Wild Pansies in Japan: Claude Lévi‐Strauss as Humanistic Anthropologist

Abstract

The Other Face of the Moon and Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World consist of the lectures Claude LeviStrauss delivered during his five trips to Japan between 1977 and 1988. Beyond offering his insightful interpretations of Japanese society and culture, they force us to reflect on major issues in anthropology. An underlying theme is his lifelong thesis that to understand the self of the West, one must study the other whose “wisdom” points to the end of West’s cultural supremacy. For example, he points out that the issue of biological reproduction versus social paternity—so troubling for “us”—does not exist among peoples whom anthropologists study and that they unhesitatingly give primacy to the social (2013a:57). In Japan, Levi-Strauss spent most of his time in remote areas, meeting with various types of artisans and learning their thoughts about “work.” In the oldest eighth-century myth-histories, Kojiki and Nihongi, he finds a major opposition between life and death, mediated by the third term, the short duration of human life (2013b:15). Of his favorite, The Tale of Genji, which depicts life at the Kyoto imperial court during the Heian Period (794–1185 C.E.), he emphasizes repeatedly that comparable works did not appear in Europe until the 18th century (2013a:115; 2013b:23). He is attracted by its “slow, tangled plot rife with nuance, and evolving characters whose deep-seated motivations escape us, as often happens in real life” and “a melancholic lyricism” that creates a large space “for the feeling for nature as for the sense of the impermanence of things and the unpredictability of beings.” This pathos over the brevity of life has been pointed out as the most important ethos for the Japanese (see Ohnuki-Tierney 2002). But, to my limited knowledge, Levi-Strauss was the first to point to the brevity of life as the third term, overcoming the dualism, mediating between life and death. Another of his discoveries is the “dual refusal”: a refusal of the subject and a refusal of discourse—“the Japanese make