Sontag, S. The Anthropologist as Hero (Translated by Kulagina-Yartseva, V. S.)

Abstract: In her article Susan Sontag provides a review of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ works underlying his attitude to the profession of the anthropologist as the profession related to ‘spiritual responsibility like a creative artist’ or a psychoanalyst has. Susan Sontag gives the highest appraisal to Clause Levi-Strauss’ work ‘Tristes Tropiques’ saying that it is ‘one of the greatest books of our century’. Levi-Strauss was born in 1908 and belonged to the circle of Sartre, Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty. Being disappointed in philosophy, Clause Levi-Strauss began to study anthropology and in 1935 he went to Sao Paulo as a professor of anthroplogy. It is Susan Sontag’s opinion that his ‘Tristes Tropiques’ is an ‘intellectual biography and an example of personal history’. Due to his profession, the anthropologist divides the world into the ‘internal’ and ‘external’, domestic and exotic, academic urban world and tropics. The anthropologist also deliberately uses his own intellectual estrangement. According to Clause Levi-Strauss, anthropology is the method of political non-involvement and therefore the profession of anthropologist demands true impartiality. The anthropologist, first of all, is a witness and therefore it is an illusion that he can be taught only the theory. In his ‘Structural Anthropology’ Levi-Strauss describes the method for analyzing and recording myths that can be processed on the computer. Levi-Strauss also applies strict formalism to traditional topics of blood relation, totemism, the balance between myth and ritual and so on.

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