Farewell to a Universe of Oppositions and Anomalous Gods and Heroes Claude Levi-Strauss (Nov. 28, 1908-Oct. 30, 2009)

The last day of October, a few days into All Souls' Day, the thinker who told us that we live in a universe of opposition - of three circles composed of "A," "Not-A," and the one in the middle that was known as "Not-A and not Not-A."

His name stood out always in any class on anthropology because the smart-alecky at the back row would always link it to the jeans maker. But then again, Claude Levi-Strauss was, like his name, never identified with anthropology or the study of material things. He went beyond his discipline and moved onto the realm of the philosophical and the transcendental.

I thought he died long ago. When the death of Claude Levi-Strauss was announced last Oct. 30, it was anticlimactic, an event that did not matter at all to who he was. He was always this immortal mind, greater than the things he studied and problematized. He was always what he looked into, and what he looked into stayed with us.

He studied myths. That was where I first stumbled upon his name. Mythologiques. Composed of four volumes, the tomes (books are much too small for the span of these studies), looked into the logic of the myth. Logic and Myth - the two words never seem to be related to each other. Myths, before Levi-Strauss, were these mysterious, wild ethereal products of the ancient mind. They did not possess logic and in fact were devoid of.

Myths when used to modify other matters become mythical but not logical, as in gritty and truthful. Until Levi-Strauss started looking into the structures of stories and tales. He saw that there was always an underlying structure. It was a structure of oppositions and valences. A tandem of opposition would lead to another set of oppositions. Each opposition endowed with a value that is either negative or positive. Each opposition bears in the middle an anomalous spot that is neither positive nor negative.

This spot that has no clear value is called the mysterious spot, the mystical site. It is also the place where taboos are located. But what seduced me into the writings of Levi-Strauss is the term he gave to this part of the structure: anomalous area.

This is a wondrous area, the anomalous area. It is a product of many thoughts applied with such conviction by Levi-Strauss. He was not alone in this field. There was Arnold van Gennep, the French folklorist and his theory about the rites of passage: the preliminal, the liminal, and the post-liminal. That characters in folktales all pass through these three states.  This was a huge influence on Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," where the hero undergoes three phases. He departs, is initiated into various challenges and tasks, and returns with power and boon to be distributed to his fellow men.