Claude Lévi-Strauss as a humanist forerunner of cultural macroevolution studies

Abstract

Cross-cultural studies of humans using methods developed in evolutionary biology and comparative linguistics are flourishing. ‘Cultural macroevolution’ has great potential to address fundamental questions of cultural transformation and human history. But this field is poorly integrated with core cultural anthropology, although both aim in part at addressing similar issues. Claude Lévi-Strauss established a comparative approach searching for universals and documentation of diversity to bring understanding to cultural phenomena. Recognizing the nomothetic nature of Lévi-Strauss’ work, his abstraction and modeling, provides an example within anthropology of the search for universals and the study of big data, akin to cultural macroevolution studies. The latter could benefit, beyond the sophisticated analyses of big data mined from ethnographic work, from the integration with the intellectual legacy and practice of core anthropology and thus propitiate the synergistic interaction of disciplines. Attempts of rapprochement of disciplines from the natural sciences that lack pluralism and present a narrow view are deemed examples of ‘Wilson's effect’.