Differentiation and Undifferentiation in Levi-Strauss and Current Critical Theory

Abstract

The conclusion of Claude Levi-Strauss' L'Homme nu, entitled Finale, asserts that myth embodies a principle of differentiation identical with language and thought.1 Ritual, on the other hand, tries to retrieve an immediacy. Ritual tries to undo the work of language. Fortunately, Levi-Strauss adds, this perverse undertaking will never succeed. The undifferentiated of ritual can only be made up of objects already differentiated by language and artifically pieced together. Unlike immediacy, about which we will speak later, the notion of undifferentiated certainly corresponds to part of what goes on in rituals all over the world: promiscuous sexual encounters, the overturning of hierarchies, the supposed metamorphosis of the participants into each other or into monstrous beings, etc. One cannot agree, however, that rituals are committed to this undifferentiated once and for all. All great traditional interpretations, notably the Hindu and the Chinese, attribute to ritual the end which Levi-Strauss would reserve to myth alone: differentiation. Before structuralism, no anthropologist had expressed a different view. Levi-Strauss would reply that in all the examples that seem to verify my objection, language has been reintroduced and a secondary effect of differentiation has occurred, alien to ritual as such. Yet, there are innumerable instances of ritual differentiation visibly independent from the words that may or may not accompany them. In all rites de passage, for instance, the temporary loss of identity, or whatever ordeal the postulant may undergo, fits very well the conception of Levi-Strauss but only