Relativism and Rationality in the Social SciencesHow Natives Think. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl , Lilian A. Clare

Abstract

Lucien Levy-Bruhl, a philosopher who became an armchair anthropologist, continues to be of interest to both anthropologists and philosophers. His first and most important anthropological work, How Natives Think, was originally published in 1910 and translated into English only in 1926-three years after his second and next most important anthropological work had been translated: Primitive Mentality, originally published in 1922. For this reprint of How Natives Think anthropologist C. Scott Littleton has written a provocative fifty-page introduction. He argues that Levy-Bruhl has been both less reviled (pp. xxi-xxvii) and more influential (pp. xxvii-xlii) among anthropologists than is recognized. Levy-Bruhl, he claims, anticipated, if not abetted, the trend in anthropology toward cognitive relativity. There are various kinds of relativism. Moral relativism denies that