The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss was one of the greatest intellectuals of the twentieth century. His work has had a profound impact not only within anthropology but also linguistics, sociology and philosophy. In this short book he examines the nature and role of myth in human history, distilling a lifetime of writing into a few sharp insights. It is a crystalline overview of many of the basic ideas underlying his work, including the theory of structuralism and the difference between 'primitive' and 'scientific' thought and shows why Levi-Strauss remains a hugely important intellectual figure. With a new foreword by Patrick Wilcken.

First published in 1987. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In addresses written for a wide general audience, one of the twentieth century's most prominent thinkers, Claude Levi-Strauss, here offers the insights of a lifetime on the crucial questions of human existence. Responding to questions as varied as 'Can there be meaning in chaos?', 'What can science learn from myth?' and 'What is structuralism?', Levi-Strauss presents, in clear, precise language, essential guidance for those who want to learn more about the potential of the human mind.

The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss was one of the greatest intellectuals of the twentieth century. His work has had a profound impact not only within anthropology but also linguistics, sociology and philosophy. In this short book he examines the nature and role of myth in human history, distilling a lifetime of writing into a few sharp insights. It is a crystalline overview of many of the basic ideas underlying his work, including the theory of structuralism and the difference between 'primitive' and 'scientific' thought and shows why Levi-Strauss remains a hugely important intellectual figure. With a new foreword by Patrick Wilcken.

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.

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.

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 Levi-Strauss gave a talk to the Confederation generale du travail in Paris. Only recently discovered in the archives of the Bibliotheque national de France, this lecture, "Ethnography: The Revolutionary Science," discussed the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, to whom Levi-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 Levi-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 Desveaux, who edited the original French volume De Montaigne a Montaigne, and Peter Skafish expand the context of Levi-Strauss's talks with contemporary perspectives and commentary.

Claude Levis-Strauss approaches Mauss by combining anthropology and structural linguistics to assess his achievements and intentions arguing that Mauss - who at the time represented the mainstream of French anthropology - was in fact structuralist mangue. He then goes on to formulate the central tenets of structuralist thought: the belief in societies being organized on immutable and unconscious laws.

"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

A milestone in the study of culture from the father of structural anthropology.

This watershed work records Claude Levi-Strauss's search for "a human society reduced to its most basic expression." From the Amazon basin through the dense upland jungles of Brazil, Levi-Strauss found the societies he was seeking among the Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib. More than merely recounting his time in their midst, "Tristes Tropiques" places the cultural practices of these peoples in a global context and extrapolates a fascinating theory of culture that has given the book an importance far beyond the fields of anthropology and continental philosophy. The author's fresh approach, sense of humor, and openness to the sensuous mystique of the tropics make the scientific thrust of the book eminently accessible.

In addresses written for a wide general audience, one of the twentieth century's most prominent thinkers, Claude Levi-Strauss, here offers the insights of a lifetime on the crucial questions of human existence. Responding to questions as varied as 'Can there be meaning in chaos?', 'What can science learn from myth?' and 'What is structuralism?', Levi-Strauss presents, in clear, precise language, essential guidance for those who want to learn more about the potential of the human mind.

Die in dieser zweibandigen Ausgabe zusammengefassten Aufsatze von Marcel Mauss haben nicht nur in der Soziologie zahlreiche Arbeiten massgeblich beeinflusst. Der lange im Schatten seines Onkels Emile Durkheim stehende franzoesische Sozialwissenschaftler ist heute weltweit so aktuell wie noch nie zuvor.

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 Levi-Strauss gave a talk to the Confederation generale du travail in Paris. Only recently discovered in the archives of the Bibliotheque national de France, this lecture, "Ethnography: The Revolutionary Science," discussed the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, to whom Levi-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 Levi-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 Desveaux, who edited the original French volume De Montaigne a Montaigne, and Peter Skafish expand the context of Levi-Strauss's talks with contemporary perspectives and commentary.

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.

Tristes Tropiques begins with the line 'I hate travelling and explorers', yet during his life Claude Levi-Strauss travelled from wartime France to the Amazon basin and the dense upland jungles of Brazil, where he found 'human society reduced to its most basic expression'. His account of the people he encountered changed the field of anthropology, transforming Western notions of 'primitive' man. Tristes Tropiques is a major work of art as well as of scholarship. It is a memoir of exquisite beauty and a masterpiece of travel writing: funny, discursive, movingly detailing personal and cultural loss, and brilliantly connecting disparate fields of thought. Few books have had as powerful and broad an impact.

Claude Levi-Strauss's fascination with Northwest Coast Indian art dates back to the late 1930s. "Sometime before the outbreak of the Second World War," he writes, "I had already bought in Paris a Haida slate panel pipe." In New York in the early forties, he shared his enthusiasm with a group of Surrealist refugee artists with whom he was associated. "Surely it will not be long," he wrote in an article published in 1943, "before we see the collections from this part of the world moved from ethnographic to fine arts museums to take their just place amidst the antiquities of Egypt of Persia and the works of medieval Europe. For this art is not unequal to the greatest, and, in the course of the century and a half of its history that is known to us, it has shown evidence of a superior diversity and has demonstrated apparently inexhaustible talents for renewal." In The Way of the Masks, first published more than thirty years later, he returned to this material, seeking to unravel a persistent problem that he associated with a particular mask, the Swaihwe, which is found among certain tribes of coastal British Columbia. This book, now available for the first time in an English translation, is a vivid, audacious illustration of Levi-Strauss's provocative structural approach to tribal art and culture. Bringing to bear on the Swaihwe masks his theory that mythical representations cannot be understood as isolated objects, Levi-Strausss began to look for links among them, as well as relationships between these and other types of masks and myths, treating them all as parts of a dialogue that has been going on for generations among neighboring tribes. The wider system that emerges form his investigation uncovers the association of the masks with Northwest coppers and with hereditary status and wealth, and takes the reader as far north as the Dene of Alaska, as far south as the Yurok of northern California, and as far away in time and space as medieval Europe. As one reader said of this book, "It will be controversial, as his work always is, and it will stimulate more scholarship on the Northwest Coast than any other single book that I can think of."

El legendario ensayo de Claude levi-Strauss Raza e historia constituye un impresionante y revolucionario manifiesto sobre la dialectica de las ideas de progreso y diversidad cultural. Veinte anos mas tarde completo y matizo su perspectiva con Raza y cultura. Esta edicion reune estos dos trabajos en un unico volumen.

This collection touches on a wide range of anthropological issues, including family and marriage, myths, and rites, the environment and its representation, and constraint and freedom. The essays encompass more than forty years of analysis and constrain arguments that are as relevant today as they were thirty years ago.
Hardly a field remains untouched--sociobiology, linguistics, botany, genetics, psychiatry, esthetics, ecology, politics, neuroscience, education, morality, psychology. . . . It's all breathtaking and alarming, some of it wonderful, some of it ridiculous. . . . At times the experience is exhilarating.--Richard A. Shweder, New York Times Book Review"

En esta obra, Claude Levi-Strauss expone y lleva a la practica el metodo estructural a cuyo desarrollo va intimamente unido su nombre. Al abordar los grandes problemas de la antropologia social -de las reglas del parentesco y del matrimonio a la prohibicion del incesto y la exogamia, pasando por los ritos y practicas de la magia-, el texto analiza los problemas metodologicos que plantea el estructuralismo, y define e ilustra la ambicion del autor respecto a plantear un verdadero analisis cientifico de los fenomenos humanos sin traicionarlos, es decir, sin hacerles perder nada de su riqueza ni de los sutiles matices derivados de su diversidad. De ahi que, junto a aspectos de la realidad social -tan complejos que el observador debe contentarse con describirlos-, haya otros que el analisis estructural logra alcanzar y cuya regularidad pone de manifiesto. De este modo, la etnografia -ayudada por la historia, la linguistica, la sociologia, la psicologia y el psicoanalisis-contribuye a introducir metodos rigurosos al amparo de los cuales quizas un dia las ciencias humanas logren la categoria de ciencias de pleno derecho.

The eighteen essays collected in this volume have been selected and ordered to give what Levi-Strauss terms "a bird's-eye view of the problems of modern ethnology." As representative examples, these essays introduce readers to the methods of structural anthropology while affording a glimpse into the mind of one of the foremost anthropologists of our time.
""Structural Anthropology, Volume II" is a diverse collection. [It is] a useful 'sampler' that gives a reader the full range of Levi-Strauss's interests."--Daniel Bell, "New York Times Book Review
"