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"Every student...will welcome the chance
of makingthe acquaintance ofwhat is on all sides
acknowledged to be an anthropological classic."
—Times Literary Supplement
NATIVES
THINK
BYLUCIEN LEVY-BRUHL
L
Introduction by Dr. Ruth Bunzel
n
WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS
Digitized by the Internet Archive
2009
in
http://www.archive.org/details/hownativesthinkOOIv
f
Lucien Levy-Bruhl, philosopher, sociologist,
Sjflf
and ethnologist, was bom on April 10, 1857 and
died on March 13, 1939, his incisive intellect
notat allbluntedby age.
\f/ Levy-Bruhl taught in several lycees. He was
head of the Sorbonne's Department of the His-
tory of Modern Philosophy, founder of the
Institute of Ethnology, exchange professor at
Harvard, and guest lecturer at various American
universities. His influence on his students was
enormous.
HOW NATIVES THINK
received great
Sl'if
acclaim upon its publication in 1910. It also
provoked considerable controversy. Translated
into EngUsh in 1926, HOW NATIVES THINK
has long been out of print, and thus unavailable
to new generations of students. WASHINGTON
SQUARE PRESS is pleased to remedy this situ-
ation with its fine new edition of Levy-Bruhl's
stimulatingwork.
The illuminating introduction to this edition has been
written by an outstanding anthropologist, herself an
author of many books, Dr. Ruth L. Bunzel, adjunct
Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University.
HOW
NATIVES
THINK
by
Lucien Levy-Bruhl
Introduction by
Ruth L. Bunzel
Authorized Translation by
Lilian A. Clare
WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS. INC.* NEWYORK
HOW NATIVES THINK
A
Washington Square Press edition
1st printing October, 1966
Published by
Washington Square Press, Inc., 630 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y.
Washington Square Press editions are distributed in the U.S.
by Simon & Schuster, Inc., 630 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y.
10020 and in Canada by Pocket Books of Canada, Ltd., Richmond
Hill, Ontario, Canada,
Introduction, ©, 1966, by Ruth L. Bimzel. This Washington
Square Press edition pubUshed by arrangement with Alfred A.
Knopf. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.SA.
Introduction
In 1927, or perhaps 1928, Professor L^vy-Bnihl was in the
United States to lecture and to receive some of the many
honors that were showered on him during his long and fruit-
ful life. WhUe he was in New York he paid a visit to the De-
partment of Anthropology at Columbia where Franz Boas
entertained him at lunch. I was a graduate student, but since
I had been through the anthropologist's rite de passage, that
first field trip that establishes one's status as a professional
anthropologist, I was included. After lunch we repaired to the
dusty old seminar room, with its skeleton and its trays of
potsherds, and Professor Levy-Bruhl and I argued. I had
read Primitive Mentality and How Natives Think, which had
recently been translated, and I disapproved. I disapproved
very much and with the arrogance of youth did not hesitate
to voice my disapproval. The distinguished professor Hstened
with exquisite courtesy, partly because he was a man of ex-
quisite courtesy, but partly also because he was a scientist,
and here was someone who had actually lived among the
Zuni about whom he had written and whose culture fasci-
nated him, and he wanted to learn. So we talked about what
happens when a Zuni dancer puts on a mask and becomes
the god whose mask he wears and people shrink from him
because he is dangerous until he has been ritually desacra-
lized. And how the gods are also the ancestors and the clouds
that bring rain to the parched land, and all are but aspects of
man's relation to nature and to the great reaUty of death and
regeneration. Levy-Bruhl pointed out that what I described
was precisely what he had been talking about. I countered.
HOW NATIVES THINK
VI
"But there is nothing primitive or pre-logical about it; it is
just like the Mass." Levy-Bruhl agreed that this was so; that
he had never claimed that pre-logical thinking was confined
to the unlettered, but that it was another way of thinking
about reality, and that its incidence and characteristics should
be studied. Before we parted we had agreed that our dis-
agreement, like so many disagreements in anthropology, was
largely semantic. For anthropology puts a lot of new wine in
old bottles in its efforts to express new ideas with old words.
Now, after nearly forty years, this book which describes
the kind of mental process that does not fall within the con-
fines of logical thought is being reprinted, and I find myself
in much the same position I was—in in 1928. I value the
substance and deplore the language a position which Levy-
Bruhl himself came around to in his later writings.
How Natives Think was first published in French in 1910
and, although received with mixed feelings by anthropolo-
gists, has had a subtle influence and occupies a crucial po-
sition in the history of anthropological thought. Published two
years before Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of the Re-
ligious Life, it represents one of the first stirrings of revolt
against the extreme rationalistic thinking that dominated the
behavioral sciences of the late nineteenth century. Sociology
was beginning to recognize and deal with the non-rational
elements of human behavior. In psychology behaviorism was
having its heyday, but from Vienna new voices were being
raised. As Europe moved knowingly but irrevocably toward
the holocaust of 1914, behavioral scientists on both sides of
the Atlantic were beginning to take a new look at the nature
of man.
* « *
Lucien Levy-Bruhl was bom in Paris in 1857 and died in
1939, on the eve of the Second Worid War. The span of
eighty-two years embraced wars, revolution, the questioning
of basic premises of French culture, and the restructuring of
French society. Although he was not indifferent to these
forces, his life was devoted to scholarship and the pursuit
of ideas.
His education was that of a bright French boy of the—mid-
dle class in the latter half of the nineteenth century the
Lycee Chariemagne. On graduation he hesitated between
careers in philosophy, natural science, and music, finally
Introduction vii
choosing philosophy and attending the £cole normale superi-
eure. He took courses in clinical psychology at the clinic of
Sainte Anne. After graduating in 1879, he taught philosophy
in Poitiers and Amiens but returned to Paris in 1884 to com-
plete his doctorate at the University of Paris. He taught in
several schools in Paris until 1896 when he was appointed
to the faculty of the Sorbonne where he eventually became
Titular Professor of the History of Modern Philosophy. At
the Sorbonne he taught formal philosophy, lecturing on
Descartes, Hume, and Schopenhauer. His lectures, delivered
without notes, were models of clarity and elegance, and he
had a profound influence on students. He continued, mean-
while, his interest in more liberal education, lecturing at the
ficole libre des sciences politiques on the history of poUtical
ideas and public thought in modem Germany.
His interest in the history of ideas drew him to compara-
tive studies of ethics. La Morale et la science des moeurs,
published in 1903, shows the influence of Comte and Durk-
heim. Departing from traditional moral philosophy, he main-
tained that morals could be studied empirically by observing
the realities of moral behavior objectively, and that from
such empirical studies one could develop a science of morals.
Such studies would reveal actual moral rules, but these rules
would be valid only within definite social contexts. He sug-
gested the concept of cultural relativity and the integrity
of social systems.
Among his close friends and colleagues at this time were
£mile Durkheim, Paul Rivet, and other anthropologists, and
through his association with them he became deeply inter-
ested in anthropology. His researches in the sociology of
morals had led him to reflect on the nature of thought and
this became his dominant concern throughout the rest of his
life. His six volumes on primitive mentality appeared be-
tween 1910 and 1938, as follows:
Les Fonctions mentales dans les societes inferieures, 1910
(How Natives Think), English translation, 1926.
La Mentalite primitive, 1922 (Primitive Mentality), Eng-
lish translation, 1923.
L'Ame primitive, 1927 (The "Soul" of the Primitive), Eng-
lish translation, 1929.
Le Surnaturel et la nature dans la mentalite primitive,
1931.
HOW NATIVES THINK
Viii
La Mythologie primitive, 1935.
UExperience mystique et les symboles chez les primitives,
1935.
These books were original in thought and of immense erudi-
tion. They were widely read and translated, and were both
highly praised and severely criticized.
The first of these volimies, as Levy-Bruhl explains in his
introduction to the English edition, states the main outlines of
his theories which the later volumes expand and develop.
In addition to these books Levy-Bruhl contributed widely
to scholarly and critical journals. His interests ranged wide
over philosophy, poUtics, war, and literature.
In 1925, together with Paul Rivet and Marcel Mauss, he
founded the Institute of Ethnology in the University of Paris.
Factions soon developed within the Institute, and in 1927
Levy-Bruhl withdrew. By this time he had broken with Durk-
heim, with whom he disagreed on matters of theory and
method, and he no longer found the atmosphere of the Insti-
tute sympathetic.
Soon after this he gave up his chair at the Sorbonne to
devote himself to research and writing. During these years he
traveled widely. He spent a year as exchange professor at
Harvard University and lectured at Johns Hopkins and at the
University of California. The Ust of his travels and the places
where he lectured is too long to repeat; they included both
Americas, Asia, Ocea—nia, and North Africa, as well as all
countries of Europe except the Soviet Union. Many of
these trips were under the auspices of the Alliance —fran^aise,
as an ambassador of French culture and scholarship a more
suitable emissary would be hard to conceive.
His travels brought him in touch with a wide variety of
people of different races, cultures, and political orientations.
But even before he took to the road he was no ivory-tower
philosopher. One of his fellow pupils at the £cole normale
superieure was Jean Jaures, who remained his close friend
and collaborator until the latter's assassination in 1914. He
published a moving memorial to Jaures in 1916. Although
never directly afl&liated with any political party, he was open-
ly sympathetic with the socialists. During the Dreyfus affair
which rocked French society in the last years of the nine-
teenth century, Levy-Bruhl, along with Jaures and Lucien
Herr, espoused the cause of the unfortunate captain. Al-
