Science Quote by Claude Levi-Strauss

Levi-Strauss flips the usual hero story of science on its head. The prestige, he implies, doesn’t belong to the human answer-key; it belongs to the person with the nerve and discipline to interrogate reality in the first place. That’s a pointed move from an anthropologist who spent his career showing how “obvious” categories - nature/culture, civilized/primitive, modern/traditional - are less like facts than like inherited ways of sorting the world.

The intent is almost polemical: science isn’t a vending machine for certainties, it’s a method for locating the productive unknowns. “Right answers” are brittle because they age; “right questions” generate research programs, methods, and new forms of doubt. Levi-Strauss is also quietly arguing for humility. A culture that worships the confident explainer, the authoritative expert, the TED-talk neatness of everything, is exactly the culture most likely to stop noticing what it has prematurely decided is settled.

The subtext lands especially hard given Levi-Strauss’s historical moment: mid-century intellectual life, shaped by world war, decolonization, and the rise of structuralism. He’s defending inquiry against both political dogma and romantic intuition. In anthropology, the “right question” determines whether you treat another society as a curiosity to be judged or as a system to be understood on its own terms.

Rhetorically, the line works because it demotes the ego. It makes science less a trophy case and more a stance: rigorous curiosity, strategically applied.