"When we make the mistake of believing that the savage is governed exclusively by his organic and economic needs, we fail to notice that he addresses the same reproach to us, and that, in his view, his own desire for knowledge appears far more balanced than ours"

Lévi-Strauss, Il pensiero selvaggio

The existence of a mentality different from the Western or modern one, the hallmark of the (wrongly) so-called primitive or uncivilized peoples, was long held to be an undeniable fact. Nevertheless, and although many ethnologists – among them one of the exponents of the "evolutionist" current, such as Sir E. B. Tylor – had studied the "primitive civilizations", it was Lucien Lévy-Bruhl who put forward the hypothesis of a difference in kind in the mode of thought, in the intellect, and even in the logic proper to the various human groups. It was this "armchair" anthropologist (as the academics of the evolutionist school were usually called who did not carry out fieldwork and worked instead on collections and accounts reported by third parties, often non-academics), of philosophical training, who was the first to speak, around 1910, of the existence of a primitive mentality in the "inferior" societies, as he was accustomed to call them.
According to Lévy-Bruhl, one of the main differences between the "primitive" mentality and the "civilized" one lies in the mystical character of the collective representations of primitives. By the term "mystical" the anthropologist did not mean to refer to religious mysticism, as usually happens in Western societies, but rather to the belief in forces and actions that are not perceptible by the senses yet are, nonetheless, real.
The Lévy-Bruhl of the early writings[1] put forward the thesis that "primitive peoples" would not think rationally, unlike the peoples belonging to "modern" or "civilized" societies. From this point of view, what he called the primitive mentality was characterized as a pre-logical mentality, meaning by this a mode of thought that does not strive to avoid contradiction and that obeys instead the principle of the law of participation, in which the affective category of the supernatural stands out. Participation is the principle by means of which the collective representations of a mystical order are connected; that is, by virtue of this principle, beings and objects can at once be themselves and something else. In this way, the author maintained, archaic societies expressly connect levels of reality that would prove irreducible in the eyes of rational experience, and they set down these connections in myths and rites, in which a logic of affect prevails, that is, an emotional perception of the real and of the invisible powers, which before the gaze of primitives are as real as the data of everyday experience. This being so, primitives would grasp the world, from the beings that inhabit it to the ordinary and extraordinary phenomena that take place within it, through intuition, emotion, and feeling, without resorting to logical operations, but only to mystical and pre-logical ones.
Some years later, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, likewise of philosophical training and drawn to the study of mentalities, would devote a large part of his theoretical output to demonstrating the non-existence of "evolutionary stages" in the way human beings think, since, according to the author, humanity would share the same rational mechanisms of thought.
In this short piece we would like to follow the traces of this problem posed by Lévi-Strauss, starting from Il pensiero selvaggio, a text first published in 1962. Our choice to focus our essay on this aspect of the French anthropologist's output is due not only to the fact that, fifty years on, these reflections still continue to dismantle much of the prevailing common sense, but also, and perhaps fundamentally, to the fact that today, as ten years ago, when we were still students of anthropology, the reading of these pages continues to give us the same pleasure. Should our piece manage to awaken in anyone the desire to undertake the adventure of reading them, we would consider ourselves more than satisfied.
Let us return to the crux of the work first cited. Here Lévi-Strauss aims to show – in reply to Lévy-Bruhl – that there are no differences between the intellectual capacities of the "primitives" and those of the "civilized", and that the various forms of knowledge worked out by the former and by the latter are developed systematically in the same way. The author attempts to dismantle the postulates then in vogue, according to which the so-called savage peoples would arrive at knowledge driven solely by the urgency of everyday needs. To this end Lévi-Strauss engaged in a sharp discussion with the functionalists, who asserted that this kind of population knows only those animal or plant species useful for meeting the daily necessities of survival; for these peoples, then, knowledge would be merely the result of the need to solve practical, concrete, circumscribed problems. Faced with this approach Lévi-Strauss is categorical: human populations, the anthropologist writes, declare something useful to the extent that they first know it, and not the other way around; and all populations accumulate knowledge in order to satisfy intellectual needs, even before practical ones.
Now, what are these intellectual needs? Are they culturally determined? According to Lévi-Strauss, thought as such is founded on the demand for order, on the need to classify reality in some way and according to a given parameter. The challenge for the anthropologist, then, lies in the effort to understand whether the groups and relations that every society brings into being – relations that are for the most part particular – do or do not answer to a universal logic that manifests itself culturally. In this sense, it is important to make clear that the whole of Lévi-Strauss's output is traversed by a concern that proves foundational for anthropology, namely the universal-particular tension.
According to Lévi-Strauss, the forms of knowledge that characterize savage societies are magic and mythical thought, whereas the predominant form in Western society would be science. Against the theses then prevailing, according to which mythical thought and magic would represent an evolutionary stage prior to the scientific one, the author is intent on showing, on the one hand, that these are autonomous and parallel systems of knowledge, so that no linear or evolutionary continuity would exist between them. On the other hand, he stresses the great strides made by those kinds of knowledge in the attempt to give order to the world. From this point of view, the aim of magic and of mythical knowledge is the same one that would later guide the work of science: to arrange events in structures that make it possible to order them, to give them a coherence; that contribute, therefore, to a classifying order. Lévi-Strauss states that the "science of the concrete" – as he chose to call it – not only produced real knowledge ten thousand years before science, but still today constitutes the substratum of the modern world. For this reason he prefers to call it a "first" science, rather than a "primitive" one, since – he argues – an extraordinarily scientific mind is needed to arrive at the discoveries made in the Neolithic.

There would thus be a parallelism between the two systems, determined, in the first place, by the fact that magic too is constituted as a well-articulated system of knowledge, and, in the second place, by the observation that both forms of knowledge produce theoretical and practical results, and valid ones at that. Their differences would concern, if anything, the type of phenomena to which they are applied; but this establishes no qualitative difference in the mental operations involved in the exercise of knowing. According to the author, in both cases we are dealing with scientific knowledge, which diverges as regards the way in which it relates to nature, since two different levels of approach to the natural world are at stake: whereas the "science of the concrete" is constituted, as its very name suggests, out of a close proximity to perception, science would tend to move away from it. Nonetheless, even a classification based on sensible properties is better than chaos and constitutes a step toward a kind of rational order. In this sense, Lévi-Strauss undertakes an operation of recovering the richness of myth and rite: these preserve archaic ways of looking, of perceiving, and of classifying, which nonetheless bear witness to how the order of the world was conceived.
The French anthropologist tries to explain the operating mode of that "first science" by resorting to an analogy with bricolage, understood as a technique that allows the creation of works of art out of already-used elements, out of the remains or scraps of other materials. Mythical thought operates, on the intellectual plane, in the same way as the bricoleur on the technical plane: it reassembles remains, scraps, and refuse, obtaining brilliant results, even though it has at its disposal a finite number of possibilities, fixed by the quantity of possible combinations determined by the elements available.
More than in the content of these assemblages, Lévi-Strauss is interested in the structures to which these combinations give rise out of a finite number of elements. Unlike the scientist, mythical thought does not have raw materials suited to the project at its disposal, and therefore must make do with what it has before it. Mythical thought can certainly have a generalizing character, like that of the scientist, but it can do so only by resorting to materials not created specifically for the purpose. Scientific thought, by contrast, generates new occurrences out of prior structures of knowledge; by means of these it organizes events, whether generated with that end in view or produced by the scientific project itself.
The great influence exerted by Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic project on Lévi-Strauss is evident in the fact that the latter foregrounds the relations between elements and not their intrinsic properties. Like the linguists, he holds that meaning does not answer to intrinsic features of the elements, but rather to their structural position. This is an aspect closely bound up with the Lévi-Straussian structuralist project of creating abstract models, apt to grasp the foundations of human societies and to reveal what, in his eyes, constituted the element of primary interest: the "universal grammar of the human intellect".
In this way we can grasp the significance that the peculiarities encountered in each culture acquired for him, insofar as they allowed him to outline a general, universal model to be applied to the whole of humanity. And from this point of view, it seems to us important to stress that, although as a young man he had carried out fieldwork in Brazil, Lévi-Strauss preferred instead to concentrate on the reading and painstaking analysis of ethnographies written by others – a mode of work termed ethnological, that is to say, comparative analysis; this way of working would allow him to build formal models applicable to the whole of humanity, and to this he devoted a large part of his labor.
Unlike the structural-functionalists, who postulated the possibility of identifying the structures that sustained social institutions, Lévi-Strauss holds that the latter remain underlying and that therefore direct observation yields mere appearances, which manifest themselves differently in each culture. For this reason he devotes almost his entire body of work to comparative activity, which will allow him to create universal formal models. Such models can be stated only after grasping the structures underlying human institutions, structures that would make it possible to understand those institutions, despite the cultural diversity that presents them as dissimilar.
There is an element that we consider it important to underline in relation to the contribution offered by Lévi-Strauss's work: unlike the functionalists, who aimed at the detailed understanding of each culture, he is concerned to pose questions common to all human beings. We must not forget that these questions concerning humanity, such as, for example, what is man? why do different cultures exist? constituted the guiding thread of the evolutionist program, which – it is only fair to admit – is the paradigm under which anthropology arises and constitutes itself as a scientific discipline. But if Lévi-Strauss can allow himself to recover some of the fundamental questions of evolutionism, this is due in large part to the fact that he manages to dismantle its ideological basis, with regard to the question of the evolutionary stages of humanity. In some way, having removed that pebble from his shoe – as we believe we have brought to light on the basis of the proposal of Il pensiero selvaggio – Lévi-Strauss finds the way to recover valid postulates of evolutionism that had been set aside by the theoretical currents that followed, while nevertheless rejecting its theoretical project and elaborating new postulates opposed to it.
The awareness that the world is known, classified, contrasted within a system of oppositions (such as the raw and the cooked), that the social and kinship systems of savage peoples are far more complex than had been supposed until then, and that both myth and science are structured on the basis of pairs of opposites that relate to one another logically, allows Lévi-Strauss to reveal the uniqueness of the logical structures common to all human groups, one and the same mental schema, which is, in turn, a reflection of the structure of language.
Having understood that logical coherence and recourse to a criterion capable of ordering the world constitute a constant of thought – put another way, having found a "structure" underlying all human thought – made possible the discovery of those principles – such as binary thought – on the basis of which the entire cultural context takes shape; at the same time, through the formulation of formal models, it became possible to work out a more general theory of the nature of social relations.
Although Lévi-Strauss's work and positions have been widely debated, what has been said continues to constitute, in our view, his fundamental theoretical legacy.

Works consulted
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Il pensiero selvaggio (trad. it. di P. Caruso), Il Saggiatore, Milano 2010.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Tristi tropici (trad. it. di B. Garufi), Il Saggiatore, Milano 2008.

Lévi-Bruhl, Lucien, La mentalità primitiva, Einaudi, Torino 1981.

Lévi-Bruhl, Lucien, L'anima primitiva, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 1990.

Notes

[1] We refer above all to his first three works: Les functions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910), La mentalité primitive (1922), and L'áme primitive (1927). This specification is important, since in his later works the author tends increasingly to return to his initial premises and to revise them to the point of abandoning the initial formulations, something wholly evident in Les carnets de Lucién Lévy-Bruhl, published posthumously in 1949. Here the author states that there is no primitive mentality that can be distinguished from the modern mentality as pre-logical and mystical; rather, there would be a mystical mentality, more pronounced and readily observable among primitives, but active in, and therefore common to, every human spirit.