Levi Strauss The Raw And The Cooked Pdf

[Lola Maroun]

Please note that included in this description of the levi-straussian method,are many examples of application that are my own, and which I hope to publishsomeday. Please do not utilize without proper attribution!]

More generally, the idea is that well-understood relationships are usedas metaphors for less understood relationships. I believe that two fundamentalrelationships used for thinking are based on sex and age, as these are the fundamental bases forsocial differentiation (and the only ones universal to all human societies).Consequently, I would expect these two basic ideas to show up in our thinkingabout many things, albeit in transformed ways. More on that later. Levi-strauss didn't talk about age and sex, but he did use elaboration (transformation or developedness) and nature/culture. Elaboration is basically like age. It is about developmental processes. Nature/culture is a more qualitative distinction. Levi-Strauss, in his famous analysis of the raw, the cooked and the rotten, saw this triangle, in native thought, as being formed by the elaboration and nature/culture distinctions. Food starts as Raw, and then is transformed by either natural or cultural processes. Cultural processes yield Cooked food. Natural processes yield Rotten food.

Metaphor is signification via similarity or analogy: the relationship betweensupervisor and subordinate is like the relationship between father and son or mother anddaughter. "The ship plowed the sea".

Metonymy is where the part stands in for the whole. It is fundamentally significationvia juxtaposition and contiguity. Examples of metonymy: "the suits" (executives), the brains (smart people),hands (laborers), HQ (the people in the main office, the governing group), Wall Street (financial sector), skirts (women), "All I have to offer is blood, sweat, andtears." (Technically, some of these are synecdoche (e.g., hands). Synecdoche occurs when we use a part to stand for the whole. Metonymy is when something closely associated is used to stand in for something else, like using "skirts" to refer to women.).

A crown signifies a royalty because of metonymy. But a margarine that uses a crown fora logo uses metonymy to get to royalty and then signifies quality by metaphor: this margarine is to other margarines what royaltyare to other persons. Smoke signifies fire by metonymy, but the "smoking gun" oflawyers is (usually) a metaphor.

Humans readily see opposites. Given the color "white", people recognize"black" as its opposite. When we label skin color as white and black(even though the skin colors of whites and of African Americans are not white orblack), we setourselves up to contrast the races. It seems "natural" that if the colors areopposites, so are the races. White and Brown would not have that sense ofopposition, and, by this theory, might have led to very different racial cognitions and relations.

Given night, we recognize day as the opposite. Given east, there is west. Up - down.In - out. Us -- Them. Nature -- Culture (nurture). This does not mean that we seeeverything in binary. For example, we may contrast land with sea and with air: atrichotomy. But dichotomies are far more common in people's minds. And of course anytrichotomy can be constructed from a pair of dichotomies. Think about the threecolors of traffic lights. Suppose there are two distinctions: First, red light (stop) vs other lights(go), second, Green light (safe) vs other lights (danger). Therefore, themeaning of yellow is "not stop" and "notsafe", which leaves go+danger = caution.

Via analogies, people use dichotomies to think with. For example, if they associateblack with evil, then they will tend to associate the opposite of black (white) with theopposite of evil (good). This creates a kind of calculus:

This is similar to how we navigate streets when we think a city is laid out as a grid.For example, we think: "Comm ave crosses Gloucester st., so they are perpendicular. Gloucester is parallel toberkeley, and boylston is parallel to comm ave, so Gloucester crosses boylston". (Of course, Boston streets are laid out specifically to thwart this kind of thinking.)

Such chains act as a form of mental "derivation" of meaning. A distinction inone realm (research methods) is transformed via a chain of analogical reasoning into adistinction in another realm. Persuasive speeches often have this essential structure. Apolitician for example, compares herself to her opponent. She says of herself that she isfor "compassion for the disadvantaged", leaving the opposite to be associatedwith the opponent.

The culture of organizational theorists is particularly susceptible to levi-straussiananalysis. Here is a summary and some excerpts from a paper given at a recent conference byTom Hench. He starts by comparing the Newtonian view of the physical world with thenonlinear systems view:

If you examine old texts, you see that a paternalistic relationship between manager and employee is not unusual. In fact, the practice of promoting based on seniority almost guarantees the age differences that contribute to this. It is not unusual for a supervisor to think of subordinates as children.

In terms of the two fundamental bases of social differentiation (age and sex), we can see father/son or supervisor/subordinate as basically encoding the age dimension. It is what Levi-Strauss would associate with elaboration or transformation. Cooked vs raw.

Human resource (personnel department) professionals tend to be women. Line managerstend to be men. Both take care of help "bring-up" employees. But in general, theHR dept is more gentle, and is charged with protecting the employee from management abuses-- unfairness, harassment, etc.

"What you know about a man consists in part of flashes of vision as to what he would do in particular situations, how he would look, speak, move; it is by such flashes that you judge whether he is brave or a coward, hasty or deliberate, honest or false, kind or cruel..."

One thing that is interesting to look at is how much of academic thinking is based onancient elements of folk culture. Often what is thought to be a discovery about somethingout there (e.g. organizations, or leadership), is actually a discovery (really, anarticulation) of something in the macro-culture within which researchers are embedded.Possible examples:

When your Intro to OB textbook discusses schools of thought, you will find theoriesoriented towards the tasks/technical aspects of organizations and theories oriented towardthe human/relational aspects, and theories trying to bridge the gap. (Barley says we arein the middle of a relational-dominated wave right now: 15 years from now it will be taskdominated. Although in every age there are contrarians). When you get to the textbook chapter onleadership, it says that there are two kinds of leaders, social (aka expressive) and task (aka instrumental). When you readabout motivation, you find Hertzberg's distinguishing between hygiene factors (pay,security, working conditions, benefits, policies and practices, etc.) and motivators(feelings). When you read about teams, you hear that group development proceeds on twodimensions: task activity (the job) and group process (interpersonal). When you study conflict, you learn there is task and relational conflict. Roles within teamsare either task-oriented (brainstorming) or maintenance roles (managing cohesion, warmth)In decision making, there are rational perspectives versus garbage can and boundedperspectives, as well as cognitive decision making styles which are either left hemisphere(logical) or right hemisphere (relational). In the power chapter you find there are formal(authority, position) and informal (charisma, network) sources of power. Even withinorganizational structures, we understand there are mechanistic structures and there are organic structures.

Here's an idea. All human societies have a division of labor/behavior based on sex andage. there are hunter-gatherer groups that make no other distinctions. Suppose there arereal and enduring differences between people based on sex and age (or, they are culturallydetermined but they have been in place since homo erectus times so they are totallyingrained). These differences are then applied to everything. This kind of metaphorical,analogical thinking seems fundamental to people. It is how totemism works. The differencesbetween the fundamental things (ages and sexes) become tools to think with. When we thinkabout something new, like organizations, we apply our cultural tools and "see" that thereare two kinds of managers, task and social. When we look at our lives, we see that thereis both work and family, professional/personal, etc.

So what effect does age have? The age tools provide us with developmental and stagetheories. Group development moves from forming to storming to norming to performing.Products and organizations and careers all have life cycles. etc etc.

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