Hugh Lopes Williams, ‘Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Political Paradoxes of Structural Anthropology‘ – Journal of the History of Ideas blog

In 1952, Claude Lévi-Strauss, then a respected but by no means famous anthropologist, published the short book Race and History, commissioned by UNESCO as part of its drive to present arguments against racial prejudice from a variety of social-scientific perspectives. Apart from sparking an acrimonious exchange in French intellectual circles between Lévi-Strauss and the colonial apologist Roger Caillois, the book was largely a non-event for Lévi-Strauss’s career, which would only blossom into its maturity later that decade. The book’s argument centered around the premise that evolutionist frameworks in cultural history and anthropology were overly convenient and politically suspect ways of interpreting the fact of cultural diversity, which were by then, comfortably situated in the ethical paradigm of cultural relativism developed by Franz Boas forty years earlier.