The Interpretation of Cultures

Geertz acknowledges the 300-year-old debate about what, if anything, differentiates “civilized” and “savage” peoples. It is important to note here that while the derogatory term “savage” has fallen out of contemporary usage in the social sciences for its connotations, Geertz uses it to examine the work of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. The French term “sauvage” differs from its English cognate in that rather than connoting bestiality and inherent violence, it evokes undomesticated, “wild” freedom. The centrality of French Enlightenment ideas and language connotations to Levi-Strauss’s anthropological theory become evident in his construction of the “Cerebral Savage.” 

Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (1955) features an embedded paradox:

The anthropologist seems condemned either to journey among men whom he can understand precisely because his own culture has already contaminated them, covered them with ‘the filth, our filth, that we have thrown in the face of humanity,’ or among those who, not so contaminated, are for that reason largely unintelligible to him (350).

Out of this conundrum arises Levi-Strauss’s theoretical model, which rests on the notion of a universal human mind. By starting from the notion that “[t]he mind of man is, at bottom, everywhere the same” (350), the anthropologist can construct a general, abstract theory of the basic foundations of human existence by “reconstructing the conceptual systems that, from deep beneath its surface, animated it and gave [savage culture] form” (351).