Anthropological brotherhood: Lévi-Strauss and Rousseau

Abstract

In the article I present the influence of Rousseau’s philosophy on Lévi-Strauss reflection on the status and vocation of cultural anthropology. He develops this reflection in the context of his readings of Rousseau’s work, which he gives ethnological and anthropological meaning. In the first part of the article, I discuss the issues of two fundamental and complementary texts by Lévi-Strauss about Rousseau, in which he addresses the issue of the conditions for the emergence of ethnology and its internal, theoretical contradictions, the solution for which Lévi-Strauss finds in Rousseau, as well as its practical and political implications. In the second part, I consider the similarities and differences between Lévi-Strauss’s thought and Rousseau’s thought through the prism of the tension between their two tendencies: the political-historical and the contemplative-mystical.