since I'm in the hobby of posting my papers... I just finished just this moment and will scurry to school for submission!

One powerful image that Derrida uses to shake Levi-Strauss’ anthropology is the fact that Levi-Strauss uses the notion of the “lesson.” It was said that: “calculated for the purposes of a philosophical demonstration of the relationships between nature and society, ideal society and real society, most often between the other society and our society.” (page 113, “The Violence of the Letter”). By using the notion of “lesson” brings to mind the structure of the school wherein a teacher in hegemony and a claim to truth says what is good and bad, true and false, right and wrong, and all the permutations of the categories of correctness VS error. Although at first, the first “teacher” may be Levi-Strauss and his team while they were at the Nambikwara tribe teaching writing by the very act of giving out pencils and paper, what Levi-Strauss really means is the tribespeople teaching Levi-Strauss and the whole of his anthropology the “nature” of writing and its role in culture. Without any ado Derrida being the postmodernist that he is, demolishes this “lesson” by two grounds: the methodological and the ideological.
A very strong criticism of Derrida to Levi-Strauss is his question of the empiricism in methodology to the brand of anthropology Levi-Strauss made. To sum it up, Derrida attacked the fact that Levi-Strauss systematically affected the data he was collecting and hence the basis of his anthropology through his mere presence as a foreigner and power to incite the “scandal” of the proper name in the Nambikwara tribe. To quote Derrida: “It is the anthropologist who violates a virginal space no accurately connoted by the scene of a game and a game played by little girls… The mere presence of a spectator, then, is a violation.” (page 113, “The Violence of the Letter”). In this, Derrida already says that a grain of salt should be taken to Levi-Strauss’ brand of anthropology and perhaps of all anthropology that engages in the method of ethnography and the travelogue.
Another strong criticism of Derrida to Levi-Strauss is his mention of Levi-Strauss’ subscribing to the ideologies of Rousseau, Marx, and Freud. As a man of science Derrida said that one should be concerned with nature as it is. By saying that Levi-Strauss subscribed to ideology meant that he was less of a scientist and more of a humanist. In this criticism, Derrida invokes the Rousseauist category of “nature” and “culture” with which Levi-Strauss moves around in his anthropological discourse. To say briefly: “The opposition between nature and culture to which I attached much importance at one time… now seems to be of primarily methodological importance.” (page 103. “The Violence of the Letter”), Derrida says in this that the fact that Levi-Strauss built his anthropology on the Rousseauist category of “nature” and “culture” already thins out the science of his anthropology.
Running a risk of being a reflection paper more than a reaction paper, I courageously will pursue this point with the knowledge of this risk. I think all writing takes on this structure which Derrida accuses Levi-Strauss of: that one draws one’s knowing and categories from one’s own conception of “nature” and for Levi-Strauss’ anthropology, his conception of humanity as naturally can be seen in “the savage mind” in his constructing it as the “virginal humanity” with no influence from any “urbanity” which he on the other hand constructs as the polarity of “the savage mind” as the “civilized mind” that has already veered from the “state of nature.” This can be seen in the Rousseauist constructs of “nature” and “culture” which Levi-Strauss subscribes to. It can be seen that though Levi-Strauss says that the Nambikwara tribespeople are still a “culture” he though presents it as a “culture” closer to the “state of nature.” This I believe is a very romantic move. To glorify the state of nature and to present urbanity as “less natural” and so predispose one’s self to attribute goodness and evil respectively is a very violent act. To force upon human and cultural reality theoretical and philosophical categories might in fact confound the knowledge that can be produced in Levi-Strauss’ anthropology.
I believe that writing takes on this same structure and process. By graphically representing one’s thoughts in a medium, the letters in the written document brings with it its own genealogical characteristics and categorical positionality among the plethora of conceptuality from which it emerged. In “sending off” a unit of meaning from what is always from the past in writing, one confounds the knowing of the succeeding generations of “readers” of the letter. Though Levi-Strauss works with a logic of going back to the “roots” of the “cultures” that are closer to the “state of nature,” writing violently projects itself unto the future. In a very powerful sense, writing is always a promise to the present that it will exist. Much like how writing is depicted as “immortalizing” even in the Ancient categories of the Greeks and Romans, Derrida depicts that writing also makes mortal the writer. Much like how Levi-Strauss’ ideological categories died in its encounter with the Nambikwara culture, what a writer sends off in the future necessarily dies in its being taken agrasp as foreign by its readers.
Derrida mentions that writing stems from a “genealogical anxiety,” but I believe that it should be compounded with an attitude of its opposite: an “anxiety for contingency.” That in the violence of the letter and its power to construct all forms of knowing taken after it, one should take into account that the knowing that it affects might actually make the letter mortal and place the boundaries of its life. Every reading is a contingent meaning that in its very potentiality and capacity for the “new interpretation,” the letter is made aware of its archaic nature of simply being a document of culture.