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This article develops the idea that Lévi-Strauss' thought was shaped all at once in the encounter with structural linguistics. Nevertheless, Lévi-Strauss's readers know that his writings show blunt passages from a level of discourse that refers to the project of scientific modernity (accretion of knowledge and pursuit of generality) to one announcing the dissolution of culture into physicochemical phenomena (here defined as ultramodern level), and from these two to a language usually defined as "literary". The latter corresponds to a language which articulates the themes of loss, memory, yearning for the primitive, the concerns about the demographic and environmental transformations of the planet, and an "exaggerated" contact of cultures: themes which all persist in Lévi-Strauss' thought since its shaping as a "structuralist" one, which have been highly controversial and that could be defined as "antimodern". Accordingly, this article tries to produce a reading of Lévi-Strauss' work as articulated on three le els, which persist in Lévi-Strauss's thought since its early structuralist formation: three "musical staffs" on which his modernity, ultra-modernity and anti-modernity seem all to flow at the same time.

This paper concludes a book on ‘cultural traits’ which features 20 contributions from the most diverse disciplines, from cultural anthropology to archaeology, from psychology to history, from economics to musicology. The paper dodges the attempt to make a conceptual synthesis, arguing positively for such avoidance. Borrowing a term from the U.S. National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, the paper likens the book, Understanding Cultural Traits, to a catalysis meeting, i.e., a lowering of disciplinary barriers that influences the disciplines’ culture of data, broadens the scientific vision, and generates scientific collaborations. Catalysis is not alternative to synthesis. It is a different phase of scientific progress, one that can be hindered by an obsession for concepts and by an urge to close the discourse.

Every discipline poses its research questions in specific ways and thus uses concepts that are suited to find answers in its well defined disciplinary frameworks. Accordingly, the idea of cultural trait has been used and developed in several disciplines, often without any reference to each other. The result has often been non-communicability across different fields. We first show, by means of two examples, that the lack of deep interdisciplinary dialogue and reciprocal understanding has generated some harsh controversies. We argue that our book Understanding Cultural Traits: A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Cultural Diversity tries to overcome not only the gap between cultural traits specialists and other scientists, but also the barriers among the researchers who are not specialists on cultural traits but that nevertheless directly or indirectly use cultural traits in their different disciplines.

This paper is a philosophical reflection around the concept of a cultural trait. A trait is any perceptible or intangible characteristic aspect. In addition, to be cultural, a trait must not be intentional or part of a plan, and its diffusion and repetition – even when initially intentional – must elude control. Traits are inseparable from a cultural space and power relations that are the source of their value, and that govern their spread. Consequently, cultural traits – like “the style of a period” – can only be recognized a posteriori and at distance. Traits can be mapped in different ways, but a map is no simple object. Maps can vary along two dimensions: dynamic-static and conceptual – perceptual. Some maps are schemas or diagrams. Classifying the maps used by Zenni to illustrate the history of jazz, and comparing them with analog maps from the 1970s, I show how maps depend from the observer's (cultural) ideas. Some maps evidently express a search for hierarchy and origins. But, in contemporary philosophy, the question of the origins constitutes a problem. For Michel Foucault, history is not a search for the origin, on the contrary, it must “dispel the chimera of the origin”, because passion for the origin is functional to reassurance or self-reassurance, and there are no single origins.

For a long time literary theorists have been concerned with the question “What is literature?". This issue does not raise the same interest in our days. After all, what really matters is what we do with literature, whatever it is. Time has come for a comparison between literary and evolutionary studies. The question we should ask is: “Why is literature?" Where do poetic uses of language rise from? For what reason or reasons, in a remote era of our history, did our ancestors start to spend (or lavish) both time and mental energies in seemingly free and relaxed verbal activities which were unrelated to immediate needs? What are the features of human behaviour that literature tends to foster and strengthen? This article argues that, after all, the aim of literature - as in any other human activity - is nothing but survival.