoÂ�moÂ�sexÂ�ual couples—have their equivalents in other
soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, 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 soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, in order to create the fa-
milial 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

MODERNÂ€ASSEMBLY LINE
I now move on to my second topic: economic life.

In that sector as well, the concern of anthropologi-
cal research is to reveal models very different from
our own and thereby incite us to reÂ�flect 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 soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties
or only to those that, like our own, operate under a
market economy?
In ancient soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, in recent and contemporary
peasant soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, and also in those that anthropolo-
gists study, it is usually impossible to separate aspects
we call economic from all other aspects. The eco-
nomic activity of members of these soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties cannot
be reduced to a rational calculation whose sole object
would be to maximize gains and minimize losses. In
these soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, labor serves not only to make a Â�profit
but also—perhaps we should say especially—to ac-
quire prestige and to conÂ�tribÂ�ute to the good of the
community. Acts that for us would have a purely eco-
nomic character express preoccupations that are at
once technical, cultural, social, and religious.
To a lesser extent, is that not also the case in our
soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties? If all the activities of market soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties were
governed by economic laws, economics would be a
true science, on the basis of which it would be posÂ�
sible to predict and to act, which is obviously not
theÂ€ case. That can be considered proof that even in
Â�modes of conduct that seem purely economic to us,
other factors intervene and show up the shortcom-
60
ings of economics. But for us, these factors remain

veiled behind a screen of supposed rationality, and
the study of different soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, 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 soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties show an aston-
ishing capacity to solve probÂ�lems of production. Even
in remote prehistoric times, human beings knew how
to engage in large-Â�scale industrial activities. We know
of sites in France, Belgium, Holland, and EngÂ�land
covering several tens of hectares, pocked with mine
shafts for the extraction of flint, where workers, prob-
ably orÂ�gaÂ�nized into teams, toiled by the hundreds.
The flint nodules passed through workshops as spe-
cialized as the stations of a modern assembly line.
InÂ€ 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 prod-
ucts several hundred kiÂ�loÂ�meÂ�ters in evÂ�ery direction,
which would have required a powerful commercial
operation.
Anthropology provides indications of the same or-
der. 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 prac-
ticed by present-Â�day Maya peasants.
Thanks to aerial and satellite photographs, we
have recently learned that very sophisticated agricul-
tural systems existed in Maya country and in various
other regions of South America—Venezuela, Colom-
bia, 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 pe-
riod,Â€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 inÂ�habÂ�iÂ�tants per
square kiÂ�loÂ�meÂ�ter.
Anthropology nevertheless reveals a paradox.
Alongside these great achievements, attesting to what
in our language we would call a “productivist mental-
ity,” there are others that point in the opposite direc-
tion. 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 orÂ�gaÂ�nized for that
62
purpose, possessed absolute power to fix the begin-

ning and the duration of the seasons for hunting,
fishing, and collecting wild plants. There was a wide-
spread belief in supernatural “masters” of each ani-
mal or plant species, who punished the guilty for
taking too much, and this belief encouraged modera-
tion. 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 reÂ�flective.
At very different levels and in various realms, hu-
man soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties thus display heterogeneous attitudes in
economic matters. There is not one model of eco-
nomic activity but several. The Â�modes of production
studied by anthropologists—hunting and gathering,
horticulture, agriculture, artisanship, and so on—
represent so many different types. It is difÂ�fiÂ�cult to re-
duce them, as some believed possible, to the succes-
sive 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
ofÂ€ agriculture. In several respects, agriculture repre-
sented progÂ�ress: it provided more food for a given
space and time, allowed more rapid deÂ�moÂ�graphic ex-
63
pansion, denser settlements, and soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties that cov-

ered a larger expanse and that were also larger in
size.
But in other respects, agriculture constitutes a re-
gression. 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 mat-
ters 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 advan-
tages, but a price must always be paid.
We have some difÂ�fiÂ�culty placing ourselves within
that perspective because, in considering the so-Â�called
backward or underdeveloped soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties as they ap-
peared when we established contact with them in
theÂ€nineteenth century, we neglect one obvious fact:
those soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties were nothing but relics, mutilated ves-
64
tiges, after the upheavals that we ourselves had pro-

duced, directly or indirectly. Indeed, it was the greedy
exploitation of exotic regions and of their popula-
tions between the sixteenth and the nineteenth cen-
turies that made possible the Western world’s rapid
development. The feeling of strangeness that indus-
trial civilization experiences toward the so-Â�called un-
derdeveloped soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties consists primarily in the fact
that it rediscovers in these soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties what it has itself
produced, but in a negative form that it is unable to
recognize.
The apparent simplicity or passivity of these soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�
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 probÂ�lems of industrialization in
underdeveloped countries, industrial civilization ini-
tially encounters the deformed image, as if fixed in
place by the centuries, of the destruction it had to
Â�accomplish in order to exist. Diseases introduced
byÂ€ whites into populations that had no immunity
against them struck entire soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties from the map.
Even in the most remote regions of the planet, where
one might imagine that soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties would survive in-
65
tact, pathogenic germs wreaked havoc, traveling with

surprising speed, sometimes several dozen years be-
fore contact proper occurred.
The same can be said for raw materials and tech-
nologies. There are soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties in Australia where the
introduction of iron axes, while facilitating and sim-
plifying labor and economic activity, led to the ruin
of traditional culture. For complex reasons that I
cannot enter into for lack of time, the Â�adoption of
metal tools brought on the collapse of economic,
Â�social, and religious institutions associated with the
possession and transmission of stone axes. And in
the form of worn-Â�out or damaged tools, or some-
times even as debris that defies deÂ�scripÂ�tion, iron trav-
els farther and faster than human beings, thanks to
wars, marriages, and commercial exchanges.
THE AMBIGUOUS CHARACTER OF “NATURE”
Having deÂ�fined the historical frameworks within

which cultural discontinuities arise, I can now at-
tempt, with fewer risks of error, to identify the deep-Â�
seated causes of the resistance these soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties often
mount against development. First, most so-Â�called
primitive soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties tend to prefer unity over internal
conÂ�flicts; second, they demonstrate respect for natu-
66
ral forces; and third, they are loath to take the path of
historical change.
The noncompetitive character of some of these soÂ�
ciÂ�eÂ�ties has often been invoked to explain their resis-
tance to development and industrialization. Let us
not forget, however, that the passivity and indiffer-
ence for which they are criticized may be a conse-
quence 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
Â�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 Â�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 win-
ner, but rather when evÂ�eryÂ�one was assured there
would be no loser.
Observations made in other soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties appear to
suggest the opposite; yet these soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties as well lack a
real spirit of competition. For example, when tradi-
tional games are played between two sides that repre-
67
sent, respectively, the living and the dead, they must

necessarily end with the victory of the living.
FiÂ�nally, it is striking that almost all so-Â�called prim-
itive soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties reject the idea of majority rule. Since
they consider social cohesion and harmonious rela-
tions within the group to be preferable to any inno-
vation, the question put to a vote is resubmitted as
many times as necessary to reach a unanimous deci-
sion. Sometimes, simulated battles precede the delib-
erations. Old quarrels are settled, and the voting can
proceed only when the group, refreshed and restored,
has created within it the conditions for that indis-
pensable unanimity.
The idea many of these soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties have of the rela-
tion 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 soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties
undoubtedly recognize that a separation exists be-
tween the two realms.
No society, however humble it may be, fails to grant
a preeminent value to the arts of civilization—the
cooking of food, pottery, weaving—by which the hu-
man condition moves away from the condition of
animals. Nevertheless, among so-Â�called primitive
68
peoples, the notion of nature is always ambiguous:

nature is preculture, and it is also subculture; but
itÂ€ 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 tech-
nologies, manufactured objects, are devalorized by
indigenous thought whenever the essential is at is-
sue, 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 Euro-
pean folklore and contemporary indigenous soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�
ties, many cases exist where the use of manufactured
objects, whether made locally or imported, is pro-
scribed 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 ChrisÂ�tianÂ�iÂ�ty 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
refused—and still refuse in some cases—to cede terri-

tories in exchange for sometimes enormous compen-
sation 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 tech-
niques of their Iroquois neighbors, refused to apply
them to the production of wild rice—the staple of
their diet, which is in fact very suitable for cultiva-
tion—because 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 ap-
pear when we compare soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, they include con-
stant elements, which are interpreted differently or
which differ only in their application. Many soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties
consider the opposition between nature and culture
and that between woman and man to be homolo-
gous. They therefore set aside for Â�women the forms
of activity conceived as being on the order of nature,
such as gardening, or those that place the artisan
inÂ€ 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 comÂ�

plexÂ�ity, which in fact varies by society.
“OUR SOÂ�CIÂ�EÂ�TIES ARE MEANT TO CHANGE”
From that dual perspective, we see how pointless it is

to speak of “people without hisÂ�tory.” The soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties we
call primitive have a hisÂ�tory like all the others; but,
unlike what occurs in our soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, they reject hisÂ�
tory and strive to sterilize evÂ�eryÂ�thing within their soÂ�
ciÂ�eÂ�ties that could constitute the barest hint of his-
torical change. Our soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties are meant to change;
that is the principle of their structure and of their
operation. So-Â�called primitive soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties appear primi-
tive 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 soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties. In addition,
soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties of a very low technical and economic level
may possess a sense of well-Â�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-Â�called primitive soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties 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 misÂ�
understood. I proposed to compare soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties to ma-
chines, of which, as we know, there are two types:
mechanistic and thermodynamic.
The first type of machine uses energy that is pro-
vided to it from the start. If it were perfectly con-
structed, producing no friction and never overheat-
ing, it could in theory run indefiÂ�nitely. 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 con-
suming their energy and gradually destroying it.
I therefore said that the soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties that anthropolo-
gists study, compared to our larger and more comÂ�pliÂ�
cated soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, are somewhat like “cold” soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties in
contrast to “hot” ones: clocks compared to steam en-
gines. They are soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties that produce little disorder—
physicists would say little “entropy”—and which tend
to persist indefiÂ�nitely in their initial state (or what
they imagine to be an initial state). That explains
why, seen from the outside, they appear to be with-
out hisÂ�tory and without progÂ�ress.
Our own soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties not only make great use of ther-
modynamic machines but also resemble steam en-
72
gines in terms of their internal structure. Antago-

nisms comparable to what can be observed in a steam
engine, between the source of heat and the source of
cooling, must exist in these soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties. They operate
onÂ€a difference in potential, a social hierarchy, which
throughout hisÂ�tory has gone by the names “slavery,”
“serfdom,” “class divisions,” and so on. Such soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties
create and maintain imbalances within themselves,
which they then use to produce both much more or-
der—industrial civilization—and, at the level of inter-
personal relationships, much more entropy.
The soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties anthropologists study can thus be
considered systems of weak entropy, running at a his-
torical temperature near absolute zero. That is what
we express in saying that these soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties have no hisÂ�
tory. “Historical” soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties like our own possess a
greater differential in their internal temperatures, a
differential attributable to economic and social in-
equalities.
EvÂ�ery society, of course, always entails both as-
pects, like the yin and yang of Chinese philosophy:
these two principles are opposed and complemen-
tary, 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 aspects—order and disorder—corre-

spond to the two ways a civilization can be consid-
ered: culture on one hand, society on the other.
Culture consists of the set of relations that the hu-
man beings of a given civilization maintain with the
world; society consists more particularly of the rela-
tions that these same human beings maintain with
one another.
Culture makes order: we cultivate the earth, con-
struct houses, produce manufactured goods. By con-
trast, our soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties make a great deal of entropy. They
dissipate their strength and exhaust themselves in
the social conÂ�flicts, poÂ�litÂ�iÂ�cal struggles, and psycho-
logical tensions they produce in individuals. And the
values on which they rested at the start inevitably
wear thin. One could almost say that our soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties
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 with-
out 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
soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties are largely mechanistic in their egalitarian-
74
ism, governed by the rule of unanimity I have already

deÂ�scribed.
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 applica-
tions 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-Â�Simon recommended in early nineteenth-Â�
century France, it would know how to move “from
the governance of men to the administration of
things.” In formulating that program, Saint-Â�Simon
was anticipating both the anthropological distinc-
tion between culture and society, and the revolution
occurring before our eyes at this moment with ad-
vances 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 robots—in transforming
machines into humans. Then, when culture had fully
75
accepted the obligation to produce progÂ�ress, society

would be liberated from a millennial curse that con-
strained it to subjugate human beings for progÂ�ress’s
sake. Henceforth, hisÂ�tory would come to pass on its
own, and society, placed outside and above hisÂ�tory,
could again enjoy the transparency and internal equi-
librium by which the least damaged of the so-Â�called
primitive soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties attest that such things are not in-
compatible with the human condition.
Within that perspective, however utopian, anthro-
pology would find its highest jusÂ�tifiÂ�caÂ�tion, since the
forms of life and thought it studies would no Â�longer
have merely a historical and comparative interest:
they would make humanity’s 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 soÂ�ciÂ�
eÂ�ties.
As a first consequence, Â�modes of economic activity
that constitute archaic vestiges, obstacles to develop-
ment, in the eyes of the modern industrialist and fi-
nancier 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 Â�modes of pro-
duction totally different from our own, will be pre-
served. The hope is that we will thereby palliate the
dangers of a form of agriculture reduced to a few
high-Â�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 Â�modes of produc-
tion, ought we not to make sure that the irreplace-
able know-Â�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 psy-
chological, social, and moral factors of the produc-
tion proÂ�cess. Specialists in industrial sociology de-
nounce the contradiction between, on one hand,
objective productivity—which requires parceling up
and reducing tasks to their essentials, undercutting
labor initiatives, and distancing the producer from
the product—and, on the other, subjective productiv-
ity, which allows the worker to express his or her per-
sonality and desire for creation. To limit myself to
one example, a Melanesian whose social rules oblige
him to ostentatiously maintain his sister’s house-
hold, or who seeks, by the size of the yams produced
77
in his garden, to prove that he has a good relation-

ship 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 individu-
als, to leave their stamp on matter, to give an objec-
tive expression to their subjectivity through their
work.
The example of so-Â�called primitive soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties can
Â�instruct us in all these aspects. Such soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties are
founded on principles that have the effect of convert-
ing the volume of wealth produced into moral and
social values: personal accomplishment in one’s work,
the respect of loved ones and neighbors, moral and
social prestige, a harmony achieved between human
beings and the natural and supernatural worlds. An-
thropological investigations help us to better under-
stand the necessity of findÂ�ing a balance among these
various components of human nature. And evÂ�eryÂ�
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 SCIÂ�ENÂ�TIFIC,

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 concep-
tions 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. Ex-
ceptÂ€ 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 deÂ�scribe what cannot be explained, or
whether, behind the apparent disorder of beliefs,
practices, and customs, it is possible to discover a co-
herence.
Taking as my starting point the myths of the in-
digenous 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 sciÂ�enÂ�tific thought rea-
sons by formulating concepts and linking them to-
79
gether, mythic thought operates with the aid of im-

ages 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 sen-
soryÂ€ 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
enÂ�tiÂ�tled Mythologiques (Introduction to the Study of My-
thology), published between 1964 and 1971.
Two lovers, incestuous or forbidden from being to-
gether by social conventions, succeed in uniting only
in death, which will form them into a single body:
weÂ€ easily accept that story, because our literary traÂ�
ditions have made it familiar to us. The West has
theÂ€medieval 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 new-
born brother and sister and makes a single child of
them. That child grows up; one day, it shoots an ar-
row 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 incestu-
ous 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 com-
pare them episode by episode to be convinced that
the second story exactly reproduces the first: it sim-
ply tells it backwards. Would we thus not have in the
two instances a single myth, which neighboring pop-
ulations illustrate by symmetrical and inverted narÂ�
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 constelÂ�
lation, into which the incestuous lovers are trans-
formed after their death (somewhat like the Cowherd
and the Weaver in the Chinese tradition, still cele-
brated by the festival of Tanabata in Japan), while the
second narrative claims to explain the origin of sun-
spots. 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 conÂ�figuÂ�raÂ�tions, the same story is told, back-
ward or forward, like a film shown from the begin-
ning 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 con-
denses into water.
The result of such an analysis is that, instead of
two different myths, there would now be only one.
Through that step-Â�by-Â�step proÂ�cess, 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 conÂ�tribÂ�
ute toward shedding light on present-Â�day probÂ�lems.
Our soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties no Â�longer have myths. To solve the
probÂ�lems raised by the human condition and by nat-
ural phenomena, they turn to science; or, more pre-
cisely, for each type of probÂ�lem they turn to a special-
ized sciÂ�enÂ�tific discipline.
Is that always the case? What peoples without writ-
ing ask of myths, what humanity as a whole has asked
of them for the hundreds of thousands of years—
perhaps millions of years—of human hisÂ�tory, 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 soci-
82
ety to which one belongs, to inspire the absolute conÂ�

fiÂ�dence 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 hisÂ�tory to explain, justify, or con-
demn it. The manner of interpreting the past varies,
depending on the milieu to which we belong, our poÂ�
litÂ�iÂ�cal convictions, our moral attitudes. For a French
citizen, the 1789 revolution explains the conÂ�figuÂ�
ration of present-Â�day society. And, depending on
whether we judge that conÂ�figuÂ�raÂ�tion 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 reÂ�
flections to Japan. But based on the little I know
about the hisÂ�tory 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 parÂ�ticÂ�iÂ�pants contin-
ued 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

beÂ€pursued ever further—without a second thought,
without nostalgia or regret—others, by contrast, saw
that openness as a way of borrowing the West’s own
weapons from it, in order, possibly, to resist it and
toÂ€ preserve the speÂ�cific characteristics of Japanese
culture.
We are thus led to wonder whether an objective
and sciÂ�enÂ�tific hisÂ�tory is possible or whether, in our
modern soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, hisÂ�tory does not occupy a role com-
parable to that of myths. The role that myths play for
soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties without writing—they legitimate a social or-
der and a conception of the world, explain what
things are by what they were, find the jusÂ�tifiÂ�caÂ�tion for
their present state in a past state, and conceive of the
future as a function of both that present and that
past—is also the role that our civilizations atÂ�tribÂ�ute
to hisÂ�tory.
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 dif-
ferently. Conversely, we readily believe that there is
only one HisÂ�tory, whereas in reality evÂ�ery poÂ�litÂ�iÂ�cal
party, evÂ�ery social milieu, at times evÂ�ery individual
recounts a different hisÂ�tory 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 perpetu-
ate 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 HisÂ�tory, as our civiliza-
tions 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 soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, does not
have only one possible meaning. There is no absolute
interpretation of the historical past; all the interpre-
tations are relative.
To conclude this lecture, allow me an even bolder
reÂ�flection. Even with respect to the order of the world,
science is now shifting from a timeless perspective to
a historical perspective. The cosmos no Â�longer ap-
pears to us, as it did in Newton’s time, to be governed
by eternal laws such as gravity. For modern astro-
physics, the cosmos has a hisÂ�tory. It began fifÂ�teen or
twenty billion years ago with a unique event, the Big
Bang; it grew, continued its expansion, and—depend-
85
ing on the hypothesis—will continue indefiÂ�nitely in

the same direction or will alternate between cycles of
expansion and contraction.
Even as science proÂ�gresses, however, it convinces us
that we are becoming less and less capable of master-
ing by means of thought phenomena that, by their
spatial and temporal orders of magnitude, escape our
mental capacities. In that sense, the hisÂ�tory of the
cosmos is becoming a kind of great myth for the or-
dinary 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 sciÂ�enÂ�tific thought stands in radical op-
position 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
progÂ�ress of sciÂ�enÂ�tific thought push it toward hisÂ�
tory?Â€That was already the case in nineteenth-Â�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 knowl-
edge preserves affinities with myths. And if, as it
seems, science itself is tending toward a hisÂ�tory of life
and of the world, we cannot rule out the possibility
86
that, after long following diverging paths, sciÂ�enÂ�tific

thought and mythic thought will one day move closer
together. In terms of that hypothesis, the interest an-
thropology takes in the study of mythic thought
would be even more jusÂ�tiÂ�fied, because of the contri-
bution it makes to the knowledge of ever-Â�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 Â�eryÂ�t 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 soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties without writing and our own.
ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND GENETICISTS
To explain that distance, some in the past have re-

sorted—and still sometimes resort—to two types of
argument. According to them, that gap is insur-
mountable because it results from the fact that hu-
man groups differ in their genetic inheritance. The
inequality supposedly existing between these inheri-
tances would have an impact on intellectual capaci-
ties and moral dispositions. Such is the racist thesis.
According to evolutionist theory, by contrast, the in-
equality 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 soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties

must necessarily follow, some took the lead, others
fell behind, others may perhaps have gone backwards.
The only probÂ�lems 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 probÂ�lems
to whose solution anthropology hopes to conÂ�tribÂ�ute:
first, the probÂ�lem of race; and second, the meaning to
be given to the notion of progÂ�ress.
Throughout the nineteenth century and during
the first half of the twentieth, many wondered
whether race inÂ�fluÂ�enced culture and, if so, in what
way. Because peoples who do not have the same phys-
ical appearance also have different ways of life, cus-
toms, and beliefs, it was concluded that physical dif-
ferences and cultural differences were linked. As the
preamble to the second UNESCO statement on the
probÂ�lem of race (1951) commonsensically acknowl-
edges, 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 DifferenÂ�

ces” (Paris: UNESCO, 1951), n.p. <http://honestthinking.
org/en/unesco/UNESCO.1951.Statement_on_Race.htm>
89
Anthropology has long put forward two argu-

ments against the idea that race and culture are
linked. In the first place, the number of cultures that
exist on the earth’s surface, and above all, the num-
ber that still existed two or three centuries ago vastly
surpass the number of races that even the most me-
ticulous investigators have wanted to distinguish:
several thousand versus a dozen or two. And two cul-
tures 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 ra-
cially different groups.
In the second place, cultural inheritances evolve
much faster than genetic inheritances. There is a
world between our great-Â�grandparents’ culture and
our own. We could go so far as to say that there is
lessÂ€difference between the way of life of the ancient
Greeks and Romans and that of our eighÂ�teenth-Â�
century ancestors than between these ancestors’ way
of life and our own. Nevertheless, with a few excep-
tions, we have the same genetic inheritance as they.
These two reasons explain why, nearly a hundred
years ago, a divorce occurred between so-Â�called cul-
tural or social anthropologists, who study technolo-
gies, customs, institutions, and beliefs, and old-Â�school
physical anthropologists, who stubbornly persisted
90
in measuring and calibrating skulls, skeletons, and

living beings. No correlation could be established be-
tween these two types of investigations. If you will
allow me to invoke an image, the physical anthropol-
ogists’ sieve had mesh too coarse to capture any of
the differences between the cultures to which we cul-
tural or social anthropologists attach a meaning.
By contrast, in the last thirty or forty years, collab-
oration has occurred between anthropology and the
new biological discipline called population genetics.
By means of biological arguments, this discipline has
conÂ�firmed anthropologists’ traditional distrust of
any effort to reestablish a connection or causal rela-
tionship 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
Â�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 conceive—it has even
91
been established in certain cases—that the second set

has a completely different geographical distribution
than the first. Depending on the characteristic cho-
sen, “invisible races” will thus make their appearance
within the traditional races or will spill over the al-
ready weak boundaries assigned to them.
ConÂ�firming the positions of anthropologists, ge-
neticists have thus replaced the notion of “race” with
that of “genetic stock.” A genetic stock, rather than
encompassing supposedly immutable characteristics
with well-Â�deÂ�fined boundaries, is composed of mix-
tures, 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 invesÂ�
tigator and which he chooses as a means of clasÂ�siÂ�fiÂ�
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 so-
Â�called 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), polyga-
mous privileges for chiefs or elders, or even practices
that revolt us, such as infanticide, appeared absurd
and even scandalous. It was not until population ge-
netics emerged as a field in about 1950 that we per-
ceived the reasons behind these practices.
We have a tendency to consider the races most re-
mote 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 geographi-
cal area; and these differences are almost as large be-
tween 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 liv-
ing in relative isolation and competing with one an-
other (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 spe-
cies. And we know that the evolution that led from
the fossil hominoids to present-Â�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 suit-
able for making us what we have become; and also,
that they remain the most suitable for keeping hu-
man evolution moving in the same direction and at
the same rate. By contrast, enormous contemporary
soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, 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 be-
come aware of these new probÂ�lems, before we could
recognize the objective value and moral meaning of
Â�modes of life, practices, and beliefs that we had previ-
ously mocked or, at best, had looked on with conde-
scending curiosity. But with the entry of population
genetics on the anthropological scene, another turn-
about occurred, one whose theoretical implications
may be even greater.
I mentioned facts that lie within the sphere of cul-
ture: so-Â�called primitive soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties maintain low deÂ�moÂ�
graphic growth by continuing to breastfeed children
for as long as three or four years, by observing vari-
ous sexual prohibitions, and, if need be, by practic-
ingÂ€abortion 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-Â�
form, with the customs imposed on individuals of
both sexes to unite and reproduce, with the ways pre-
scribed to bring children into the world and to rear
them—or to refuse to do so—and 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
inÂ�fluÂ�enced culture and, if so, in what way. Having al-
ready observed that the probÂ�lem thus posed is insol-
uble, we now perceive that things occur in the oppo-
site direction. It is the forms of culture that human
beings Â�adopt in one place or another, their ways of
living, past and present, that to a large extent deter-
mine the rate and orientation of their biological evo-
lution. Far from having to wonder whether culture is
or is not a function of race, we discover that race—or
what is generally understood by that misnomer—is
one function among others of culture.
How could it be otherwise? It is a group’s 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, intermarriages—permitted, encouraged, or

prohibited—will be able to occur among them.
Even in our own soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, we know that marriages
do not occur completely by chance. Conscious or un-
conscious factors come into play: the distance be-
tween the family residences of the future spouses,
questions of ethnic origin, religion, level of educa-
tion, family resources. If I may extrapolate from prac-
tices and customs that until recently were extremely
widespread, we will have to admit that, since the ear-
liest 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
aÂ€ few examples in my previous lectures. How could
such rules, applied for generations, not act differen-
tially on the transmission of genetic inheritances?
But that is not all. The rules of hygiene practiced
by evÂ�ery society, the relative intensity and effective-
ness of treatment for this or that disease or deÂ�fiÂ�ciency,
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 indiscriminately—in the case of
97
so-Â�called abnormal births, twins, and so on—and

those, like infanticide, that are applied particularly to
girls. FiÂ�nally, 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 in-
directly subject to rules whose ultimate origin is not
biological but social.
Human evolution is therefore not a by-Â�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 an-
thropologists 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 communi-
cate. Once culture exists, however, it consolidates
these traits and propagates them. When cultures di-
verge, they consolidate and favor different traits, such
as resistance to cold or heat (for soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties that, by
choice or by necessity, had to adapt to extreme cli-
mates), or to oxygen-Â�deficient atmospheres (for those
living at high altitudes). And who knows whether ag-
gressive or contemplative dispositions, technical in-
genuity, 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 dis-
tant effects of intermediate links. If such effects are
real, it would be true to say that evÂ�ery culture se-
lectsÂ€ genetic abilities that, by retroaction, inÂ�fluÂ�ence
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 via-
ble;Â€ otherwise, there is the risk that other systems
better able to propagate and reproduce themselves
will gradually eliminate it. The conditions needed
toÂ€ develop differences, to deÂ�fine adequately the dis-
tinction between one culture and its neighbors, are
roughly the same as those that favor biological differ-
ences 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 prefigÂ�ure genetic ones, esÂ�
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 par-
ticular traits.
Thirty-Â�four years ago, in a leaflet enÂ�tiÂ�tled Race and
HisÂ�tory, written at the request of UNESCO, I relied on
the notion of “coalition” to explain why isolated cul-
tures cannot on their own create the conditions for
aÂ€truly cumulative hisÂ�tory. For that, I said, it takes a
vaÂ�riÂ�ety of cultures, intentionally or unintentionally
combining their respective wagers and thus provid-
ing themselves with a chance to realize, in the great
gamble of hisÂ�tory, the winning streaks that permit
hisÂ�tory to advance.
At present, geneticists propose fairly similar views
about biological evolution. They demonstrate that a
genome acÂ�tually constitutes a system in which some
genes play a regulatory role and others act in unison
on a single characteristic; conversely, several charac-
teristics 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 hisÂ�
tory of populations, genetic recombination plays a
role comparable to that played by cultural recombi-
nation 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 dis-
advantaged descendants: the cultural variations to
which these descendants would be exposed would
come to pass more quickly than their genetic inheri-
tance 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 evÂ�erywhere, life re-
quires and engenders diversity. That intellectual, so-
cial, aesthetic, and philosophical diversity is not con-
nected by any causal relationship to that which exists
at the biological level between the great human fami-
lies. It is merely parallel to that diversity, but in a dif-
ferent 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
orÂ€ 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-Â�type civilization has
made the enormous progÂ�ress it has, while the civili-
zations 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 in-
equality—or diversity—of human cultures, which is
closely linked to it in the public’s mind.
THE SCANDAL OF DIVERSITY
The diversity of cultures has rarely appeared to hu-

man beings for what it is: a natural phenomenon re-
sulting from direct or indirect relations among soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�
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 in-
stinctual, 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 parÂ�ticÂ�iÂ�pate in their culture by
terms that we would translate as “barbarian.” Etymo-
logically, both terms seem to connote the chirping of
birds. They thus categorized these peoples as ani-
mals. And the term “savage,” which we have long em-
ployed 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 na-
ture—as the German term Naturvölker indicates—evÂ�
eryÂ�thing that is remote from the norms under which
they themselves live.
There is no doubt that the great religious and phil-
osophical systems—whether Buddhism, ChrisÂ�tianÂ�iÂ�ty,
or Islam; Stoic, Kantian, or Marxist doctrines; or fiÂ�
nally, various declarations of human rights—have
constantly militated against that attitude. These sys-
tems, however, forget that human beings do not real-
ize 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 ac-
knowledge it fully. For if you treat the different states
in which human soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties—both ancient in time and
remote in space—happen 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 beÂ�comes uniÂ�fied and iden-
tical to itself. It is simply that this unity and identity
are realized only gradually and not evÂ�erywhere at the
same rate.
The evolutionist solution is appealing, but it overÂ�
simÂ�pliÂ�fies the facts. EvÂ�ery society, from its own per-
spective, can divide soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties different from itself into
two categories: those that are contemporary to it
butÂ€ geographically remote; and those that have ex-
isted in nearly the same space but that have preceded
it in time.
When we consider soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties of the first type, there
is a temptation to establish between them relations
equivalent to an order of succession in time. How
canÂ€contemporary soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties 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 metallurgy—but who draw figÂ�ures on rock
faces and make stone tools—to the unknown peoples
who engaged in similar activities in France and Spain
fifÂ�teen 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 perni-
cious to me. We know only certain aspects of van-
ished civilizations—fewer 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-Â�
day, the other vanished) resemble each other, that
they are identical in evÂ�ery 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-Â�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
capÂ�italist era and become open to industrialization.
We now know all that is false. In the first place, what
is called Japanese feudalism—military in its orienta-
tion, pervaded by dynamism and pragmatism—dis-
played only superficial resemblances to European
feudalism. It represented a perfectly original form of
social orÂ�gaÂ�niÂ�zaÂ�tion. Second and above all, by the six-
teenth century Japan was already an industrial na-
tion that manufactured and exported to China suits
of armor and sabers by the tens of thousands; some-
what later, it also exported similar numbers of har-
quebuses and cannons. During the same period,
Â�Japan had more inÂ�habÂ�iÂ�tants than any country in Eu-
rope, more universities, and a higher literacy rate.
And fiÂ�nally, a form of commodity and fiÂ�nanÂ�cial capÂ�
italism that owed nothing to the West was in full
swing well before the Meiji Restoration.
The two soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, therefore, were far from occupy-
ing successive positions on a single line of develop-
ment. Rather, they followed parallel paths; and, at
evÂ�ery moment in hisÂ�tory, they made choices that did
106
not necessarily coincide with each other. It is some-

what 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 progÂ�ress occurs
in a single direction.
Is all that true not only of soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties that have coex-
isted in time, far away from one another, but also of
soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties of the second type, those that, in a deter-
mined place, historically preceded the society of to-
day? The hypothesis of a unilinear evolution, so frag-
ile when evoked to place soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties remote in space
along a continuum, seems in this case difÂ�fiÂ�cult to
avoid. We know by the concordant evidence of pale-
ontology, prehisÂ�tory, and archaeology that the terri-
tories occupied by the great present-Â�day civilizations
were first inhabited by various species of the genus
Homo, who carved crude flints. With time, these stone
tools were reÂ�fined and perfected; carved stone made
way for polished stone, bone, and ivory; pottery, weav-
ing, and agriculture followed, gradually combined
with metallurgy, whose phases can also be distin-
guished. In that case, can we not speak of a true evo-
lution?
Yet it is not as easy as some believe to orÂ�gaÂ�nize this
indisputable progÂ�ress into a regular and continuous
107
series. For a long time, successive phases were distin-

guished: 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 sim-
ple. 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
progÂ�ress—since polishing is much more costly in raw
materials than carving. Rather, it was an attempt to
copy in stone the copper or bronze weapons pos-
sessed 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 simultane-
ously with polished stone, sometimes prior to it.
It was formerly believed that the different carved-Â�
stone technologies—“core” industries, “flake” indus-
tries, and “blade” industries—reÂ�flected a historical
progÂ�ress 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
progÂ�ress in a single direction but aspects or, as they
say, “facies” of a very complex reality. Hundreds of
thousands—perhaps more than a million—years ago,
stone industries were the work of an ancestor of
108
Homo sapiens called Homo erectus. Yet these industries

attest to a complication and reÂ�finement that were not
surpassed until the end of the Neolithic period.
There is no denying the reality of the progÂ�ress
achieved by humanity. We simply need to take a more
nuanced view of it. The development of our knowl-
edge invites us to spread out over space forms of civi-
lization that we were inclined to spread out over
time.
ProgÂ�ress is neither necessary nor continuous. It
proceeds by leaps, bounds, or, as the biologists would
say, mutations. These leaps and bounds do not al-
ways 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 sev-
eral moves at his disposal but in different directions.
The progÂ�ress of humanity is not like someone climb-
ing a staircase step by step. It rather brings to mind
the player whose chances are distributed over several
dice and who, evÂ�ery time he throws them, sees them
disperse on the table. What he wins with one, he al-
ways risks losing with another, and it is only by a
stroke of luck that hisÂ�tory beÂ�comes cumulative, in
other words, that the numbers add up to a favorable
combination.
But what might our attitude be toward a civiliÂ�
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 be-
longs? Would the observer not be inclined to call that
civilization staÂ�tionÂ�ary? In other words, is not the dis-
tinction between cumulative hisÂ�tory (one that accu-
mulates discoveries and inventions) and staÂ�tionÂ�ary
hisÂ�tory (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 ethno-
centric perspective we always Â�adopt in evaluating a
different culture? We would thus consider cumula-
tive any culture that develops in a direction similar to
our own, whereas other cultures would appear staÂ�
tionÂ�ary 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 essen-

tial, I have in the past used several comparisons,
which I ask for your permission to repeat.
In the first place, the attitude I denounce resem-
bles in many respects the one we observe in our own
soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, where elderly people and the young do not
110
react to events in the same way. The elderly generally

consider the hisÂ�tory unfolding during their old age
to be staÂ�tionÂ�ary, in opposition to the cumulative hisÂ�
tory they witnessed in their youth. An era in which
they are no Â�longer actively involved, where they no
Â�longer play a role, no Â�longer has any meaning. Noth-
ing is happening, or what is happening has only neg-
ative characteristics in their eyes. By contrast, their
grandchildren experience that period with all the fer-
vor their elders have lost.
Also in our own soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, the opponents of a poÂ�
litiÂ�cal regime do not readily acknowledge that it is
evolving. They condemn it en bloc, cast it outside hisÂ�
tory as a sort of entr’acte, believing that normal life
will resume its course only after the regime ends. The
view of the militants is completely different, espe-
cially, let us note, when they occupy an imÂ�porÂ�tant
place in the apparatus of the party in power.
The opposition between proÂ�gresÂ�sive 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 incre-
ment 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. EvÂ�ery 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 im-
prints in our minds a complex system of references,
consisting of value judgments, motivations, and fo-
cuses of interest, including the ideas inculcated in
usÂ€about our civilization’s past and future. Over the
course of our lives, we literally move with that sys-
temÂ€of references, while the systems of other cultures,
other soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties, are perceived only through the distor-
tions that our own system imposes on them, when it
does not make us incapable of seeing anything at all.
EvÂ�ery time we are inclined to call a culture inert or
staÂ�tionÂ�ary, we must therefore ask ourselves if that ap-
parent immobility does not stem from our ignorance
of its true interests, and if, with its own criteria—
which are different from our own—that 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 civili-
112
zation has devoted itself primarily to sciÂ�enÂ�tific knowl-

edge and its applications. If we Â�adopt that criterion,
we will make the quantity of energy available per capÂ�
ita the index of the degree of development in human
soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties. If the criterion had been the ability to pre-
vail over particularly hostile geographical environ-
ments, the Eskimos and the Bedouins would win first
prize. India was better able than any other civiliza-
tion to elaborate a philosophical and religious sys-
temÂ€capable of reducing the psychological risks of a
deÂ�moÂ�graphic imbalance. Islam formulated a theory
of the solidarity of all forms of human activity (tech-
nical, 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 millen-
nia in evÂ�eryÂ�thing having to do with the relations be-
tween 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 comÂ�plexÂ�ity that, to under-
stand 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 toÂ€un-
derstand the role it played as melting pot of the an-
cient world. Egyptian civilization is intelligible only
as the joint achievement of Asia and Africa. And the
great poÂ�litÂ�iÂ�cal systems of ancient Africa, its legal con-
tributions, its philosophical thought—long hidden
from Westerners—its plastic arts, and its music, are
so many aspects of a very fertile past. Think, fiÂ�nally,
of the many contributions of pre-Â�Columbian Amer-
ica to the material culture of the Old World: first, the
potato, rubber, tobacco, and coca (the foundation of
modern anesthesia), which in various capacities con-
stitute four pillars of Western civilization; second,
corn and groundnuts, which revolutionized the Afri-
can 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. FiÂ�nally, the
number zero, the foundation of arithmetic, and indi-
rectly 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 Eu-
rope 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-Â�nineteenth century, Europe
and the United States were certainly more advanced
in terms of industrialization and mechanization. The
West was better able to develop sciÂ�enÂ�tific knowledge
and to draw from it all sorts of applications, which
made it possible to increase immensely human be-
ings’ 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
atÂ€ tempering and fermentation technologies, which
may explain why they have now taken the lead in bio-
technology. If we turn to literature, it was not until
the eighÂ�teenth century that works appeared in Eu-
rope that were comparable to the Genji monogatari in
their subtlety and psychological depth; and, to find
aÂ€memorialist whose flights of poetry and poiÂ�gnant
melancholy matched those of your thirteenth-Â�century
chroniclers, we had to wait until Chateaubriand.
In my first lecture, I recalled that interest in the so-
Â�called 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 dis-
played for rustic pottery, the works of humble Ko-
rean peasants. It was then that your country devel-
oped 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
SÇetsu, 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 pracÂ�tiÂ�tioners, would inspire raku ceramics,
the bold simÂ�pliÂ�fiÂ�caÂ�tions of a master potter such
asÂ€ KÇetsu and, at the graphic and plastic levels, the
work of painters and decorators such as SÇtatsu and
KÇrin.
Now—and this is the point I want to make—that
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 curi-
osity gradually broadened to include the so-Â�called
primitive arts. But make no mistake: Japanese art
prepared the West for that craze without the West be-
ing 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
forÂ€ bold progÂ�ress 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 imÂ�porÂ�tant than the way evÂ�ery
culture combines them, Â�adopts them, or excludes
them. What constitutes the originality of each cul-
ture is its particular way of solving probÂ�lems, of putÂ�
ting into perspective values that are roughly the same
for all human beings: for all without exception pos-
sess a language, technologies, art, positive knowledge,
religious beliefs, and a social and poÂ�litÂ�iÂ�cal orÂ�gaÂ�niÂ�zaÂ�
tion. But the mix is never exactly the same for each
culture, and anthropology is intent on unÂ�derÂ�standÂ�
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 progÂ�ress is real or that certain cultures can be
117
ordered in relation to one another, provided that only

one particular aspect is considered. Nevertheless, cul-
tural relativism asserts that that possibility, even in
its restricted form, runs up against three limits.
First, although the reality of progÂ�ress is indisput-
able when one considers the evolution of humanity
in a casual manner, progÂ�ress 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 soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties that are
his primary object of study, he is incapable of identi-
fying criteria that would allow him to order all of
them along a continuum.
FiÂ�nally, 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 orÂ�gaÂ�niÂ�zaÂ�tion or another. The
anthropologist’s hypothesis, in fact, is that moral cri-
teria are a function of the particular society that has
Â�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.
EvÂ�ery 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 yet—and this is one of the major probÂ�lems
arising for anthropology at present—for about a cen-
tury, have not all soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties recognized, one after an-
other, the superiority of the Western model? Do we
not see the whole world gradually borrowing its tech-
nologies, its way of life, its clothing, even its enter-
tainment?
From the vast Asian populations to the tribes
lostÂ€ in the South American or Melanesian jungle,
aÂ€ unanimous assembly, unprecedented in hisÂ�tory,
proclaimed until recently that one form of civiliza-
tion was superior to all the others. At a time when
Western-Â�style civilization is beginning to doubt itself,
the people who have achieved inÂ�deÂ�penÂ�dence in the
course of the last half a century continue to cham-
pion it, at least through the mouths of their leaders.
These leaders sometimes even accuse anthropologists
of insidiously prolonging colonial domination. They
say that anthropologists conÂ�tribÂ�ute toward perpetu-
ating 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 Lévi-
Â�Strauss,” they would say to one another, “he’s only
interested in things that no Â�longer exist.” The dogma
of cultural relativism is thus called into question by
the very people for whose moral beneÂ�fit anthropolo-
gists deemed it imperative to decree it.
That situation poses a serious probÂ�lem for anthro-
pology 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 bio-
logical and the cultural level. The upheavals brought
about by burgeoning industrial civilization, the in-
creased 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 combina-
tions 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 compro-

mised. But we must have no illusions. The great cre-
ative eras were those in which communication had
advanced enough that distant partners could stimu-
late one another, but without being so frequent and
rapid that the ease of exchanges reduced the indis-
pensable obstacles between individuals and between
groups to such a point as to obliterate diversity.
It is true that for human beings to progÂ�ress, they
must collaborate. During that collaboration, how-
ever, the contributions, whose initial diversity was
precisely what made the collaboration fruitful and
necessary, come to be identical. Teamwork is the
source of all progÂ�ress; 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 Â�longer the game goes on.
In the eyes of anthropologists, that is the dilemma
modern humanity is now facing. EvÂ�eryÂ�thing 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 tech-
nological progÂ�ress 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 ca-
pable of navigating between those two pitfalls, of
elaborating your own formulas for living and think-
ing, 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 ab-
juring its speÂ�cific 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-Â�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 peÂ�rimÂ�eÂ�ter.
For centuries, Japan maintained a balance between
two attitudes: sometimes open to external inÂ�fluÂ�ences
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 Â�modes of conduct, to

share its allegiance between national deities and what
you yourselves call “invited gods,” is no doubt famil-
iar to you, and I make no claim to teach you any-
thing. 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-Â�how. You have pro-
vided a solution to that probÂ�lem by instituting what
is called the living national treaÂ�sures system, ningen
kokuhÇ. I do not think I am betraying a state secret in
confiding that the public authorities in my country
are currently preparing meaÂ�sures aimed at establish-
ing a system in France directly inspired by your own.
Another aspect of your hisÂ�tory that is particularly
instructive for the French lies in the different ways—I
would even say the opposite ways—that our two coun-
tries entered the industrial age. In France, a bourgeoi-
sie of lawyers and bureaucrats, allied to a peasantry
hungry for property, started a revolution that simul-
taneously abolished outdated privileges and stifled
nascent capÂ�italism. 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 capÂ�italized on the past

instead of destroying it. Japan was thus able to place
the available human resources in the serÂ�vice of the
new order. The critical spirit did not have the leisure
to wreak its devastation. The entire apparatus of
Â�symbolic representations—dating back to the time of
pre–rice-Â�growing production and already integrated
into rice-Â�growing production—was 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 Ja-
pan conÂ�firms to us is that each particular culture,
and the set of cultures of which all humanity is com-
posed, can survive and prosper only by operating in
accordance with a dual rhythm: opening up and clos-
ing 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, evÂ�
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 de-
liver these lectures, perhaps with the notion that an-
thropology can teach Japan someÂ�thing. 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
meÂ€ more of this) Japan, through its unique way of
posing the probÂ�lems of modern humankind and by
the solutions it offers, can teach anthropology a
greatÂ€deal.
125
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Claude Lévi-Â�Str auss was born on November 28,

1908, in Brussels. He held the chair of social anthro-
pology at the Collège de France from 1959 to 1982 and
was elected a member of the Académie Française in
1973. He died in Paris on October 30, 2009.
Among his works:

La vie familiale et sociale des Indiens Nambikwara. Paris: So-
ciété des Américanistes, 1948. [Family and Social Life of the
Nambikwara Indians. Translated by Eileen Sittler. New
Haven, Conn.: Human Relations Area Files, 197?]
Les structures élémentaires de la parenté. Paris: PUF, 1949; The
Hague: Mouton, 1967. [The Elementary Structures of Kin-
ship. Translated by James Harle Bell, John Richard von
Sturmer, and Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon, 1969.]
Race et histoire. Paris: UNESCO, 1952. [Race and HisÂ�tory.
Paris: UNESCO, 1952.]
Tristes tropiques. Paris: Plon, 1955. [Tristes Tropiques. Trans-
lated by John Russell. New York: Atheneum, 1961.]
Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Plon, 1958. [Structural Anthro-
127
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
pology. Translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke

Grundefest Schoepf. New York: Basic, 1963.]
Le totémisme aujourd’hui. Paris: PUF, 1962. [Totemism. Trans-
lated by Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon, 1963.]
La pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon, 1962. [The Savage Mind. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.]
Mythologiques. Paris: Plon, 1964–1971. Vol. 1, Le cru et le cuit.
Vol. 2, Du miel aux cendres. Vol. 3, L’origine des manières de
table. Vol. 4, L’homme nu. [Introduction to the Study of My-
thology. Translated by John Weightman and Doreen
Weightman. New York: Harper & Row, 1969–1981. 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 An-
thropology II. Translated by Monique Layton. Harmond-
sworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1973.]
La voie des masques. Geneva: Albert Skira, 2 vols. 1975; re-
vised, 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 éloigné. Paris: Plon, 1983. [The View from Afar.
Translated by Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss.
New York: Basic, 1985.]
Paroles données. Paris: Plon, 1984. [Anthropology and Myth:
Lectures, 1951–1982. Translated by Roy Willis. New York:
Blackwell, 1987.]
La potière jalouse. Paris: Plon, 1985. [The Jealous Potter. Trans-
128
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
lated by Bénédicte Chorier. Chicago: University of Chi-

cago Press, 1988.]
Histoire des lynx. Paris: Plon, 1991. [The Story of Lynx. Trans-
lated by Catherine Tihanyi. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1995.]
Regarder écouter lire. Paris: Plon, 1993. [Look, Listen, Read.
Translated by Brian C.Â€J. Singer. New York: Basic, 1997.]
Oeuvres. Paris: Gallimard, 2008.
129

Antropology and The Problems of Modern Civilization

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Anthropology Confronts the Problems

of the Modern World m

Claude Lévi-Â�Str auss

for eword by maur ice olender

tr anslated by jane mar ie todd

the belknap press of harvard

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, EngÂ�land

all r ights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-Â�in-Â�Publication Data

Foreword by Maurice Olender ix

1. The End of the West’s

2. Three Great Contemporary ProbÂ�lems:

3. Recognizing Cultural Diversity:

About the Author 127

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

cover in this volume the questions underpinning his

Let me fir st t hank the Ishizaka Foundation for

LEARNING FROM OTHERS

For about the last two centuries, Western civilization

civilizations, having embraced the same ideal, be-

the eighÂ�teenth century constituted definitive solu-

sary to produce more. We therefore have the sense

ourselves? Now that Western-Â�style civilization no

UNUSUAL AND ODD FACTS

No matter how far back in time or how distant in

earlier, had the Chinese Buddhist monks who went

Marco Polo’s long visit to China. In the early Renais-

body of travel literature would spur anthropologi-

turesque details that the other sciences cast disdain-

say, “one must first observe the differences in order to

cousins of the first type and recommend it, if indeed

ture. Nothing shows that better than the tendency of

What, then, are these soÂ�ciÂ�eÂ�ties that anthropologists

long tradition to call “primitive,” a term that many

fectly viable so long as they are not threatened from

only a limited number of days and must therefore

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

the earth constitute so many readymade experiments,

ences. Indeed, astronomy was able to constitute itself

Kunio’s monumental enterprise a century later ap-

AUTHENTICITY AND INAUTHENTICITY

By this point, we are better able to understand what

aside his beliefs, his preferences, and his prejudices.

* Niels Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (New

The second ambition of anthropology is totality. It

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

different modalities, what is at issue is always the ac-

* Uchi means at once a house as building, the interior, the

pologist as a working hypothesis in his attempt to

sumes lived contact with people, but by books and

whether they are highly literate communities in a

* Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communica-

“MY OWN WESTERN STANDPOINT”

Anthropology, however, should not be reduced to the