James Baquet

    If I could go back to university (either back in time, or to return to school in my late years), I would study anthropology.

    “Anthropos” means “man,” so anthropology is the study of humankind. It can be divided into four types: biological anthropology (also called “physical anthropology”), the study of the structures of the bodies of humans and their close ancestors; linguistic anthropology, which studies the interaction of language and social life; archaeology, which analyzes the materials and landscapes left behind by older cultures; and — the one in which I am most interested — cultural anthropology and its subset social anthropology, which studies the human in the context of cultures and societies.

    Three great anthropologists stand out from the early days of the discipline: James George Frazer, who studied mythology and comparative religion; Franz Boas, who created the fourfold division described above, common in American anthropology; and today’s subject, Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009).

    Born in France, Levi-Strauss undertook ethnographic studies with his wife in Brazil from 1935 to 1939, returning to France just in time for World War II. As a result of oppression there, he spent most of the 1940s in America, where he worked with Boas (who died in his arms after having a heart attack at Columbia University), the philosopher Jacques Maritain, and other expatriated scholars. In 1948 he returned to France and obtained his doctorate from the Sorbonne (the University of Paris).

    One of Levi-Strauss’s key insights was that all humans share the same characteristics, whether they possess the so-called “savage” mind or the “civilized” one. Late in life, explaining his choice to become a vegetarian, he said, “We are all cannibals.” He elaborated, “A day will come when the thought that to feed themselves, men of the past raised and massacred living beings … shall no doubt inspire the same repulsion as that of the travelers of the 16th and 17th century facing cannibal meals of savage primitives in America, Oceania or Africa.”

    Vocabulary

    Which word above means:

    1. made up of four parts

    2. group within a group

    3. living outside of one’s country

    4. killed without restraint

    5. study and stories of the gods

    6. all humans together

    7. took on; performed a task

    8. descriptions of individual cultures

    9. disgust, aversion

    10. branch of academic study