经济学人04:思想界最后的巨人克洛德·列维-斯特劳斯

搜索关注在线英语听力室公众号：tingroom，领取免费英语资料大礼包。

　　逝者

　　Claude Lévi-Strauss

　　克洛德·列维-斯特劳斯

　　Claude Lévi-Strauss, anthropologist², died on October 30th, aged³ 100.

　　人类学家克洛德·列维-斯特劳斯于10月30日逝世，享年100岁。

　　Before Claude Lévi-Strauss revolutionised the discipline, anthropology⁴ in France, and generally elsewhere, was a matter of ill-attended lectures in small, cold halls, and the collection of feathers and fish-hooks as evidence of the quaint⁵ divergences⁶ of the “primitive⁷” tribes of mankind. He made it as fashionable as philosophy and poetry, both of which he wove through his ethnographical studies as perhaps only French intellectuals can. The proper study of mankind was indeed man: not in his politicking⁸, warring or banking⁹, but naked, painting his body, hunting bears, snaring¹⁰ birds. Here lay the universal truths about how the human mind worked and what man was.

　　在克洛德·列维-斯特劳斯变革这门学科之前，无论在法国，还是世界其它地方，人类学普遍是下面的情形：又小又冷的讲堂，冷冷清清的课堂，各色的羽毛和鱼钩（作为人类“原始”族群文化多样性的证物）。列维-斯特劳斯让人类学变成了和哲学、诗歌一样时髦的东西，并把这两种元素融入进自己的民族学著作中，这恐怕只有法国的知识分子才办得到。研究人类就应该纯粹去研究人：不是披着政客、士兵或银行家外衣的那类人，而是赤身裸体、肤着油彩、猎熊捕鸟的这类人。这里存在着关于人类思考模式及人之本性的普遍真理。

　　Obedient to Rousseau, who always “set him aflame”, Mr Lévi-Strauss observed men from afar. He never got too near or stayed too long in his rare stints¹¹ of field-work, mostly in Brazil in the 1930s; he grasped only a few words of the languages, and avoided the “hateful” distractions¹² of individual characters. In the bitter phrase of Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom he sparred for years, he preferred to view men like ants. He focused not on their differences but on the deep-lying patterns and systems in everything they did, until he could proclaim that all tribal¹³ myths were reducible to one formula, and that all human thought, “savage¹⁴” or not, was built up from binary¹⁵ opposites such as hot and cold, night and day, raw and cooked, good and bad. Round these concepts whole societies, as well as stories, were organised.

　　列维-斯特劳斯是卢梭的忠实信徒，后者的思想经常让他“热血沸腾”，所以，斯特劳斯是用一种超然于物外的态度观察的人类。在他屈指可数的几次田野调查中（多数都是1930年代在巴西完成的），他从不和当地的族群走得太近，也不久留，所以土著语也说不了几句，并极力避免让“可恶”的个人性格特点干扰自己的研究。和他口上交锋多年的让-保罗·萨特曾用辛辣的语言评价列维-斯特劳斯，说他喜欢把人类看成是一堆蚂蚁。斯特劳斯做观察时，会忽略掉族群间的差异，而是注重隐秘于所有行为下面共通的模式和系统，直到他可以将所有族群的神话都归到同一个方程式。除此之外，人类所有的思考——无论是“野蛮人”的想法，还是“文明人”的思维——都是一种二元对立结构，像冷和热、白天和黑夜、生食和熟食、好和坏。所有社会，无一例外，都是围绕这些对立的概念构建而成的，各种的神话故事就更不用说了。

　　Mr Lévi-Strauss, throwing down the gauntlet in “La Pensée Sauvage” in 1962, saw nothing primitive about the tribes he studied. Totemism, for example, was a system as complex as the Linnaean classification. In tribal myths, apparently¹⁶ diverse and arbitrary elements—eruptions by lizards¹⁷ and woodpeckers, the significance of black arrows or the artemisia plant—were suddenly revealed to have a universal unity¹⁸ at their heart, a quest for objective knowledge and origins as acute as any in the West. The minds behind them were not savage, just “untamed”. The salient difference was that his tribesmen stayed within their limits, simply putting the materials they had together in new ways, like handymen or bricoleurs. “Civilised” man, on the other hand, tried to defy his constraints¹⁹ and change the world with new inventions, like an engineer.

　　列维-斯特劳斯在1962年出版了《野性的思维》一书，等于是（向萨特）下的战书。斯特劳斯认为自己研究的原始族群一点都不原始。比如，图腾这个系统的复杂程度堪比林奈的植物学分类体系。族群神话中那些表面看起来复杂任意的元素——比如蜥蜴、啄木鸟和火山爆发，比如黑色的箭或是蒿类植物的特殊含义——如果究其内核，会突然显现出协同一致性，那是一种对于客观知识和万物由来的探求，当中表现出的急切感不亚于西方任何一次同类的探求。神话背后折射出的不是一群野蛮人的思维，只是“未驯服的”思维。斯特劳斯笔下的原始人和我们明显不同的地方在于，他们并不逾越自身所处的限度，而只是把已有的东西换一种方式重新组合而已，就像杂活工一样。而“文明”人则好像工程师：通过创新发明来藐视人类自身的局限，来改变世界。

　　The world needed both these types, said Mr Lévi-Strauss. And he embodied²⁰ both. He too hopped²¹ from subject to subject like a bricoleur, discarding philosophy for its arid²² moralising, giving up law out of sheer boredom²³, vaunting socialism until it tired him, turning to anthropology as if he was still a fascinated boy in a curio shop. He abandoned theories like scorched²⁴ earth in the forest. But the far-sighted engineer in him set up a “laboratory” at the Collège de France, where he held the brand-new chair of social anthropology from 1959 to 1982, and produced the four huge volumes of “Mythologiques” (1964-71), in which he tracked 813 myths the length of the American continent. He happily called himself both “neolithic” and a man of science.

　　这两种类型，列维-斯特劳斯说，世界缺了哪种都不行。而两种在他身上都有所体现。他也像杂活工一样，不断在各种行当间跳来跳去：先是放弃了哲学，因为讨厌那些枯燥的道德训诫；后又放弃了法律，只是因为厌倦了；还一直热衷歌颂社会主义，但也是以厌倦收场。当他转向人类学的时候，似乎仍然像一个走进奇异玩意店的好奇的孩子（因为他以往抛弃种种理论就象抛下森林大火留下的焦土一样没有顾忌）。但是他身体里那个富有远见的工程师这时出动了：他在法兰西学院创立了“实验室”，在这个崭新的教席上传播他的社会人类学思想，从1959年开始，直到1982年。他还拿出了四卷名为《神话学》(1964-1971)的鸿篇巨制，在书里，他跟踪了813个神话的传播轨迹，幅度跨越整个美洲大陆。他既喜欢自称为新石器时代的人，也爱说自己是搞科学研究的。

　　The underlying²⁵ order

　　隐蔽的秩序

　　Generations of students considered him the father of structuralism—the theory of underlying order in everything. This annoyed him. He invoked²⁶ the word in the 1950s mostly in homage²⁷ to linguists²⁸ like Roman Jakobson, who had posited²⁹ binary opposites (voiced and voiceless elements) as the building blocks of language. Thereafter structuralism had become a “vogue”, he thought, “besmirched” by being wrongly applied³¹, and weirdly³² linking him with thinkers—Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault—with whom he had nothing in common.

　　列维-斯特劳斯在一代又一代学生的眼中都是“结构主义”（研究万物表面之下隐性秩序的理论）的缔造者，斯特劳斯本人对此很是无可奈何。他在1950年代使用这个词的时候，主要是为了向罗曼·雅各布森（认为语言是由清音和浊音这两种二元对立的元素所构成）一样的语言学家致敬。自那时起，斯特劳斯认为，结构主义便俨然成了一个“时髦的东西”，但却总是被误用或滥用，于是，这个词的纯粹性就受到了“玷污”。令他甚为诧异的是，“结构主义”竟把他和雅克·拉康或是米歇尔·福柯这样的思想家联系到一块儿，他们之间其实毫无共同点。

　　But there was really no avoiding structure in his life. He loved Rameau’s music, Poussin’s paintings. His own career appeared to contain a fair element of chance: the second world war, with exile in New York, that led him to Jakobson, or his meetings with Max Ernst and André Breton, who taught him to look at objects with a surrealist’s eye. And yet possibly all this too, as he wrote in “Tristes Tropiques” in 1955, exemplified how, over time, “events without any apparent connection, and originating from incongruous periods and places…suddenly crystallise into a sort of edifice³³ conceived by an architect…”

　　但是关于他的生活，却没任何（因为模糊或指代不清而）需要回避的东西。他喜欢拉莫的音乐，喜欢普桑的绘画。他自己的职业生涯中似乎包含着相当部分的机缘成分在里面：比如二次大战流亡纽约时与雅各布森的结识，或是和马克斯·厄恩斯特及安德烈·布勒东的会面（教他用超现实的眼光看待客观事物）。但是，也许所有的这些同样证明了他在《忧郁的热带》(1955)中的那个表述：“一些看起来毫不相关的事件，发生于不同的地方，来源自不同的时期...... 突然结晶成某种纪念物，好像是建筑师所精心设计出来的......”

　　Ever diffident and retiring, he wished to be remembered only for his “moment in anthropological³⁴ thought”: an effort at systematising cultures as profound, he hoped, as what Marx had done for ideologies³⁵, or Freud for dreams. Proselytising was left to his difficult, often beautiful, books and the pages of his journal L’Homme. The existentialists, and all who thought that man should be studied as an individual rather than en bloc³⁰, noisily attacked him. He dismissed their “shop-girl metaphysics”.

　　列维-斯特劳斯向来谦虚谨慎、不喜抛头露面，他只希冀于人们记住自己在“人类学思想史上那片刻的辉煌”：即针对文化的系统化作出的努力；他希望自己的研究能够引起像马克思之于意识形态、弗洛伊德之于梦的诠释一样深刻的影响。改变人们思想观念的任务就交给了他那些通常装帧精美、却异常艰深的著作，还有他在自己创办的《人类》学刊中发表过的文章。存在主义哲学家和所有认为人应该作为个体而非群体进行研究的人都七嘴八舌地攻击他。他对这些人的想法很是不屑，认为是“商店女店员式的形而上”。

　　Before his immense age turned him into a national treasure for thinkers of all stripes and none, greens claimed him, and he was happy to be claimed. The consumer filth³⁶ and monoculture of the “civilised” world had depressed³⁷ him ever since the writing of “Tristes Tropiques”. As he faded, he mourned the vanishing of the tribes. “Primitive” man was not nobler or purer than he was, but they were, in the deepest sense, connected: for universal laws linked his thinking, in all its book-lined complexity³⁸, to that of the Indian clad only in tree-bark, trailing a deer along a forest path.

　　古树般的高龄让他成了国宝级的人物，其实在被认为是“所有流派（和无流派）思想者的财富”之前，绿色主义者就对他心有戚戚，他也很乐于得到这些人的肯定。消费时代的单一文化令他心生厌倦，早在写作《忧郁的热带》之时，他就对“文明”社会表现出了失望感。伴随着自己黄金时代的慢慢远逝，他同时为日渐消失的原始族群感到惋伤。“原始”人虽不如他文明，却在最深层的意义上与他连结：因为统一的法则将他们各自的思维联系在一起；尽管他的思维穿的是书籍作衬里由复杂编织出外衣，而沿林间路追逐鹿的印第安人的思维外衣只是树皮衣。

分享到：