Wild Thought (La Pensée sauvage)

Introduction

Lévi-Strauss published the book in 1962 and dedicated it to the memory of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who had died the year before. The French title is a pun: “pensées sauvages” also means wild pansies, which appeared on the cover. Lévi-Strauss argues that the thought of so-called primitive peoples is a “science of the concrete”, which classifies plants, animals and social groups with great precision. Like a bricoleur who works with whatever is at hand, mythical thought recombines existing elements, whereas the engineer designs tools for a project. The book reinterprets totemism as a system of classification. The first English translation (1966) was titled The Savage Mind.

Connections

Builds on

• Course in General Linguistics1916 · Ferdinand de Saussure

Criticizes

• Critique of Dialectical Reason1960 · Jean-Paul Sartre

Taken up in

• Beyond Nature and Culture2005 · Philippe Descola

More works by Claude Lévi-Strauss

• 1955Tristes Tropiques