Quick Answer
Start by ignoring the English title, which says the opposite of what the book argues. The French means untamed thought, and the argument is that the thinking of societies without writing is not an early draft of science but a fully developed intellectual practice organised around sensory qualities rather than abstractions. The demolition of the category of totemism is superb. The method that produces it cannot be tested, and that is the standing objection.
Key Takeaways
- The title is a mistranslation that inverts the book's whole point.
- Classification by sensory quality is rigorous, not a failed attempt at abstraction.
- Bricolage is the concept that escaped and is now used everywhere.
- Totemism was largely invented by anthropologists, and the chapter dismantling it is the best part.
- The method cannot fail, which is why structuralism did not survive as a research programme.
🕑 15 min read
The Title Problem
Begin here, because it has caused sixty years of confusion.
The French title is La Pensee sauvage. Sauvage means wild or untamed, as in a wild plant, and the phrase carries a pun the English cannot: the wild pansy, pensee sauvage, which is the flower pictured on the original cover.
What Levi-Strauss meant was thought in its uncultivated state, as against thought that has been domesticated by writing, schooling and formal method. He did not mean savage.
The English title imports precisely the hierarchy of civilised and primitive that the book was written to destroy, and it has led generations of readers to assume the argument is the opposite of what it is. A recent retranslation renders it as wild thought, which is correct and arrived about fifty years late.
Which edition: the older Chicago translation is the one most people own and the one most secondary literature cites. A newer translation exists with the better title and improved apparatus. Either is fine for the argument; the newer is easier.
Who Levi-Strauss Was
Born in Brussels in 1908 to a French Jewish family, Levi-Strauss trained in philosophy and law before taking a teaching post in Brazil in the mid-1930s, where he did the fieldwork among Amazonian peoples that supplied his examples for the rest of his life.
He returned to France, was dismissed under the anti-Jewish laws of the Vichy regime, and escaped to New York in 1941. The years there were decisive: he met the linguist Roman Jakobson, whose structural phonology gave him the method he would apply to everything else.
He returned to France after the war, published on kinship, then on myth in a four-volume sequence, and became one of the dominant intellectual figures of the century. He died in 2009, aged a hundred.
The fieldwork was relatively brief. He was a theorist working with other people's ethnography for most of his career, and that is both why he could see patterns across hundreds of societies and why specialists in particular regions often objected to what he did with theirs.
What He Was Arguing Against
The position he was attacking had been respectable and was still widely held.
Earlier anthropology, particularly the school associated with Lucien Levy-Bruhl, had proposed that so-called primitive peoples thought in a fundamentally different way: pre-logical, mystical, participating in the world rather than analysing it, unable or unwilling to distinguish cause from resemblance.
Alongside this ran the evolutionary assumption that magic, religion and science were sequential stages, with magic as a failed proto-science and religion as an intermediate stage, an argument associated with Frazer and enormously influential.
Both accounts placed European thought at the end of a line and everybody else somewhere behind on it.
Levi-Strauss's counter-position: there is one human intellect. The difference is not capacity or logic but the objects to which the logic is applied and the aims it serves. Mythical thought and scientific thought are two strategies, both rigorous, both classificatory, operating on different levels.
The Science of the Concrete
The opening chapter is the book's best and the phrase is its most useful coinage.
Scientific thought, on this account, works by abstracting away from sensory qualities: it wants mass, charge, wavelength, properties that persist when appearances change. Mythical thought does the reverse. It builds its system out of exactly the qualities the senses deliver, and it treats them as the significant features.
Raw and cooked. Wet and dry. High and low. Fresh and rotten. Left and right. Edible and inedible. These are not vague impressions; they are the terms of a classificatory apparatus, applied consistently, generating an ordered account of the world.
His claim is that this is intellectually serious work. It satisfies the same demand for order that drives science, it produces systems of great internal consistency, and it is not an inability to abstract but a different decision about what to build with.
How Much They Actually Knew
The evidence he brings is the part of the book that lands hardest, and it is worth being specific.
He assembles reports of the botanical and zoological knowledge held by peoples described in the earlier literature as pre-logical. Groups distinguishing hundreds of plant species by name, with detailed knowledge of habitat, season, growth stage, medicinal property and use. Classifications of insects, reptiles and birds finer than any European folk taxonomy and in some cases anticipating distinctions formal biology made later.
The observation that follows is a good one: this knowledge is far in excess of what subsistence requires. Nobody needs to name and classify hundreds of species they will never eat, use or encounter as a hazard. The knowledge exists because these societies find the world interesting, and are doing intellectual work for the same reason anyone does.
The desire to know is not a luxury that appears once material needs are met; it is a standing human demand that operates at every level of technology. That single observation dismantles a great deal. The picture of pre-industrial peoples as absorbed in survival, with culture and thought as later refinements available only to those with leisure, turns out to be a projection. They were classifying beetles they had no use for, in enormous detail, because a mind that can classify will classify.
Bricolage
The concept that escaped this book and went everywhere.
Levi-Strauss contrasts two figures. The engineer works from a plan, specifies the materials the plan requires, and obtains them. The bricoleur, roughly a handyman or tinkerer, works with a stock of whatever has accumulated: leftovers, salvage, things kept because they might be useful.
The bricoleur's materials carry a history. Each piece was previously part of something else, and its previous use clings to it. To make something new, the bricoleur asks what the available stock could be turned into, rather than what the job requires.
Mythical thought, he argues, is bricolage. It does not invent new conceptual elements; it rearranges a finite stock of images, creatures, relationships and oppositions already present in the culture, and the meanings each element carries from previous arrangements come with it.
This explains a real feature of myth: its elements are so few and so repetitive, and its combinations so various. It also explains why myths cannot be paraphrased into propositions, since the meaning is in the arrangement rather than in the pieces.
The term has since been borrowed by design, by literary theory, by education, by software engineering, and by anyone describing making do inventively with what is on hand.
The Demolition of Totemism
The strongest single argument in the book, developed here and in a companion volume published the same year.
Totemism, as anthropology had constructed it, was the belief that a social group stands in a special mystical relationship to a particular animal or plant species, descends from it, identifies with it, and is forbidden to eat it.
Levi-Strauss argues the category is an artifact. Anthropologists assembled it from scattered practices in unrelated societies, treated the assemblage as a single institution, and then looked for the mystical psychology that would explain it.
His alternative is elegant and it is the book's central methodological demonstration. The groups are not saying they are like bears. They are using the differences between natural species as a code for expressing differences between social groups. Bears differ from eagles; clan A differs from clan B; the natural difference is borrowed to carry the social one because it is ready to hand, publicly visible and needs no explanation.
Hence his formulation that natural species are chosen not because they are good to eat but because they are good to think with. What matters is not the animal's qualities but its position in a system of contrasts.
Binary Oppositions
The method underlying everything, and the place to apply pressure.
Levi-Strauss took from structural linguistics the idea that meaning arises from difference. A sound in a language means nothing in itself; it functions by contrasting with the other sounds available. He generalised: cultural elements likewise signify through their oppositions, and the analyst's task is to recover the system of contrasts.
So myths get analysed into paired terms, sky and earth, raw and cooked, life and death, and the relations between the pairs.
The productive version of this is genuinely illuminating and it made sense of a great deal of material that had looked arbitrary.
The problem is that binary opposition is a tool that never comes up empty. Given any body of material and sufficient ingenuity, oppositions can be found, and where they are not obvious they can be reached by treating one term as an inverted or transformed version of another. Levi-Strauss uses that move frequently.
An analysis that always succeeds is not being constrained by its object, and this is the criticism structuralism never answered.
The Problem of History
The second major objection, and it goes deeper than method.
Structural analysis looks for the system as it stands. It is not interested in how the system arrived, what it was before, or what pressures are changing it. The societies analysed appear as arrangements rather than as communities with histories.
This has consequences that are not merely academic. The peoples Levi-Strauss discusses were, at the time he wrote, living through colonisation, dispossession, epidemic and forced settlement. None of that appears. A structural account of a classification system says nothing about who is imposing it, who is disadvantaged by it, or what happened to the people using it.
Later anthropology moved sharply in the other direction, toward history, power and the particular, and the movement was substantially a reaction against this.
In fairness: Levi-Strauss addresses history directly in the final chapter and denies that he is dismissing it. His position is that historical explanation is one kind of intelligibility among others and has no special claim. That is a defensible philosophical position and it does not answer the political objection.
The Attack on Sartre
The final chapter is a sustained assault on Sartre's philosophy of history, and most readers should know what it is before deciding whether to read it.
Sartre had argued that history is the medium in which human beings make themselves, that historical consciousness is what distinguishes the fully human, and by implication that societies without historical self-understanding are less than fully realised.
Levi-Strauss's reply is that this is the old hierarchy in a new outfit: privileging historical consciousness makes European modernity the standard again and everyone else a preliminary. He argues that history is one code for organising human experience, that other societies use other codes with equal sophistication, and that the preference for history reflects our position rather than any general truth.
The chapter is polemical, assumes familiarity with Sartre's work, and was a significant event in French intellectual life at the time. A reader who is not invested in that dispute can skip it without losing the book's argument.
The Objections That Stuck
Three, beyond the method and history problems already covered.
Universality. Levi-Strauss grounds his structures in universal properties of the human mind, and the evidence for that grounding is the structures themselves. The circularity is real and he never escaped it.
The material. He worked overwhelmingly from published ethnography, and specialists have frequently objected that his use of their regions' material is selective, that context is stripped, and that the versions of myths he analyses are chosen because they fit.
Agency. Nobody in a structural analysis does anything. The structure operates; people are its medium. That has been criticised as both empirically false and ethically evasive, and it is the criticism that did the most to end structuralism's dominance.
What Survived
The method did not, as a research programme. Almost nobody now does structural analysis in the manner of the myth volumes.
What survived is larger than the method.
The refusal of the primitive category is now simply the position of the field. Nobody in anthropology argues that some peoples think pre-logically, and the change is substantially attributable to this argument.
The idea that meaning is relational and arises from systems of difference passed into literary theory, semiotics, philosophy and cultural analysis, and remains foundational there. Post-structuralism is named for what it came after.
Bricolage escaped entirely and is now a word people use without knowing where it came from.
And the science-of-the-concrete argument has been vindicated from an unexpected direction: the recognition of traditional ecological knowledge as a genuine body of expertise, sought out by conservation biologists and land managers, is exactly the point he was making with less practical urgency in 1962.
How to Read It
Honest practical advice, because this book defeats a lot of people.
Read Tristes Tropiques first if you have not. It is his fieldwork memoir, it is one of the great books of the century by any measure, it is beautifully written, and it shows what the theory was built out of.
Then read chapters one and two of this book, which contain the science of the concrete and bricolage and are the most valuable part.
Then the totemism material, which is the clearest demonstration of the method doing real work.
Skip the final chapter unless you care about Sartre.
And expect the examples to come faster than you can absorb them. He moves between Australian, Amazonian, North American and African material in consecutive sentences, assuming the reader will follow the structural point without needing the ethnographic context. Following the argument rather than the examples is the correct strategy.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you are interested in myth as a mode of thought rather than as a collection of stories, because this is the most serious attempt to say what kind of thinking it is.
Read it if you want the argument that dismantled the primitive category, made in full rather than as a slogan.
Read it alongside Campbell for the instructive contrast: both look for universal patterns in myth, and where Campbell finds a single story with psychological meaning, Levi-Strauss finds a logic with no message at all.
Do not read it as an introduction to anthropology, do not expect it to be about any particular people, and do not be discouraged by the first fifty pages, which are the hardest.
The transferable idea here is that a classification is an argument. Every system for sorting things, including the ones you use daily without noticing, embeds a claim about which differences matter and which do not. Levi-Strauss's peoples were not being quaint when they organised the world into wet and dry, or raw and cooked; they were asserting that those distinctions carry information. Look at how you sort people, work, days or foods, and the categories will tell you what you actually believe is significant, which is frequently not what you would say if asked. That is a genuinely useful piece of self-examination and it requires no fieldwork at all.
A terrible English title on a book that deserved better.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. A newer translation exists under a more accurate title, and our reasons for preferring it are set out above.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Savage Mind about?
Claude Levi-Strauss's 1962 argument that the thought of societies without writing is not a primitive stage on the way to science but a different and equally rigorous intellectual practice, working by classification of sensory qualities rather than by abstraction.
Why is the English title misleading?
The French is La Pensee sauvage, which puns on wild thought and on the wild pansy, a flower pictured on the original cover. Sauvage means untamed rather than savage, and the English title implies exactly the hierarchy the book spends two hundred pages demolishing.
Who was Claude Levi-Strauss?
A French anthropologist, 1908 to 2009, who did fieldwork in Brazil in the 1930s, spent the war years in New York, and founded structural anthropology by applying methods from structural linguistics to kinship, classification and myth.
What is bricolage?
His term for the way mythical thought works: assembling meaning from whatever materials are already at hand, each carrying a history of previous uses, as against the engineer who specifies materials in advance from a plan. It has become a widely used concept far beyond anthropology.
What is the science of the concrete?
His name for the classificatory systems of societies without writing, which organise the world through observable sensory qualities such as raw and cooked, wet and dry, sky and earth, and which are frequently extraordinarily detailed and accurate about local nature.
What is his account of totemism?
That the anthropological category of totemism was largely an invention of anthropologists. Groups do not identify with particular animals out of mystical kinship; they use differences between natural species as a ready-made code for expressing differences between social groups.
Is the book difficult?
Yes. The prose is dense, the examples come rapidly from dozens of unrelated societies with minimal context, and the argument moves by demonstration rather than by exposition. The final chapter is a technical attack on Sartre that most readers can skip.
What are the main criticisms?
That the binary oppositions are imposed rather than found, that the method is unfalsifiable because any material can be arranged into oppositions, that it ignores history, power and individual agency, and that it treats living societies as specimens of a structure.
Does he argue all cultures are equal?
He argues that the intellectual capacity behind them is the same and that the difference is one of aim and method rather than of stage. He does not claim the two modes are interchangeable, and he is clear that they are good at different things.
Is structuralism still influential?
As a method it has largely been superseded, and its influence on later thought was enormous. Post-structuralism, literary theory, semiotics and a great deal of cultural analysis developed by extending or attacking positions that begin here.
Should you read Tristes Tropiques first?
Many readers should. It is his memoir of fieldwork in Brazil, beautifully written, far more accessible, and it shows the person behind the method. This book is the theoretical statement and assumes you already want it.
Who should read it?
Anyone interested in how classification works, in myth as a mode of thought rather than a set of stories, or in the history of twentieth-century thought. It is demanding and its central argument is worth the demand.
The people classifying beetles were doing what you are doing
The lasting effect of this book, on anyone who takes it seriously, is that it becomes impossible to look at an unfamiliar system of belief and see confusion. What you are looking at is a classification, built by people who found the world interesting enough to organise, working with the materials available to them and to a standard of internal consistency that is frequently higher than your own. You may still think it is wrong about the facts. You will not be able to think it is stupid, and that change of posture is worth more than any particular conclusion in the book.
Sources & References
- Levi-Strauss, Claude (1962). La Pensee sauvage; English as The Savage Mind and later as Wild Thought.
- Levi-Strauss, C. (1962). Totemism, the companion volume.
- Levi-Strauss, C. (1955). Tristes Tropiques.
- Levy-Bruhl, Lucien. Writings on so-called pre-logical mentality, the position being refuted.
- Jakobson, Roman. Structural phonology, the source of the method.
- Critical literature on structuralism, its unfalsifiability and its neglect of history.
- Research on traditional ecological knowledge and folk taxonomy.