In this short video Noam Chomsky explains how the humanities are missing complex theories to explain social and cultural phenomena. He points out that the French intellectuals of Paris in the 1970s were the last intellectuals to develop theories. He explains how the discovery of the atrocities of Stalin and Mao generated the fall of the French intellectuals. Subsequently, it is the theory of poststructuralism which was generated from Lévi-Strauss ideas that becomes the preferred instrument to study in depth socio-cultural phenomena, which are the object of anthropology. Their ultimate goal is determining universal constants of human societies. They propose to study human cultures as structures of verbal and non-verbal languages. With the poststructuralism, man as a subject of his own consciousness and his own freedom disappears.
So we’re just like the physicists they talk incomprehensibly, they have big words we’ll have big words. They draw you know far-reaching conclusions. We’ll draw far-reaching conclusions. We’re just as prestigious as they are now if they say well look we’re doing real science and you guys aren’t that’s white male sexist you know bourgeois. Our answer: how are we any different from them! (interview résumé)
