"Circumcision and imposing the penile sheath are in a relationship of inverse symmetry."
"… imposing a cultural penile sheath or taking off a natural penile sheath answers to the same project: marking the penis with a cultural sign, through addition or withdrawal."1
Markings? Certainly not! A marking only imprints. You really need to be deprived of the specific organ of male autosexuality to call penile sheath and circumcision markings. A removable finery, the penile sheath imprints nothing and speaking of mark for a dress is absurd; would the kippa or the veil be marks? Circumcision too imprints nothing; it cuts off, in an irreversible way and by atrocious torture. Not only does Lévi-Strauss conflate both rituals but also, he names them erroneously. Of course, they have a common point: imposed by males, separating them from females and displaying the entrance into men’s clan, they are grossly sexist (cf. Miriam Pollack2.) But the penile sheath has a pleasant, almost playful character; it is an adornment, a decoration. Circumcision is maiming torture, the aim of which is, on the one hand, to lessen pleasure3 to pretend oneself morally superior to non-practising communities and, on the other hand, to submit the human person by the trauma, amnesied, of a threat of eviration made present for life by a beginning of realization. The qualification of mark is ethically and intellectually false. On behalf of a scientist, that mistake is enormous, unimaginable. It is the symptom of the unconscious trauma provoked in its author by his circumcision.
His discourse is only apparently scientific:
"... comparing not rituals that superficially resemble each other, but that differ to the point that, at the time of Frazer, ethnology works would have treated them separately: the rite of circumcision about bodily mutilation, the rite of imposing the sheath about dresses or fineries and adornments. Behind these surface differences, only an internal criticism allows for achieving an invariant scheme. We wonder to what conditions several uses, myths or rites, suitably redefined, could be mutually convertible. And that invariance, discovered at a deep level, permits and legitimates comparative work.
With Frazer (for whose monumental work nothing can shake our admiration), a tense comparatism grows often-premature generalizations. I proceed conversely: generalizing first and then comparing."
That orgy of rationalizations masks an unconscious condoning of the banalized crime against humanity of which its nonsensical practitioners believe themselves morally superior by an as religious as infantile belief. Circumcision is eugenics surgically imposed to the child, discriminatory to such an extent that its absence is punished by exclusion from the community. Seeing an invariant between the penile sheath and circumcision is all the more apologetic of the latter than that rationalization claims to scientific nature. The penile sheath, the kippa or the veil are invariants of the differentiation of the sexes. Sexual excisions are aberrations of differentiation of the sexes.
However, a second mistake, of fact this time, testifies to the seriousness of the circumcision trauma in the sociologist:
"The outcome is exposing the glans in one case, hiding it in the other."
Only the first part of that sentence is true; the penile sheath does not hide the glans, which is already covered by the foreskin. Therefore, there is no "inverse symmetry" and that mistake projects upon intact men the circumcision status of its author; he seemingly wishes to hide his glans even in intimacy, contrary to the Bororos who take their sheath off at night.
Besides, Lévi-Strauss ignores psychoanalysis and Roheim's works on primitives ("Psychoanalysis and anthropology" dates from 1950, "Tristes tropiques" from 1955). According to the latter, and all the more since they lived nude, Bororo men have a better chance to pass their Oedipus complex than the circumcised, called to neurosis, in the best case:
"... the superabundance of ritual dealing with that theme (orality) is a camouflage of the Oedipus complex."
"It seems to me that although the oral and separation elements are undoubtedly present, they are merely a ritual and regressive defence mechanism, a bulwark against the Oedipus complex, aggressiveness and maleness."4
Finally, Lévi-Strauss recalls the circumcision of Moses' son. But, unlike the honorary character of the penile sheath, that circumcision was not only forced upon the child but also upon Moses’ family5. Comparatism is thus still more inappropriate here.
For the psychoanalyst, joining in the same text two such blunders on the extremity of the penis is symptomatic of the circumcision trauma. Those mistakes disclose a concealed desire: not being circumcised. Lévi-Strauss seems to have been jealous of the beautiful feather sheaths of his dear Bororos and everything occurs as if he had chosen to study them because of them. His unconscious desire was to emphasize the primitive character of Judaic circumcision and, by comparison, the funny, friendly character of the sheath. The latter particularizes the masculine sex in an as sexist way as circumcision but without mutilating it. Facing the obsessive extravagance of the communitarian barbarity, Lévi-Strauss' structuralist insistence is an as obsessive symptom. Hiding behind pseudo-scientificity, his communitarianism gets lost in his classifications and obeys the unconscious: the equivalence of the contraries in the first mistake, projection in the second. Psychoanalysis enables us to see clearly in that patriarchal and male chauvinist magma. Lévi-Strauss is not exempt from the comparatism that he reproaches Frazer but he well saw the invariant common to both rituals: the sexist, absurd, and anti-natural separation of males from females.
Nevertheless, since he wanted to compare, the sociologist might have reported that circumcision has an endogamous, racist aim of pretence to moral superiority based upon physical difference, inexistent in the Bororos. No more than Montaigne ("Everybody calls barbarity what they are not used to."), the author of "Race and history" had the right to affirm: "The barbarian is first the one who believes in barbarity"6. It amounts to saying that barbarity does not exist. That is angelism; the respect of cultures does not allow condoning the intolerable. Systematically perpetrated in the presence of circumcision7, on one side or the other and sometimes both, the generalized practice of genocide in the 20th century reverses that affirmation into that that the barbarians are those who authorize themselves barbarity, which corresponds to facts, not intellectual or moral definitions. Now, there is one barbarity that till now escapes condemnation: the worst of all, the tritest of all, barbarity against the child. Cultural relativism is there diametrically at odds with elementary ethics. If everyone has a right to define their norms, the natural law imposes itself on all, above all when it is confirmed by science. Medicine condemns customs that mutilate the human body. The medical code of ethics is clear: mutilation may not be practised without a "very serious medical motive" (article 41 of the French medical code, corresponding to article 16 of the French Civil Code). Therefore, it seems that Levy-Strauss’ statement bout the “barbarian” is a symptom of the same unconscious trauma, in which he justifies the circumcising barbarity.
By comparing the penile sheath and circumcision, Exode sur Exode, unconsciously and pathologically narcissistic and communitarian, conceals the most abject pedocriminality, a pedocriminality against humanity with extremely serious worldly outcomes8. Those idolatrous-of-cultural-difference sociology and philosophy preach perverse ethics. It is extolled by a bunch of Afro-American feminists formed by cultural anthropology in the circumciser United States. Victims of the collective and transgenerational Stockholm and Münchhausen syndromes joined in sexual mutilation9, they go, within a hysterical delirium, and get excised in their origin country and accuse activists against excision of imperialism10. Those eugenic deliriums belong to the racism of puritan moral superiority typical of sexual mutilation. "Metoo!" yells the child within Claude(*)!
1 Lévi-Strauss C. Exode sur Exode. In L'Homme, 1988 28 (106/107). Le mythe et ses métamorphoses, p. 13-19. https://www.persee.fr/doc/hom_0439-4216_1988_num_28_106_368967
2 Pollack M. Circumcision, identity, gender and power.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miriam-pollack/circumcision-identity-gen_b_1132896.html
3 Bertaux-Navoiseau M. Poll: 81% of circumcised men ignore serial little orgasms, 91% of the intact enjoy them.
4 Psychoanalysis and anthropology. New York: International university press; 1950. p. 149-150.
5 In our work The birth of Judaism, between exegesis and Egyptology, we interpreted that circumcision in a way consistent with real history, which enables to understand what really happened between Zipporah, the alleged God, and Moses: https://www.amazon.com/dp/107025262X.
6 Lévi-Strauss C. Race et histoire. Paris: Denoël-Gonthier; 1968, p. 19-22.
7 Bertaux-Navoiseau M. Genocide and circumcision, causality and near-absolute correlation (psychoanalytical theory of genocide).
8 See a series of articles on the theme Racism, violence, and circumcision:
https://univ-paris8.academia.edu/MBertauxNavoiseau/Discrimination,-violence,-and-circumcision.
9 Bertaux-Navoiseau M. Sexual mutilation (excision, circumcision), a dangerous collective and transgenerational madness: Münchhausen syndrome by proxy and an aggravated collective Stockholm syndrome.
10 Tierney J. A new debate on female circumcision. The New York Times. 30 November 2007.https://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/30/a-new-debate-on-female-circumcision/.
(*) Circumcision is a rape repressed by articles 222-23 : "Every act of sexual penetration, whatever its nature, committed upon the person of the other through violence... is rape." and 222-26 : "Rape is punished by life criminal imprisonment and a 150 000 Euros fine when it is preceded, accompanied or followed by torture or acts of barbarity." of the French criminal code.