We Are All Cannibals: And Other Essays

By Claude Levi-Strauss and Maurice Olender

On Christmas Eve 1951, Santa Claus was hanged and then publicly burned outside of the Cathedral of Dijon in France. That same decade, ethnologists began to study the indigenous cultures of central New Guinea, and found men and women affectionately consuming the flesh of the ones they loved. Everyone calls what is not their own custom barbarism,” said Montaigne. In these essays, Claude Lévi-Strauss shows us behavior that is bizarre, shocking, and even revolting to outsiders but consistent with a people’s culture and context.

These essays relate meat eating to cannibalism, female circumcision to medically assisted reproduction, and mythic thought to scientific thought. They explore practices of incest and patriarchy, nature worship versus man-made material obsessions, the perceived threat of art in various cultures, and the innovations and limitations of secular thought. Lévi-Strauss measures the short distance between complex” and primitive” societies and finds a shared madness in the ways we enact myth, ritual, and custom. Yet he also locates a pure and persistent ethics that connects the center of Western civilization to far-flung societies and forces a reckoning with outmoded ideas of morality and reason.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9780231541268

Claude Levi-Strauss

Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009) was a French social anthropologist who became a leading scholar in the structural approach to social anthropology. His books included A World on the Wane, Structural Anthropology, The Savage Mind, Anthropologu and Myth, and Look, Listen, Read.

Reviews for We Are All Cannibals

[davidwineberg · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What is wonderful about Claude Levi-Strauss is that having spent his life observing other cultures, everything was acceptable and respectable. There were no taboos in his thought processes. He found examples of all kinds of behavior our western society considers repugnant or at very least unacceptable, and all he saw was success. Social success, community success, and evolutionary success. His attitude was there were no primitive societies. Society, language and culture were fully developed wherever he studied them. He found many societies never “evolved” to the agricultural stage – not because they were primitive, but because they simply ignored or skipped it. They saw how hard their neighbors worked for so little success and they said fogeddaboudit. Similarly for today’s legal morass regarding biological parents. Many societies share children, husbands, wives and daughters. They have produced and continue to produce normal, non-neurotic children to carry on - for thousands of years now. The man spent his life in sponge mode. Nothing shocked or offended him. He took it all in as evidence. Evidence that historians were wrong, that sociologists were wrong and that anthropologists were wrong. Open your mind as well as your eyes, and an entirely new world makes itself known. That is the joy of reading Claude Levi-Strauss.This collection of 16 essays was originally arranged for La Repubblica, and contains papers from 1989-2000, so they are decently contemporary. It opens with an essay on Christmas like you’ve never learned in bible school. It traces Santa Claus back to Roman Saturnalias, celebrations of the dead, which took on aspects of bringing children through rites of passage and into the tribe. Fall festivals were full of fear and death because of the shortening, colder days. What we call Hallowe’en had its origins in sending children around as the dead, as ghosts and skeletons. Giving the “dead” children treats was a stage of acceptance as full members of the tribe, coming back from the dead. St. Nicholas himself was renowned for raising children from the dead. The winter solstice was the end of a depressing period, when hope renewed, and every society had celebrations. Levi-Strauss collected and compared myths worldwide, and the patterns are striking. We are far more similar than we are different.The book ends with an extraordinarily uncomfortable essay called Corsi et Ricorsi, which postulates that we repeat everything ad infinitum, throughout evolution. He examines three cases. He cites D. Wilson describing Homo sapiens as a cancer on the Earth as seen from space. He delves into the speech capabilities of other primates, and draws parallels with the genetic code as language. Finally, he tells of the ability of amoebas to congregate and act as one being when food is scarce. They use the same chemical between them that our brains use to communicate internally. Life, it seems, is fractal.There is so much wonderment, so many thought-provoking observations, so many amazing facts, you have to read carefully. We are all Cannibals is just intellectual bliss.David Wineberg