We Are All Cannibals - And Other Essays (Hardcover)

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.

General

Imprint:	Columbia University Press
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism
Release date:	March 2016
Authors:	Claude Levi-Strauss
Foreword by:	Maurice Olender
Translators:	Jane Marie Todd
Dimensions:	210 x 140 x 25mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover - Trade binding
Pages:	176
ISBN-13:	978-0-231-17068-0
Languages:	English
Subtitles:	French
Categories:	Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Anthropology > Social & cultural anthropology > General
LSN:	0-231-17068-8
Barcode:	9780231170680

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