Science Quote by Claude Levi-Strauss

Wisdom, in Levi-Strauss's framing, is less a trophy case of solutions than a disciplined refusal to accept the problem as given. The line has the cool sting of methodological arrogance: the "wise man" doesn’t merely outscore others on a quiz; he rewrites the quiz. That matters because answers are socially rewarded and quickly ossify into doctrine, while questions destabilize the premises everyone else is quietly obeying.

Coming from Levi-Strauss, the intent is inseparable from structuralism’s central move: shift attention from the surface content of culture (the tale, the ritual, the taboo) to the underlying structures that make it thinkable. The "right question" is a lever that exposes hidden oppositions, categories, and rules - the grammar of myth and kinship that societies don’t articulate but continually enact. In other words, he’s not praising ignorance or endless skepticism; he’s arguing that the most powerful scientific act is selecting the frame that makes patterns visible.

The subtext also cuts against colonial-era anthropology’s bad habit of treating non-Western societies as puzzles to be solved by Western expertise. If the goal is to understand how a system of meanings holds together, then "right answers" can be a kind of violence: they close the case, flatten ambiguity, declare the native explanation obsolete. The right question keeps the investigator honest by forcing them to confront their own categories - why we call something "marriage", "nature", or "reason" in the first place.

It’s a scientist’s boast, but also a warning: knowledge advances less by certainty than by better doubt.