2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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P HILOSOPHY, NON-PHILOSOPHY, AND SCIENCE
Once again, however, the science in name of which structuralism proceeds toward his
non-philosophical ambition is a science to come: it is a future science of anthropology that
aspires to gain its legitimate status alongside the regular natural sciecne but that, nonethe-
less, will have to wait decades, if not more, befire the goal is accomplished. As in the case
of AI and psychology, structuralism takes itself to be scientific, to be, in its case, a social
science. Similarly, however, the social scientists, although they all greatly esteem the ac-
complishments of the upcoming discipline, are quick to point out that structuralism is too
enamored of “grand theories” and “rationalistic generalizations” to really belong with the
empirical sciences. For example, the British anthropologist Edmund Leach, himself an ad-
mirer and sometimes a follower of Lévi-Strauss, had the following comment on Lévi-
Strauss’ first book, The Elementary Structures of Kinship:
This work is of interest to all anthropologists even though its details are
open to the same kind of objections ass before—namely, that Lévi-Strauss
is liable to become so fascinated by the logical perfection of the “systems”
nhe is describing that he disregards the e,mmpirical facts. 55
Similar sentiments are echoed on the opposite side of the Atlantic by Clifford Geertz, when
he says that
in Lévi-Strauss’s work the two faces of anthropology—as a way of going
at the world and as a method of uncovering lawful relations among empirical
facts—are turned in toward one another so as to force a direct confrontation
between them rather than (as it is more common among ethnologists)
out away from one another as to avoid such a confrontation and the inward
stresses that go with it. This accounts both for the power of its work and for
its general appeal. […] But it also accounts for the more intraprofessional
suspicion that what is presented as High Science may really be an ingenious
and somewhat roundabout attempt to defend a metaphysical position, advance
an ideological argument, and serve a moral cause. 56
55. Edmund Leach, Claude Lévi-Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970) 109. This opposition
between ingenious and potentially fertile ideas that are pushed too far for their own’s sake unless
they are tamed by a robust dose of empiricism, is the constant leitmotiv of Leach’s book, perhaps the
most popular introduction to Lévi-Strauss’s thought in English-speaking countries