Search results for ""Author Claude Levi-Strauss""

"Levi-Strauss continues his assault on the myth of the primitice as savage by turning to the phenomena of totemism an totoemix classification ... to show, contrary to this myth, that primitive thought rests upon a rich and complex conceptual structure." – Commentary

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Claude Lévi-StraussAnthropology and MythLectures 1951 – 1982Translated by Roy WillisThe published work of Claude Lévi-Strauss over the last three and a half decades has established him as one of the word’s most innovative anthropologists. Yet throughout this period he was maintaining a full teaching commitment in Paris.The pieces in Anthropology and Myth illustrate (in his own word) ‘the effort, the tentative advances and retreats and now and again the achievements of a thought process during some thirty-two years that amount to a large proportion of an individual life and the span of a generation’. Lévi-Strauss used the lecture theatre as a workshop in which to try out and develop new ideas, and many of the familiar themes of his book will be found here: analysis of myth and ritual, totemism, kinship, marriage social stucture. Offering a unique glimpse of the genesis of such subjects throughout his teaching career, this book provides a sketchbook of the themes painted elsewhere in larger, more finished form, and thus forms a document of vital importance for the history of anthropological thought.ContentsTranslator’s NotePreface The Field of Research Mythologics Inquiries into Mythology and Ritual Current Controversies and Social Organization and Kinship Clan, Lineage, House Appendix: Nine Course ReportsChronological TableIndexJacket illustrations: (Front) The Jungle, 1943, by Wifredo Lam, gouache on paper mounted on canvas. 7’10 1/4” x 7’6 1/2” (239.4 x 229.9 cm). Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Inter-American Fund. © DACS 1986 – Photograph © 1986, The Museum of Modern Art, New York is reproduced by kind permission. (Back) Photograph reproduced by kind permission of the Collège de France and Librairie Plon.

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"In olden days, in a village peopled by animal creatures, lived Wild Cat (another name for Lynx). He was old and mangy, and he was constantly scratching himself with his cane. From time to time, a young girl who lived in the same cabin would grab the cane, also to scratch herself. In vain Wild Cat kept trying to talk her out of it. One day the young lady found herself pregnant; she gave birth to a boy. Coyote, another inhabitant of the village, became indignant. He talked all of the population into going to live elsewhere and abandoning the old Wild Cat, his wife, and their child to their fate ..." So begins the Nez Perce's myth that lies at the heart of "The Story of Lynx", Claude Levi-Strauss's accessible examination of the mythology of American Indians. In this wide-ranging work, the author considers the many variations in a story that occur in both North and South America, but especially among the Salish-speaking peoples of the Northwest Coast. He also shows how centuries of contact with Europeans have altered the tales. Levi-Strauss focuses on the opposition between Wild Cat and Coyote to explore the meaning and uses of "gemellarity", or twinness, in Native American culture. The concept of dual organization that these tales exemplify is one of non-equivalence: everything has an opposite or other, with which it coexists in unstable tension. In contrast, Levi-Strauss argues, European notions of twinness - as in the myth of Castor and Pollux - stress the essential sameness of the twins. This fundamental cultural difference lay behind the fatal clash of European and Native American peoples. This work addresses and clarifies all the major issues that have occupied Claude Levi-Strauss for decades, and in it he explicitly connects history and structuralism.

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In this volume Levi-Strauss explores the mythologies of the Americas, with occasional incursions into European and Japanese folklore, tales of sloths and squirrels interweave with discussions of Freud, Saussure, "signification," and plays by Sophocles and Labiche. The author also critiques psychoanalytic interpretation and defends the interpretive powers of structuralism.

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Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World is the first English translation of a series of lectures Claude Lévi-Strauss delivered in Tokyo in 1986. Written with an eye toward the future as his own distinguished career was drawing to a close, this volume presents a synthesis of the author’s major ideas about structural anthropology, a field he helped establish. Critiquing insights of his earlier writings on the relationship between race, history, and civilization, Lévi-Strauss revisits the social issues that never ceased to fascinate him.He begins with the observation that the cultural supremacy enjoyed by the West for over two centuries is at an end. Global wars and genocides in the twentieth century have fatally undermined Western faith in humanity’s improvement through scientific progress. Anthropology, however, can be the vehicle of a new “democratic humanism,” broadening traditional frameworks that have restricted cross-cultural understandings of the human condition, and providing a basis for inquiries into what other civilizations, such as those of Asia, can teach.Surveying a world on the brink of the twenty-first century, Lévi-Strauss assesses some of the dilemmas of cultural and moral relativism a globalized society faces—ethical dimensions of economic inequality, the rise of different forms of religious fundamentalism, the promise and peril of genetic and reproductive engineering. A laboratory of thought opening onto the future, Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World is an important addition to the canon of one of the twentieth-century’s most influential theorists.

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Two previously unpublished lectures charting the renowned anthropologist’s intellectual engagement with the sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne In January 1937, between the two ethnographic trips he would describe in Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss gave a talk to the Confédération générale du travail in Paris. Only recently discovered in the archives of the Bibliothèque national de France, this lecture, “Ethnography: The Revolutionary Science,” discussed the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, to whom Lévi-Strauss would return in remarks delivered more than a half-century later, in the spring of 1992. Bracketing the career of one of the most celebrated anthropologists of the twentieth century, these two talks reveal how Lévi-Strauss’s ethnography begins and ends with Montaigne—and how his reading of his intellectual forebear and his understanding of anthropology evolve along the way.Published here for the first time, these lectures offer new insight into the development of ethnography and the thinking of one of its most important practitioners. Essays by Emmanuel Désveaux, who edited the original French volume De Montaigne à Montaigne, and Peter Skafish expand the context of Lévi-Strauss’s talks with contemporary perspectives and commentary.

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Two previously unpublished lectures charting the renowned anthropologist’s intellectual engagement with the sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne In January 1937, between the two ethnographic trips he would describe in Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss gave a talk to the Confédération générale du travail in Paris. Only recently discovered in the archives of the Bibliothèque national de France, this lecture, “Ethnography: The Revolutionary Science,” discussed the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, to whom Lévi-Strauss would return in remarks delivered more than a half-century later, in the spring of 1992. Bracketing the career of one of the most celebrated anthropologists of the twentieth century, these two talks reveal how Lévi-Strauss’s ethnography begins and ends with Montaigne—and how his reading of his intellectual forebear and his understanding of anthropology evolve along the way.Published here for the first time, these lectures offer new insight into the development of ethnography and the thinking of one of its most important practitioners. Essays by Emmanuel Désveaux, who edited the original French volume De Montaigne à Montaigne, and Peter Skafish expand the context of Lévi-Strauss’s talks with contemporary perspectives and commentary.

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This volume of Lévi-Strauss's writings from 1941 to 1947 bears witness to a period of his work which is often overlooked but which was the crucible for the structural anthropology that he would go on to develop in the years that followed. Like many European Jewish intellectuals, Lévi-Strauss had sought refuge in New York while the Nazis overran and occupied much of Europe. He had already been introduced to Jakobson and structural linguistics but he had not yet laid out an agenda for structuralism, which he would do in the 1950s and 60s. At the same time, these American years were the time when Lévi-Strauss would learn of some of the world's most devastating historical catastrophes - the genocide of the indigenous American peoples and of European Jews. From the beginning of the 1950s, Lévi-Strauss's anthropology tacitly bears the heavy weight of the memory and possibility of the Shoah. To speak of 'structural anthropology zero' is therefore to refer to the source of a way of thinking which turned our conception of the human on its head. But this prequel to Structural Anthropology also underlines the sense of a tabula rasa which animated its author at the end of the war as well as the project – shared with others – of a civilizational rebirth on novel grounds. Published here in English for the first time, this volume of Lévi-Strauss’s texts from the 1940s will be of great interest to students and scholars in anthropology, sociology and the social sciences generally.

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This volume of Lévi-Strauss's writings from 1941 to 1947 bears witness to a period of his work which is often overlooked but which was the crucible for the structural anthropology that he would go on to develop in the years that followed. Like many European Jewish intellectuals, Lévi-Strauss had sought refuge in New York while the Nazis overran and occupied much of Europe. He had already been introduced to Jakobson and structural linguistics but he had not yet laid out an agenda for structuralism, which he would do in the 1950s and 60s. At the same time, these American years were the time when Lévi-Strauss would learn of some of the world's most devastating historical catastrophes - the genocide of the indigenous American peoples and of European Jews. From the beginning of the 1950s, Lévi-Strauss's anthropology tacitly bears the heavy weight of the memory and possibility of the Shoah. To speak of 'structural anthropology zero' is therefore to refer to the source of a way of thinking which turned our conception of the human on its head. But this prequel to Structural Anthropology also underlines the sense of a tabula rasa which animated its author at the end of the war as well as the project – shared with others – of a civilizational rebirth on novel grounds. Published here in English for the first time, this volume of Lévi-Strauss’s texts from the 1940s will be of great interest to students and scholars in anthropology, sociology and the social sciences generally.

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On Christmas Eve 1951, Santa Claus was hanged and then publicly burned outside of the Cathedral of Dijon in France. That same decade, ethnologists began to study the indigenous cultures of central New Guinea, and found men and women affectionately consuming the flesh of the ones they loved. "Everyone calls what is not their own custom barbarism," said Montaigne. In these essays, Claude Levi-Strauss shows us behavior that is bizarre, shocking, and even revolting to outsiders but consistent with a people's culture and context. These essays relate meat eating to cannibalism, female circumcision to medically assisted reproduction, and mythic thought to scientific thought. They explore practices of incest and patriarchy, nature worship versus man-made material obsessions, the perceived threat of art in various cultures, and the innovations and limitations of secular thought. Levi-Strauss measures the short distance between "complex" and "primitive" societies and finds a shared madness in the ways we enact myth, ritual, and custom. Yet he also locates a pure and persistent ethics that connects the center of Western civilization to far-flung societies and forces a reckoning with outmoded ideas of morality and reason.

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On Christmas Eve 1951, Santa Claus was hanged and then publicly burned outside of the Cathedral of Dijon in France. That same decade, ethnologists began to study the indigenous cultures of central New Guinea, and found men and women affectionately consuming the flesh of the ones they loved. "Everyone calls what is not their own custom barbarism," said Montaigne. In these essays, Claude Levi-Strauss shows us behavior that is bizarre, shocking, and even revolting to outsiders but consistent with a people's culture and context. These essays relate meat eating to cannibalism, female circumcision to medically assisted reproduction, and mythic thought to scientific thought. They explore practices of incest and patriarchy, nature worship versus man-made material obsessions, the perceived threat of art in various cultures, and the innovations and limitations of secular thought. Levi-Strauss measures the short distance between "complex" and "primitive" societies and finds a shared madness in the ways we enact myth, ritual, and custom. Yet he also locates a pure and persistent ethics that connects the center of Western civilization to far-flung societies and forces a reckoning with outmoded ideas of morality and reason.

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Perhaps the most influential anthropologist of his generation, Claude Levi-Strauss left a profound mark on the development of twentieth-century thought, equal to that of phenomenology and existentialism. Through a fertile mixture of insights gleaned from linguistics and from sociology and ethnology, Levi-Strauss elaborated his theory of structural unity in culture and became the preeminent representative of structural anthropology. La Pensee sauvage, published in French in 1962, was his crowning achievement. Ranging over philosophies, historical periods, and human societies, it challenged the prevailing assumption of the superiority of modern Western culture and sought to explain the unity of human intellection. Unfortunately titled The Savage Mind when it first published in English in 1966, the original translation nevertheless sparked a fascination with Levi-Strauss's work among generations of Anglophone readers. Wild Thought: A New Translation of "La Pensee sauvage" rekindles that spark with a fresh and accessible new translation. Including critical annotations for the contemporary reader, it restores the accuracy and integrity of the book that changed the course of twentieth-century thought, making it an indispensable addition to any philosophical and anthropological library.

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Perhaps the most influential anthropologist of his generation, Claude Levi-Strauss left a profound mark on the development of twentieth-century thought, equal to that of phenomenology and existentialism. Through a fertile mixture of insights gleaned from linguistics and from sociology and ethnology, Levi-Strauss elaborated his theory of structural unity in culture and became the preeminent representative of structural anthropology. La Pensee sauvage, published in French in 1962, was his crowning achievement. Ranging over philosophies, historical periods, and human societies, it challenged the prevailing assumption of the superiority of modern Western culture and sought to explain the unity of human intellection. Unfortunately titled The Savage Mind when it first published in English in 1966, the original translation nevertheless sparked a fascination with Levi-Strauss's work among generations of Anglophone readers. Wild Thought: A New Translation of "La Pensee sauvage" rekindles that spark with a fresh and accessible new translation. Including critical annotations for the contemporary reader, it restores the accuracy and integrity of the book that changed the course of twentieth-century thought, making it an indispensable addition to any philosophical and anthropological library.

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