Le sauvage a la mode

Abstract

This collection of lectures [ 1 ], read in the course of 1974?75 at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, under the responsibility of Claude Meillassoux, criti? cizes aspects and implications of what they consider to be a sort of 'Rousseauist' revival in French anthropology inspired by Claude Levi-Strauss. All of the contributors (with the exception of Fabietti) are French anthro? pologists more or less belonging to the Marx? ist tradition in anthropology. And all articles, save Amselle's one on Turnbull, are attacking the ideology of the new 'noble savage' as emerging from the ethnographic work of Americanists like Jaulin, Clastres and Lizot, whose views on anthropology are based upon a profound appreciation of American Indian cultures. Observed from a distance this de? bate turns out to be an internal discussion between two self-designated, apparently divergent categories of Parisian anthropologists: the one more or less identifying with a tradi? tion that is presumed to lead from Marx to Meillassoux, the other with one developing, presumably, from Rousseau to Levi-Strauss. Fundamentally at stake is, after all, the way