Claude Lévi-Strauss
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Spouses | Rose Marie Ullmo
(m. 1946; div. 1954)Monique Roman (m. 1954) |
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Claude Lévi-Strauss (
Lévi-Strauss argued that the "savage" mind had the same structures as the "civilized" mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere.[7][8] These observations culminated in his famous book Tristes Tropiques (1955) which established his position as one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought. As well as sociology, his ideas reached into many fields in the humanities, including philosophy. Structuralism has been defined as "the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity."[4] He won the 1986 International Nonino Prize in Italy.
Biography
Early life and education
Gustave Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in 1908 to
From 1918 to 1925 he studied at
Early career
In 1935, after a few years of secondary school teaching, he took up a last-minute offer to be part of a French cultural mission to Brazil in which he would serve as a visiting professor of sociology at the University of São Paulo while his then-wife, Dina, served as a visiting professor of ethnology.
The couple lived and did their anthropological work in Brazil from 1935 to 1939. During this time, while he was a visiting professor of sociology, Claude undertook his only
In the 1980s, he discussed why he became
A day will come when the thought that to feed themselves, men of the past raised and massacred living beings and complacently exposed their shredded flesh in displays shall no doubt inspire the same repulsion as that of the travellers of the 16th and 17th century facing cannibal meals of savage American primitives in America, Oceania, Asia or Africa.
Expatriation
Lévi-Strauss returned to France in 1939 to take part in the war effort and was assigned as a liaison agent to the
Around that time, he and his first wife separated. She stayed behind and worked in the
In 1941, he was offered a position at the
The war years in New York were formative for Lévi-Strauss in several ways. His relationship with Jakobson helped shape his theoretical outlook (Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss are considered to be two of the central figures on which structuralist thought is based).[21] In addition, Lévi-Strauss was also exposed to the American anthropology espoused by Franz Boas, who taught at Columbia University. In 1942, while having dinner at the Faculty House at Columbia, Boas died in Lévi-Strauss's arms.[22] This intimate association with Boas gave his early work a distinctive American inclination that helped facilitate its acceptance in the U.S.
It is noteworthy that he received none of the medals and honours usually awarded to Resistants, let alone created Compagnon de la Libération.
After a brief stint from 1946 to 1947 as a
Later life and death
In 2008, he became the first member of the Académie française to reach the age of 100 and one of the few living authors to have his works published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. On the death of Maurice Druon on 14 April 2009, he became the dean of the Académie, its longest-serving member.
He died on 30 October 2009, at age 100.[3] The death was announced four days later.[3]
Career and development of structural anthropology
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The Elementary Structures of Kinship was published in 1949 and quickly came to be regarded as one of the most important anthropological works on kinship. It was even reviewed favorably by
Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lévi-Strauss continued to publish and experienced considerable professional success. On his return to France, he became involved with the administration of the
While Lévi-Strauss was well known in academic circles, in 1955 he became one of France's best-known intellectuals by publishing Tristes Tropiques in Paris that year by Plon (best-known translated into English in 1973, published by Penguin). Essentially, this book was a memoir detailing his time as a French expatriate throughout the 1930s and his travels. Lévi-Strauss combined exquisitely beautiful prose, dazzling philosophical meditation, and ethnographic analysis of the Amazonian peoples to produce a masterpiece. The organizers of the Prix Goncourt, for instance, lamented that they were not able to award Lévi-Strauss the prize because Tristes Tropiques was nonfiction.[citation needed]
Lévi-Strauss was named to a chair in social anthropology at the Collège de France in 1959. At roughly the same time he published Structural Anthropology, a collection of his essays that provided both examples and programmatic statements about structuralism. At the same time as he was laying the groundwork for an intellectual program, he began a series of institutions to establish anthropology as a discipline in France, including the Laboratory for Social Anthropology where new students could be trained, and a new journal, l'Homme, for publishing the results of their research.
The Savage Mind
In 1962, Lévi-Strauss published what is for many people his most important work, La Pensée Sauvage, translated into English as
The Savage Mind discusses not just "primitive" thought, a category defined by previous anthropologists, but also forms of thought common to all human beings. The first half of the book lays out Lévi-Strauss's theory of culture and mind, while the second half expands this account into a theory of history and social change. This latter part of the book engaged Lévi-Strauss in a heated debate with Jean-Paul Sartre over the nature of human freedom. On the one hand, Sartre's existentialist philosophy committed him to a position that human beings fundamentally were free to act as they pleased. On the other hand, Sartre also was a leftist who was committed to ideas such as that individuals were constrained by the ideologies imposed on them by the powerful. Lévi-Strauss presented his structuralist notion of agency in opposition to Sartre. Echoes of this debate between structuralism and existentialism eventually inspired the work of younger authors such as Pierre Bourdieu.
Mythologiques
Now a worldwide celebrity, Lévi-Strauss spent the second half of the 1960s working on his master project, a four-volume study called Mythologiques. In it, he followed a single myth from the tip of South America and all of its variations from group to group north through Central America and eventually into the Arctic Circle, thus tracing the myth's cultural evolution from one end of the Western Hemisphere to the other. He accomplished this in a typically structuralist way, examining the underlying structure of relationships among the elements of the story rather than focusing on the content of the story itself. While Pensée Sauvage was a statement of Lévi-Strauss's big-picture theory, Mythologiques was an extended, four-volume example of analysis. Richly detailed and extremely long, it is less widely read than the much shorter and more accessible Pensée Sauvage, despite its position as Lévi-Strauss's masterwork.
Lévi-Strauss completed the final volume of Mythologiques in 1971. On 14 May 1973, he was elected to the Académie française, France's highest honour for a writer.
Anthropological theories
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Lévi-Strauss sought to apply the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure to anthropology.[32] At the time, the family was traditionally considered the fundamental object of analysis but was seen primarily as a self-contained unit consisting of a husband, a wife, and their children. Nephews, cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents all were treated as secondary. Lévi-Strauss argued that akin to Saussure's notion of linguistic value, families acquire determinate identities only through relations with one another. Thus, he inverted the classical view of anthropology, putting the secondary family members first and insisting on analyzing the relations between units instead of the units themselves.[33]
In his own analysis of the formation of the identities that arise through marriages between tribes, Lévi-Strauss noted that the relation between the uncle and the nephew was to the relation between brother and sister, as the relation between father and son is to that between husband and wife,[34] that is, A is to B as C is to D. Therefore, if we know A, B, and C, we can predict D.[clarification needed] An example of this law is illustrated in the diagram. The four relation units are marked with A to D. Lévi-Strauss noted that if A is positive, B is negative, and C is negative, then it can inferred that D is positive, thereby satisfying the constraint 'A is to B as C is to D'; in this case, the relations are contrasting. The goal of Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology, then, was to simplify the masses of empirical data into generalized, comprehensible relations between units, which allow for predictive laws to be identified, such as A is to B as C is to D.[33]
Lévi-Strauss's theory is set forth in Structural Anthropology (1958). Briefly, he considers culture a system of symbolic communication, to be investigated with methods that others have used more narrowly in the discussion of novels, political speeches, sports, and movies. His reasoning makes the best sense when contrasted against the background of an earlier generation's social theory. He wrote about this relationship for decades.
A preference for "functionalist" explanations dominated the social sciences from the turn of the 20th century through the 1950s, which is to say that anthropologists and sociologists tried to state the purpose of a social act or institution. The existence of a thing was explained, if it fulfilled a function. The only strong alternative to that kind of analysis was a historical explanation, accounting for the existence of a social fact by stating how it came to be.
The idea of social function developed in two different ways, however. The English anthropologist
In the United States, where the shape of anthropology was set by the German-educated Franz Boas, the preference was for historical accounts. This approach had obvious problems, which Lévi-Strauss praises Boas for facing squarely. Historical information seldom is available for non-literate cultures. The anthropologist fills in with comparisons to other cultures and is forced to rely on theories that have no evidential basis, the old notion of universal stages of development or the claim that cultural resemblances are based on some unrecognized past contact between groups. Boas came to believe that no overall pattern in social development could be proven; for him, there was no single history, only histories.
There are three broad choices involved in the divergence of these schools; each had to decide:
- what kind of evidence to use;
- whether to emphasize the particulars of a single culture or look for patterns underlying all societies; and
- what the source of any underlying patterns might be, the definition of common humanity.
Social scientists in all traditions relied on cross-cultural studies,[citation needed] as it was always necessary to supplement information about a society with information about others. Thus, some idea of a common human nature was implicit in each approach. The critical distinction, then, remained twofold:
- Does a social fact exist because it is functional for the social order, or because it is functional for the person?
- Do uniformities across cultures occur because of organizational needs that must be met everywhere, or because of the uniform needs of human personality?
For Lévi-Strauss, the choice was for the demands of the social order. He had no difficulty bringing out the inconsistencies and triviality of individualistic accounts. Malinowski said, for example, that magic beliefs come into being when people need to feel a sense of control over events when the outcome is uncertain. In the Trobriand Islands, he found proof of this claim in the rites surrounding abortions and weaving skirts. But in the same tribes, there is no magic attached to making clay pots even though it is no more certain a business than weaving. So, the explanation is not consistent. Furthermore, these explanations tend to be used in an ad hoc, superficial way – one postulates a trait of personality when needed. However, the accepted way of discussing organizational function did not work either. Different societies might have institutions that were similar in many obvious ways and yet, served different functions. Many tribal cultures divide the tribe into two groups and have elaborate rules about how the two groups may interact. However, exactly what they may do—trade, intermarry—is different in different tribes; for that matter, so are the criteria for distinguishing the groups. Nor will it do to say that dividing in two is a universal need of organizations, because there are a lot of tribes that thrive without it.
For Lévi-Strauss, the methods of linguistics became a model for all his earlier examinations of society. His analogies usually are from phonology (though also later from music, mathematics, chaos theory, cybernetics, and so on). "A really scientific analysis must be real, simplifying, and explanatory," he writes.[35] Phonemic analysis reveals features that are real, in the sense that users of the language can recognize and respond to them. At the same time, a phoneme is an abstraction from language – not a sound, but a category of sound defined by the way it is distinguished from other categories through rules unique to the language. The entire sound structure of a language may be generated from a relatively small number of rules.
In the study of the kinship systems that first concerned him, this ideal of explanation allowed a comprehensive organization of data that partly had been ordered by other researchers. The overall goal was to find out why family relations differed among various South American cultures. The father might have great authority over the son in one group, for example, with the relationship rigidly restricted by
A number of partial patterns had been noted. Relations between the mother and father, for example, had some sort of reciprocity with those of father and son– if the mother had a dominant social status and was formal with the father, for example, then the father usually had close relations with the son. But these smaller patterns joined in inconsistent ways. One possible way of finding a master order was to rate all the positions in a kinship system along several dimensions. For example, the father was older than the son, the father produced the son, the father had the same sex as the son, and so on; the matrilineal uncle was older and of the same sex, but did not produce the son, and so on. An exhaustive collection of such observations might cause an overall pattern to emerge.
However, for Lévi-Strauss, this kind of work was considered "analytical in appearance only". It results in a chart that is far more difficult to understand than the original data and is based on arbitrary abstractions (empirically, fathers are older than sons, but it is only the researcher who declares that this feature explains their relations). Furthermore, it does not explain anything. The explanation it offers is
A proper solution to the puzzle is to find a basic unit of
Right or wrong, this solution displays the qualities of structural thinking. Even though Lévi-Strauss frequently speaks of treating culture as the product of the axioms and corollaries that underlie it, or the phonemic differences that constitute it, he is concerned with the objective data of field research. He notes that it is logically possible for a different atom of kinship structure to exist–sister, sister's brother, brother's wife, daughter – but there are no real-world examples of relationships that can be derived from that grouping. The trouble with this view has been shown by Australian anthropologist Augustus Elkin, who insisted on the point that in a four-class marriage system, the preferred marriage was with a classificatory mother's brother's daughter and never with the true one. Lévi-Strauss's atom of kinship structure deals only with consanguineal kin. There is a big difference between the two situations, in that the kinship structure involving the classificatory kin relations allows for the building of a system which can bring together thousands of people. Lévi-Strauss's atom of kinship stops working once the true MoBrDa is missing.[clarification needed] Lévi-Strauss also developed the concept of the house society to describe those societies where the domestic unit is more central to the social organization than the descent group or lineage.
The purpose of structuralist explanation is to organize real data in the simplest effective way. All science, he says, is either structuralist or reductionist.[36] In confronting such matters as the incest taboo, one is facing an objective limit of what the human mind has accepted so far. One could hypothesize some biological imperative underlying it, but so far as social order is concerned, the taboo has the effect of an irreducible fact. The social scientist can only work with the structures of human thought that arise from it. And structural explanations can be tested and refuted. A mere analytic scheme that wishes causal relations into existence is not structuralist in this sense.
Lévi-Strauss's later works are more controversial, in part because they impinge on the subject matter of other scholars. He believed that modern life and all history were founded on the same categories and transformations that he had discovered in the Brazilian
He argued for a view of human life as existing in two timelines simultaneously, the eventful one of history and the long cycles in which one set of fundamental mythic patterns dominates and then perhaps another. In this respect, his work resembles that of Fernand Braudel, the historian of the Mediterranean and 'la longue durée,' the cultural outlook and forms of social organization that persisted for centuries around that sea. He is right in that history is difficult to build up in a non-literate society, nevertheless, Jean Guiart's anthropological and José Garanger's archaeological work in central Vanuatu, bringing to the fore the skeletons of former chiefs described in local myths, who had thus been living persons, shows that there can be some means of ascertaining the history of some groups which otherwise would be deemed a historical. Another issue is the experience that the same person can tell one a myth highly charged in symbols, and some years later a sort of chronological history claiming to be chronic of a descent line (e.g., in the Loyalty islands and New Zealand), the two texts having in common that they each deal in topographical detail with the land-tenure claims of the said descent line (see Douglas Oliver on the Siwai in Bougainville). Lévi-Strauss would agree to these aspects be explained inside his seminar but would never touch them on his own. The anthropological data content of the myths was not his problem. He was only interested in the formal aspects of each story, considered by him as the result of the workings of the collective unconscious of each group, which idea was taken from the linguists, but cannot be proved in any way although he was adamant about its existence and would never accept any discussion on this point.
Structuralist approach to myth
Similar to his anthropological theories, Lévi-Strauss identified myths as a type of speech through which a language could be discovered. His work is a structuralist theory of mythology which attempted to explain how seemingly fantastical and arbitrary tales could be so similar across cultures. Because he had the believe that there was no one "authentic" version of a myth, rather that they were all manifestations of the same language, he sought to find the fundamental units of myth, namely, the mytheme. Lévi-Strauss broke each of the versions of a myth down into a series of sentences, consisting of a relation between a function and a subject. Sentences with the same function were given the same number and bundled together. These are mythemes.[37]
What Lévi-Strauss believed he had discovered when he examined the relations between mythemes was that a myth consists of juxtaposed
Lévi-Strauss sees a basic paradox in the study of
On the one hand it would seem that in the course of a myth anything is likely to happen. ... But on the other hand, this apparent arbitrariness is belied by the astounding similarity between myths collected in widely different regions. Therefore the problem: If the content of myth is contingent [i.e., arbitrary], how are we to explain the fact that myths throughout the world are so similar?
Lévi-Strauss proposed that universal laws must govern mythical thought and resolve this seeming paradox, producing similar myths in different cultures. Each myth may seem unique, but he proposed it is just one particular instance of a universal law of human thought. In studying myth, Lévi-Strauss tries "to reduce apparently arbitrary data to some kind of order, and to attain a level at which a kind of necessity becomes apparent, underlying the illusions of liberty."[39] Laurie suggests that for Levi-Strauss, "operations embedded within animal myths provide opportunities to resolve collective problems of classification and hierarchy, marking lines between the inside and the outside, the Law and its exceptions, those who belong and those who do not."[40]
According to Lévi-Strauss, "mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution."[35]: 224 In other words, myths consist of:
- elements that oppose or contradict each other and
- other elements that "mediate", or resolve, those oppositions.
For example, Lévi-Strauss thinks the
- the trickster has a contradictory and unpredictable personality;
- the trickster is almost always a raven or a coyote.
Lévi-Strauss argues that the raven and coyote "mediate" the opposition between life and death. The relationship between agriculture and hunting is analogous to the opposition between life and death: agriculture is solely concerned with producing life (at least up until harvest time); hunting is concerned with producing death. Furthermore, the relationship between herbivores and beasts of prey is analogous to the relationship between agriculture and hunting: like agriculture, herbivores are concerned with plants; like hunting, beasts of prey are concerned with catching meat. Lévi-Strauss points out that the raven and coyote eat carrion and are therefore halfway between herbivores and beasts of prey: like beasts of prey, they eat meat; like herbivores, they do not catch their food. Thus, he argues, "we have a mediating structure of the following type":[35]: 224
By uniting herbivore traits with traits of beasts of prey, the raven and coyote somewhat reconcile herbivores and beasts of prey: in other words, they mediate the opposition between herbivores and beasts of prey. As we have seen, this opposition ultimately is analogous to the opposition between life and death. Therefore, the raven and coyote ultimately mediate the opposition between life and death. This, Lévi-Strauss believes, explains why the coyote and raven have contradictory personalities when they appear as the mythical trickster:
The trickster is a mediator. Since his mediating function occupies a position halfway between two polar terms, he must retain something of that duality—namely an ambiguous and equivocal character.[35]: 226
Because the raven and coyote reconcile profoundly opposed concepts (i.e., life and death), their own mythical personalities must reflect this duality or contradiction: in other words, they must have a contradictory, "tricky" personality.
This theory about the structure of myth helps support Lévi-Strauss's more basic theory about human thought. According to this more basic theory, universal laws govern all areas of human thought:
If it were possible to prove in this instance, too, that the apparent arbitrariness of the mind, its supposedly spontaneous flow of inspiration, and its seemingly uncontrolled inventiveness [are ruled by] laws operating at a deeper level...if the human mind appears determined even in the realm of mythology,
a fortiori it must also be determined in all its spheres of activity.[39]
Out of all the products of culture, myths seem the most fantastic and unpredictable. Therefore, Lévi-Strauss claims, that if even mythical thought obeys universal laws, then all human thought must obey universal laws.
The Savage Mind: bricoleur and engineer
Lévi-Strauss developed the comparison of the Bricoleur and Engineer in The Savage Mind.
Bricoleur has its origin in the old French verb bricoler, which originally referred to extraneous movements in ball games, billiards, hunting, shooting and riding, but which today means do-it-yourself building or repairing things with the tools and materials on hand, puttering or tinkering as it were. In comparison to the true craftsman, whom Lévi-Strauss calls the Engineer, the Bricoleur is adept at many tasks and at putting preexisting things together in new ways, adapting his project to a finite stock of materials and tools.
The Engineer deals with projects in their entirety, conceiving and procuring all the necessary materials and tools to suit his project. The Bricoleur approximates "the savage mind" and the Engineer approximates the scientific mind. Lévi-Strauss says that the universe of the Bricoleur is closed, and he often is forced to make do with whatever is at hand, whereas the universe of the Engineer is open in that he is able to create new tools and materials. However, both live within a restrictive reality, and so the Engineer is forced to consider the preexisting set of theoretical and practical knowledge, of technical means, in a similar way to the Bricoleur.
Criticism
Lévi-Strauss's theory on the origin of the Trickster has been criticized on a number of points by anthropologists.
Stanley Diamond notes that while the secular civilized often consider the concepts of life and death to be polar, primitive cultures often see them "as aspects of a single condition, the condition of existence."[41]: 308 Diamond remarks that Lévi-Strauss did not reach such a conclusion by inductive reasoning, but simply by working backwards from the evidence to the "a priori mediated concepts"[41]: 310 of "life" and "death", which he reached by assumption of a necessary progression from "life" to "agriculture" to "herbivorous animals", and from "death" to "warfare" to "beasts of prey". For that matter, the coyote is well known to hunt in addition to scavenging and the raven also has been known to act as a bird of prey, in contrast to Lévi-Strauss's conception. Nor does that conception explain why a scavenger such as a bear would never appear as the Trickster. Diamond further remarks that "the Trickster names 'raven' and 'coyote' which Lévi-Strauss explains can be arrived at with greater economy on the basis of, let us say, the cleverness of the animals involved, their ubiquity, elusiveness, capacity to make mischief, their undomesticated reflection of certain human traits."[41]: 311 Finally, Lévi-Strauss's analysis does not appear to be capable of explaining why representations of the Trickster in other areas of the world make use of such animals as the spider and mantis.
Edmund Leach wrote that "The outstanding characteristic of his writing, whether in French or English, is that it is difficult to understand; his sociological theories combine baffling complexity with overwhelming erudition. Some readers even suspect that they are being treated to a confidence trick."[42] Sociologist Stanislav Andreski criticized Lévi-Strauss's work generally, arguing that his scholarship was often sloppy and moreover that much of his mystique and reputation stemmed from his "threatening people with mathematics", a reference to Lévi-Strauss's use of quasi-algebraic equations to explain his ideas.[43] Drawing on postcolonial approaches to anthropology, Timothy Laurie has suggested that "Lévi-Strauss speaks from the vantage point of a State intent on securing knowledge for the purposes of, as he himself would often claim, salvaging local cultures...but the salvation workers also ascribe to themselves legitimacy and authority in the process."[44]
Personal life
He married Dina Dreyfus in 1932. They later divorced. He was then married to Rose Marie Ullmo from 1946 to 1954. They had one son, Laurent. His third and last wife was Monique Roman; they were married in 1954. They had one son, Matthieu.[45]
Honours and tributes
Ribbon bar | Country | Honour |
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France | Order of the Legion of Honour
| |
France | Commandeur of the National Order of Merit
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France | Commander of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques
| |
France | Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres | |
Belgium | Commander of the Order of the Crown | |
Brazil | Commander of the Order of the Southern Cross | |
Brazil | Grand cross of the National Order of Scientific Merit | |
Japan | Grand cross of the Order of the Rising Sun |
Works
- 1926. Gracchus Babeuf et le communisme. L'églantine.
- 1948. La Vie familiale et sociale des Indiens Nambikwara. Paris: Société des Américanistes.
- 1949. Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté
- The Elementary Structures of Kinship, translated by J. H. Bell, J. R. von Sturmer, and R. Needham. 1969.[46]
- 1952. Race et histoire, (as part of the series
- 1955. "The Structural Study of Myth." Journal of American Folklore 68(270):428–44.[37]
- 1955. Tristes Tropiques ['Sad Tropics'],
- A World on the Wane, translated by J. Weightman and D. Weightman. 1973.
- 1958. Anthropologie structurale
- Structural Anthropology, translated by C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf. 1963.
- 1962. Le Totemisme aujourdhui
- Totemism, translated by R. Needham. 1963.
- 1962. La Pensée sauvage
- The Savage Mind. 1966.
- 1964–1971. Mythologiques I–IV, translated by J. Weightman and D. Weightman.
- 1964. Le Cru et le cuit (The Raw and the Cooked, 1969)
- 1966. Du miel aux cendres (From Honey to Ashes, 1973)
- 1968. L'Origine des manières de table (The Origin of Table Manners, 1978)
- 1971. L'Homme nu (The Naked Man, 1981)
- 1973. Anthropologie structurale deux
- Structural Anthropology, Vol. II, translated by M. Layton. 1976
- 1972. La Voie des masques
- The Way of the Masks, translated by S. Modelski, 1982.
- Lévi-Strauss, Claude (2005), Myth and Meaning, First published 1978 by Routledge & Kegan Paul, U.K, Taylor & Francis Group, ISBN 0-415-25548-1, retrieved 5 November 2010
- 1978. Myth and Meaning. UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul.[48]
- 1983. Le Regard éloigné
- The View from Afar, translated by J. Neugroschel and P. Hoss. 1985.
- 1984. Paroles donnés
- Anthropology and Myth: Lectures, 1951–1982, translated by R. Willis. 1987.
- 1985. La Potière jalouse
- The Jealous Potter, translated by B. Chorier. 1988.
- 1991. Histoire de Lynx
- The Story of Lynx, translated by C. Tihanyi. 1996.[49]
- 1993. Regarder, écouter, lire
- Look, Listen, Read, translated by B. Singer. 1997.
- 1994. Saudades do Brasil. Paris: Plon.
- 1994. Le Père Noël supplicié. Pin-Balma: Sables Éditions.
- 2011. L'Anthropologie face aux problèmes du monde moderne. Paris: Seuil.
- 2011. L'Autre face de la lune, Paris: Seuil.
Interviews
- 1978. "Comment travaillent les écrivains," interviewed by Jean-Louis de Rambures. Paris.
- 1988. "De près et de loin," interviewed by Didier Eribon (Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, trans. Paula Wissing, 1991)
- 2005. "Loin du Brésil," interviewed by Véronique Mortaigne, Paris, Chandeigne.
See also
- Alliance theory
- Comparative mythology
- Evolutionary Principle
- List of important publications in anthropology
- Little Arpad
References
- ^ Claude Lévi-Strauss, "Introduction à l'oeuvre de Marcel Mauss" in Mauss, Sociologie et Anthropologie, Paris, 1950.
- ^ "Lévi-Strauss." Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
- ^ a b c Rothstein, Edward (3 November 2009). "Claude Lévi-Strauss dies at 100". The New York Times. Retrieved 4 November 2009.
- ^ Seattle Times. Associated Press. Retrieved 22 April 2015.
- ^ "Claude Levi-Strauss, Scientist Who Saw Human Doom, Dies at 100". Bloomberg. 3 November 2009. Retrieved 3 November 2009.
- ^ Briggs, Rachel; Meyer, Janelle. "Structuralism". Anthropological Theories: A Guide Prepared By Students For Students. Dept. of Anthropology, University of Alabama. Archived from the original on 27 November 2015. Retrieved 22 April 2015.
- ^ (in Portuguese) "Claude Lévi-Strauss - Biografia". Uol Educação Brasil. Access date: 9 December 2009.
- ^ Ashbrook, Tom (November 2009). "Claude Levi-Strauss". On Point
- ^ a b c
Loyer, Emmanuelle (18 January 2019). "Chapter 2: Revelations (1908–1924)". Lévi-Strauss: A Biography (3rd ed.). John Wiley & Sons. pp. 35–50. ISBN 978-1-5095-1201-0.
- ^ Voss, Susan M. (1977). "Claude Levi-Strauss: The Man and His Works". Nebraska Anthropologist. 3: 21–38.
- ^ Conversation with Jean José Marchand
- ^ Wiseman, p. 6
- ^ He writes:
'This casual attitude to the supernatural was all the more surprising for me... I lived during the First World War with my grandfather, who was Rabbi of Versailles. The house was attached to the synagogue by a long inner passage, along which it was difficult to venture without a feeling of anguish, and which in itself formed an impassable frontier between the profane world and that other which was lacking precisely in the human warmth that was a necessary precondition to its being experienced as sacred...'
- Handelman, Susan A. (2012). Slayers of Moses, The: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory. SUNY Press. p. 92. ISBN 978-1-4384-0564-3.
- Levi-Strauss, Claude (2012). Tristes Tropiques. Penguin. ISBN 978-1-101-57560-4.
- Handelman, Susan A. (2012). Slayers of Moses, The: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory. SUNY Press. p. 92.
- ^ "Catherine Clément raconte le grand ethnologue qui fête ses 99 ans," interview, Le Journal du Dimanche, 25 November 2007
- ISBN 978-1-5095-1201-0.
While himself an atheist, or at least an agnostic, he endorsed this messianic vision: 'Our task today is that of the prophet and martyr: to achieve within ourselves – and not just in our thoughts, but in our lives – a new order.'
- ^ "Personally, I've never been confronted with the question of God," says one such politely indifferent atheist, Dr. Claude Lévi-Strauss, professor of social anthropology at the Collège de France." Theology: Toward a Hidden God, Time.com.
- ^ ISBN 978-1-5095-1201-0.
- ^ "Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Influential Theory of Structuralism". ThoughtCo. Retrieved 15 October 2022.
- S2CID 142116998.
- ^ Serge, Victor (2019). Notebooks: 1936-1947. New York Review Books. pp. 61–66.
- ^ Johnson, C. (2003). Claude Levi-Strauss: The Formative Years. Cambridge University Press. pp. 1, 92, 172.
- ISBN 9780759104600.
- ^ Moore, Jerry D. (2004). Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists. Rowman Altamira.
- ^ "Anthropologist Levi-Strauss dies". BBC. 3 November 2009. Retrieved 3 November 2009.
- ^ "Death of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss". Euronews. 3 November 2009. Archived from the original on 8 November 2009. Retrieved 3 November 2009.
- ^ "Claude Lévi-Strauss". The Daily Telegraph. 3 November 2009. Archived from the original on 12 January 2022. Retrieved 3 November 2009.
- ^ Davies, Lizzy (3 November 2009). "French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss dies aged 100". The Guardian. Retrieved 3 November 2009.
- JSTOR 674306/
- Académie française. Archived from the originalon 31 March 2012.
- ^ "Claude Levi-Strauss (1908 - 2009)". Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 26 July 2015.
- ^ "Claude Levi-Strauss". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved 28 November 2022.
- ^ Moore, Jerry D. (2009). "Claude Levi-Strauss: Structuralism". Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropologically Theories and Theorists. Walnut Creek, California: Altamira. pp. 231–247.
- ^ a b Phillips, John W. "Structural Linguistics and Anthropology". National University of Singapore.
- ^ Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1967). Structural Anthropology. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books. pp. 37–46.
- ^ a b c d e Lévi-Strauss, Claude. [1958] 1963. Structural Anthropology, translated by C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf.
- ^ "Definition of reductionist | Dictionary.com". www.dictionary.com. Retrieved 15 October 2022.
- ^ JSTOR 536768.
- ^ Unknown (7 July 2014). "G324: Advanced Media Portfolio 0188 0194 0217: Claude Levi-Strauss - Binary Opposites". G324. Retrieved 15 October 2022.
- ^ a b Lévi-Strauss, Claude. [1964] 1969. The Raw and the Cooked, translated by J. Weightman and D. Weightman. p. 10.
- ^ Laurie, Timothy (2015), "Becoming-Animal Is A Trap For Humans", Deleuze and the Non-Human, edited by H. Stark and J. Roffe.
- ^ ISBN 0-87855-045-3.
- ^ Leach, Edmund (1974), Claude Levi-Strauss (Revised ed.), New York: Viking Press, p. 3
- ISBN 9780233962269.
- hdl:10453/44227
- ^ Bloch, Maurice (3 November 2009). "Claude Lévi-Strauss obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 8 March 2021.
- ^ Levi-Strauss, Claude. [1949] 1969. The Elementary Structures of Kinship [Les Structure Elementaries de la Parente], translated by J. H. Bell, J. R. von Sturmer, and R. Needham, edited by R. Needham.
- The Race Question in Modern Science). UNESCO.
- ISBN 0-415-25548-1. Retrieved 5 November 2010.
- ISBN 0-226-47471-2. Retrieved 5 November 2010.
Sources
- Doja, Albert (2008): "Claude Lévi-Strauss at his Centennial: toward a future anthropology." .
- —— 2010. "Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009): The apotheosis of heroic anthropology." .
- .
- Wiseman, Boris. 1998. Introducing Lévi-Strauss. Totem Books.
- ——, ed. 2009. The Cambridge Companion to Lévi-Strauss. Cambridge University Press.
Further reading
- Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2020. "The Key to All Mythologies" (book review). The New York Review of Books 67(2):18–20.
- This is a review of Emmanuelle Loyer, Lévi-Strauss: A Biography, translated by Ninon Vinsonneau and Jonathan Magidoff, Polity, 2019, 744 pp.; and Maurice Godelier, Claude Lévi-Strauss: A Critical Study of His Thought, translated from the French by Nora Scott, Verso, 2019, 540 pp.
- Appiah concludes his review (p. 20): "Lévi-Strauss... was... an inspired interpreter, a brilliant reader.... When the landmarks of science succeed in advancing their subject, they need no longer be consulted: physicists don't study Newton; chemists don't pore over Lavoisier.... If some part of Lévi-Strauss's scholarly oeuvre survives, it will be because his scientific aspirations have not."
- Descola, Philippe. 2009. "Claude Lévi-Strauss: a Career Spanning a Century." Pp. 36 in The Letter of the Collège de France 4.
- Erlanger, Steven (28 November 2008). "100th-Birthday Tributes Pour in for Lévi-Strauss". The New York Times. Paris. Retrieved 22 April 2015.
- Ginzburg, Carlo, Safran, Yehuda, Sherer Daniel. "An Interview with Carlo Ginzburg, by Yehuda Safran and Daniel Sherer." Potlatch 5 (2022), special issue on Carlo Ginzburg. Extensive discussion of Claude Lévi-Strauss.
- Hénaff, Marcel (1998), Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Making of Structural Anthropology, Originally published 1991 as Claude Lévi-Strauss, translated by Baker), Mary, Minneapolis, Minnesota: ISBN 0-8166-2760-6, retrieved 5 November 2010
- Pace, David (1983), Claude Levi-Strauss: The Bearer of Ashes, Boston, Massachusetts & London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ISBN 0-7100-9297-0, retrieved 5 November 2010
- Taylor, Mark Kline (1986), Beyond Explanation: Religious Dimensions in Cultural Anthropology, Macon, Georgia: ISBN 0-86554-165-5, retrieved 5 November 2010.
- Wilcken, Patrick (2011), Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory, London, UK: Bloomsbury, ]
- "Claude Lévi-Strauss" (obituary). The Economist. 12 November 2009.
External links
- What Lévi-Strauss owes to Amerindians, film directed by Edson Matarezio
- Profile of Lévi-Strauss in The Nation
- Various excerpts from Structural Anthropology at marxists.org
- List of works by Claude Lévi-Strauss
- Excerpts from La Pensée Sauvage
- Documentaire 52': About "Tristes Tropiques", 1991 – Super 16 Film
- Lecture: The Birth of Historical Societies (Hitchcock Lectures), 3 and 4 October 1984, UC Berkeley (audio file)
- Linguistic and Commodity Exchanges Examines the structural differences between barter and monetary commodity exchanges and oral and written linguistic exchanges
- Claude Lévi-Strauss: Tristes Tropiques, in English, translated by John Russell, 1961
- "Claude Lévi-Strauss, social constructivism and syllables across languages"
- Claude Lévi-Strauss and his Mythologiques — An interdisciplinary internet project by scholars of the University of Hildesheim (Germany): http://www.mythologica.eu Archived 22 September 2017 at the Wayback Machine