Claude Lévi-Strauss´ theory of super-structures

• Grant number: 23/01482-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: May 01, 2023
• End date: October 23, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Theory of Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Marcos Pazzanese Duarte Lanna
• Grantee: Marcos Pazzanese Duarte Lanna
• Host Investigator: Frederic Keck
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Collège de France, France

Abstract

After writing an ethnography of exchange in 1995 ("A dívida divina"), a monography about a small town in Rio Grande do Norte, in subsequent decades I continued research on gift theory as well as acting as advisor of thesis and dissertations around it, as well as the relations between gift and market exchange and the constitution of several hierarchical figures such as patrons priests, politicians, houses in different contexts. I considered these figures as analogous to Oceanic chiefs, but of na inverted kind, who manipulate structures in such a way they manage not to reciprocate or redistribute as expected. In the following decades, I taught, researched and published about C.Lévi-Strauss work, on themes such as the transformation he proposes of sociology (and often a sociology of exchange) into a socio-logic, or a theory of super-structures, one in which the sociological code is relativized and put into perspective, or in oppositions as well as correlated to other codes, therefore encompassed by structures. In "La voie des Masques", Lévi-Strauss demonstrates that the "house" can be a "structure" in some places and times, and that it achieves a "topological turn" ["la maison accomplit une sorte de retournement topologique de l´intérieur en éxtérieur, elle remplace une dualité interne par une unité externe" (pg.161). From this my research proposes a series of questions, such as these: what was Lévi-Strauss´s interest in returning to kinship studies after writing the 4 volumes of Mythologiques? How does his notion of "sociétés à maison" achieves this new reading of kinship? Would he search to build a theory in which infra-structural facts, related to politics, economy, circulation of people could come to be understood as language facts, just as he had done in 1949 in The Elementary Structures of Kinship showing that some forms of marriage in Oceania, Southeast Asia and Australia could be understood as a matrimonial language? Would Lévi-Strauss´s "theory of super-structures a theory of language and communication? What´s the status of the gift in this theory? Contact with Other researchers and professor who are specialists in C.Lévi-Strauss´s work and afiliated to the Laboratorie d´Anthropologie Sociale founded by him at the Collège de France, participating on seminars dedicated to themes such as kinship, myth, art, symbolic production, as well as access to "Fonds Lévi-Strauss" of the Bibliothèque Nacionale de France constitute an ideal situation to investigate these kind of questions.