Faded Genes

Claude Lévi-Strauss, chronicler of primitive man and cultural forensic dietitian, has died at the age of 100. Being French gave him a unique insight into the great unwashed, and he transformed Western thinking about the indigenous peoples they had been exploiting for millennia. He identified “structures” that underlie all human behavior, regardless of culture. His reinterpretation of the native mythology of the Americas was captured in his 4-volume work, where he pondered the differences in meaning between roasted and boiled food, reasoning that cannibals tended to boil their friends and roast their enemies. The wishy-washy genius at the same time championed the native tribes as not being intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, as had been the prevailing thought, while worrying about the homogenization of the world, as in their development these primitive cultures grew closer to modern Western ways. For all his intellect, he apparently was unfamiliar with the theory that nothing can be measured without being affected, so if he’d kept his big trap shut, Mabobo and his friends could have kept their sophisticated and distinct culture, blissfully unaware of the siren call of the Big Mac. Levi-Strauss had an abundance of critics, and he conceded he did little field work, preferring to think about primitive tribes than interact with them. His staggering genius was best captured in the slightly fictionalized cinematic biopic Krippendorf’s Tribe.