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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.
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.
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.
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.
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Tristes Tropiques (Paperback, Revised ed.)
Claude Levi-Strauss; Translated by John Weightman, Doreen Weightman; Introduction by Patrick Wilcken
1
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R600
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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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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From Montaigne to Montaigne (Hardcover, 1)
Claude Levi-Strauss; Edited by Emmanuel Desveaux; Translated by Robert Bononno; Introduction by Peter Skafish
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R1,531
Discovery Miles 15 310
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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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 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.
"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
Ujarak, Iqallijuq, and Kupaaq were elders from the Inuit community
on Igloolik Island in Nunavut. The three elders, among others,
shared with Bernard Saladin d'Anglure the narratives which make up
the heart of Inuit Stories of Being and Rebirth. Through their
words, and historical sources recorded by Franz Boas and Knud
Rasmussen, Saladin d'Anglure examines the Inuit notion of
personhood and its relationship to cosmology and mythology. Central
to these stories are womb memories, narratives of birth and
reincarnation, and the concept of the third sex-an intermediate
identity between male and female. As explained through first-person
accounts and traditional legends, myths, and folk tales, the
presence of transgender individuals informs Inuit relationships to
one another and to the world at large, transcending the dualities
of male and female, human and animal, human and spirit.This new
English edition includes the 2006 preface by Claude Levi-Strauss
and an afterword by Bernard Saladin d'Anglure.
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The Other Face of the Moon (Hardcover)
Claude Levi-Strauss; Foreword by Junzo Kawada; Translated by Jane Marie Todd
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R1,061
R962
Discovery Miles 9 620
Save R99 (9%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Gathering for the first time all of Claude Levi-Strauss's writings
on Japanese civilization, The Other Face of the Moon forms a
sustained meditation into the French anthropologist's dictum that
to understand one's own culture, one must regard it from the point
of view of another. Exposure to Japanese art was influential in
Levi-Strauss's early intellectual growth, and between 1977 and 1988
he visited the country five times. The essays, lectures, and
interviews of this volume, written between 1979 and 2001, are the
product of these journeys. They investigate an astonishing range of
subjects-among them Japan's founding myths, Noh and Kabuki theater,
the distinctiveness of the Japanese musical scale, the artisanship
of Jomon pottery, and the relationship between Japanese graphic
arts and cuisine. For Levi-Strauss, Japan occupied a unique place
among world cultures. Molded in the ancient past by Chinese
influences, it had more recently incorporated much from Europe and
the United States. But the substance of these borrowings was so
carefully assimilated that Japanese culture never lost its
specificity. As though viewed from the hidden side of the moon,
Asia, Europe, and America all find, in Japan, images of themselves
profoundly transformed. As in Levi-Strauss's classic ethnography
Tristes Tropiques, this new English translation presents the voice
of one of France's most public intellectuals at its most personal.
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."
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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