the structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss as foundational of western ethnocentrism

 

while I have a great admiration for his grand construction of how archaic societies were built up and grew during the course of history in this book "the elementary structures of Kinship", a corner stone in cultural studies today which have influenced famous thinkers like Lacan, Derrida and Bourdieu, I can´t avoid the idea of finding traces of phallocentrism typical of authors of that part of the middle of the 20th century,

 

We see in Levi strauss´ interpretation of the passage from nature to culture/nurture, the primary signifier (the sacred) of the building of the village is the Totem found in its center. At the periphery of the village, we see  the the woman living at the circumference (the profane), isolated during the taboo assigned metaphor to the periodic cycle  of  menstruations, never allowed to gain access to the center. In his book "the raw and the cooked", we have again this binary dichotomy grounding, nature as raw food eating and nurture as cooked, the center and the periphery,  teh civilized versus the wild. I am thinking here how such unconscious discourses can structur the media reports of the youth riots in surburban areas of Paris in 2005, after the death of two of their comrades  followed by the police, and the nasty and racist comments of Sarkosy,  national security minister in the Chirac  government at that time, calling them "la racaille" which means scumbags in french.

 

 This dialectic of exclusion persists in all following neo-colonial discourses on teh Other pof western culture, always relegated to the circumference, where poverty, illiteracy are the major indicators of rejection from welfare given only to a part of mankind, etc.. It is found in literary theories, humanities (orientalism) and social sciences even amazingly in "hard sciences". We can also see traces of orientalistic in KW´s interpretations of the sacred text of the East.

 

then the phenomenlogy of states of consciousness (the interiors of the zone 1) found in several texts of Neo-advaita, Yogachara or Madhymaka philosophies are interpreted (the exteriors of the zone 1) from perspectives highly influenced by that sort of structuralism which too often hides lots of logocentrism, sexistic, hetero-normative and ethnical a priori assumptions on the division of labor in late capitalistic and emergent societies.

 

So we need to be very careful when we look at structural systems like for example the Spirlal dynamics or Jean Gebster´s model, on cultural evolution to not fall in that ethnocentric trap. I am not surprised that KW doesn´t even mention that, he was caught on using unreflected phallocentrism in his choice of the symbol of the centaur, a male and phallic allegory of western sociocentric order. KW is not mentioning at all in his bibliography the contemporary works of Halbfass and Faure on that.

 

 

 

 

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