Stay connected to your heritage

Does going back to nature solve our contemporary problems? Rousseau, Gandhi and the era of countercultural romanticism in the 1960s and 70s made people dream of the “noble savage” and a “return to nature,” a panacea for all our maladies.
For anthropologist, Lévi-Strauss, the savage was not intrinsically noble or in any way “closer to nature.” He was withering, for example, when describing the Caduveo, whom he portrayed as a tribe so in rebellion against nature — and thus doomed— that it even shunned procreation, choosing to “reproduce” by abducting children from enemy tribes.
His descriptions of north and south American Indian tribes bear little relation to the sentimental and pastoral clichés that have become commonplace. Lévi-Strauss also made sharp distinctions between the primitive and the modern, focusing on the development of writing and historical awareness. It was an awareness of history, in his view, that allowed the development of science and the evolution and expansion of the west. But he worried about the fate of the contemporary culture, which was “allowing itself to forget or destroy its own heritage,” as he wrote in The New York Review of Books. With the fading of myth’s power in the modern culture, he also suggested that music had taken on myth’s function. Music, he argued, had the ability to suggest, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society.
But Lévi-Strauss rejected Rousseau’s idea that humankind’s problems derive from society’s distortions of nature. In his view, there is no alternative to such distortions. Each society must shape itself out of nature’s raw material, he believed, with law and reason as the essential tools. This application of reason, he argued, created universals that could be found across all cultures and times. He is called a structuralist because of his conviction that a structural unity underlies all of humanity’s mythmaking, and he showed how those universal motifs played out in societies, even in the ways a village was laid out.
For Lévi-Strauss, every culture’s mythology was built around oppositions: hot and cold, raw and cooked, animal and human. And it is through these opposing “binary” concepts, he said, that humanity makes sense of the world.
In his Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture, Lévi-Strauss demonstrated how a structural examination of myth might proceed. He cited a report that in 17th-century Peru, when the weather became exceedingly cold, a priest would summon all those who had who had a harelip, or who were twins. They were accused of being responsible for the weather and were ordered to repent. Why harelips and twins? Lévi-Strauss cited a series of north American myths that associate twins with opposing natural forces: threat and promise, danger and expectation.
Lévi-Strauss’s ideas shook his field. He has clearly indicated the power of myths in shaping the views and destiny of the primitive people. He was also aware of the fading power of myths in our contemporary culture. Should we not reinvent more adequate contemporary myths that include our scientific insights and progressive religion aspirations? At the same time, we need to reconnect ourselves to our past heritage. Without connectedness to the past and rootedness in more contemporary myths, we are doomed.

The writer is professor of science and religion and author of ‘Tamas: There Are Many Alternative Stories’