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Here’s why: nobody could pack more baloney into one paragraph than Levi-Strauss could. Here’s an example (FYI, he’s talking about Western language vs. primitive language. Levi-Strauss loved primitive people and he started the movement that insisted that no culture was better than another. Interestingly, in the later years of his life, Levi-Strauss sometimes questioned his own anti-racist ideology, as if it might somehow backfire on his people – which it did when the UN labeled Zionism as “racism” in 1975! The UN later withdrew that label):

“Words like ‘oak’, ‘beech’, ‘birch’, etc., are no less entitled to be considered as abstract words than the word ‘tree’; and a language possessing only the word ‘tree’ would be, from this point of view less rich in concepts than one which lacked this term but contained dozens or hundreds for the individual species and varieties. The proliferation of concept as in the case of technical languages, goes with more constant attention to properties of the world, with an interest that is more alert to possible distinctions which can be introduced between them. This thirst for objective knowledge is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive’. Even if it is rarely directed towards facts of the same level as those with which modern science is concerned, it implies comparable intellectual application and methods of observation. In both cases the universe is an object of thought at least as much as it is a means of satisfying needs.” — from the book “The Savage Mind” by Claude Levi-Strauss, 1962.

Wow, did you get all of that? Your brain hurts, doesn’t it? Even better for the intellectuals, Levi-Strauss was “French” (actually, he wasn’t, he was a Jew who grew up in [but was not born in] France. Not the same thing as being French!). Anyway, nothing excites an intellectual more than something, or someone, French. (Right, “anti”?)