Claude Lvi-strauss's Books

Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss,Didier Eribon

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Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss,Didier Eribon

At the age of eighty, one of the most influential yet reclusive intellectuals of the twentieth century consented to his first interviews in nearly thirty years. Hailed by Le Figaro as "an event," the resulting conversations between Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon (a correspondent for Le Nouvel Observateur) reveal the great anthropologist speaking of his life and work with ease and humor. Now available in English, the conversations are rich in Lévi-Strauss's candid appraisals of some of the best-known figures of the Parisian intelligentsia: surrealists André Breton and Max Ernst, with whom Lévi-Strauss shared a bohemian life in 1940s Manhattan; de Beauvoir, Sartre, and Camus, the stars of existentialism; Leiris, Foucault, Dumézil, Jacob, Lacan, and others. His long friendships with Jakobson and Merleau-Ponty are recalled, as well as his encounters with prominent figures in American anthropology: Lowie, Boas (who suddenly died in his chair beside Lévi-Strauss at a banquet at Columbia University), Benedict, Linton, Mead, and Kroeber. Lévi-Strauss speaks frankly about how circumstances and his own inclinations, after his early fieldwork in Brazil, led him to embrace theoretical work. His straightforward answers to Eribon's penetrating questions—What is a myth? What is structuralism? Are you a philosopher?—clarify his intellectual motives and the development of his research; his influential role as an administrator, including the founding of the Laboratory of Social Anthropology and of the journal L'Homme; the course of his writings, from Elementary Structures of Kinship to The Jealous Potter; and his thoughts on the conduct of anthropology today. Never before has Lévi-Strauss spoken so freely on so many aspects of his life: his initial failure to be elected to the Collège de France; his reaction to the events of May 1968; his regrets at not being a great investigative reporter or playwright; his deep identification with Wagner, Proust, and Rousseau. This is a rare opportunity to become acquainted with a great thinker in all his dimensions.

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184

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ISBN 10

0226474755

ISBN 13

9780226474755

The View from Afar

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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The View from Afar

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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

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332

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University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226474747

ISBN 13

9780226474748

Myth and Meaning

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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Myth and Meaning

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

In these five lectures originally prepared for the CBC, Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the world's greatest living thinkers, offers the insights of a lifetime spent interpreting myths and trying to discover their significance for human understanding.

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University of Toronto Press

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ISBN 10

0802063489

ISBN 13

9780802063489

The Other Face of the Moon

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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The Other Face of the Moon

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

Gathering for the first time all of Claude Lévi-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 Lévi-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 Lévi-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 Lévi-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.

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101

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Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674075188

ISBN 13

9780674075184

From Montaigne to Montaigne

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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From Montaigne to Montaigne

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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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U of Minnesota Press

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ISBN 10

1452962871

ISBN 13

9781452962870

The Naked Man

Mythologiques, Volume 4

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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The Naked Man

Mythologiques, Volume 4

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

The Naked Man is the fourth and final volume [of Mythologiques], written by the most influential and probably the most controversial anthropologist of our time. . . . Myths from North and South America are set side by side to show their transformations: in passing from person to person and place to place, a myth can change its content and yet retain its structural principles. . . . Apart from the complicated transformations discovered and the fascinating constructions placed on these, the stories themselves provide a feast."—Betty Abel, Contemporary Review "Lévi-Strauss uses the structural method he developed to analyze and 'decode' the mythology of native North Americans, focusing on the area west of the Rockies. . . . [The author] takes the opportunity to refute arguments against his method; his chapter 'Finale' is a defense of structural analysis as well as the closing statement of this four-volume opus which started with an 'Ouverture' in The Raw and the Cooked."—Library Journal "The culmination of one of the major intellectual feats of our time."—Paul Stuewe, Quill and Quire

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754

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University of Chicago Press

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ISBN 10

0226474968

ISBN 13

9780226474960

Structural Anthropology

By: Claude Levi-Strauss

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Structural Anthropology

By: Claude Levi-Strauss

The “structural method,” first set forth in this epoch-making book, changed the very face of social anthropology. This reissue of a classic will reintroduce readers to Lévi-Strauss's understanding of man and society in terms of individuals—kinship, social organization, religion, mythology, and art.

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444

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Basic Books

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ISBN 10

0786724439

ISBN 13

9780786724437

Structural Anthropology

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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Structural Anthropology

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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

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410

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ISBN 10

0140138218

ISBN 13

9780140138214

The Raw and the Cooked

Mythologiques, Volume 1

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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The Raw and the Cooked

Mythologiques, Volume 1

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

Lévi-Strauss is a French savant par excellence, a man of extraordinary sensitivity and human wisdom . . . a deliberate stylist with profound convictions and convincing arguments. . . . [The Raw and the Cooked] adds yet another chapter to the tireless quest for a scientifically accurate, esthetically viable, and philosophically relevant cultural anthropology. . . . [It is] indispensable reading."—Natural History

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420

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University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226474879

ISBN 13

9780226474878

The Story of Lynx

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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The Story of Lynx

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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 Percé myth that lies at the heart of The Story of Lynx, Claude Lévi-Strauss's most accessible examination of the rich mythology of American Indians. In this wide-ranging work, the master of structural anthropology considers the many variations in a story that occurs 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. Lévi-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, Lévi-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. The Story of Lynx addresses and clarifies all the major issues that have occupied Lévi-Strauss for decades, and is the only one of his books in which he explicitly connects history and structuralism. The result is a work that will appeal to those interested in American Indian mythology.

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298

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University of Chicago Press

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ISBN 10

0226474720

ISBN 13

9780226474724

Structural Anthropology Zero

By: Claude Levi-Strauss

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Structural Anthropology Zero

By: Claude Levi-Strauss

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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300

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John Wiley & Sons

Published Date

ISBN 10

1509544992

ISBN 13

9781509544998

The Raw and the Cooked

Mythologiques, Volume 1

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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The Raw and the Cooked

Mythologiques, Volume 1

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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420

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University of Chicago Press

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ISBN 10

0226474879

ISBN 13

9780226474878

Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

This first English translation of lectures Claude Lévi-Strauss delivered in Tokyo in 1986 synthesizes his ideas about structural anthropology, critiques his earlier writings on civilization, and assesses the dilemmas of cultural and moral relativism, including economic inequality, religious fundamentalism, and genetic and reproductive engineering.

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142

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Harvard University Press

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ISBN 10

0674075129

ISBN 13

9780674075122

From Honey to Ashes

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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From Honey to Ashes

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

The distinguished anthropologist discusses the role and importance of honey and tobacco in the culture of the South American Indians

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512

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ISBN 10

0226474895

ISBN 13

9780226474892

From Montaigne to Montaigne

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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From Montaigne to Montaigne

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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U of Minnesota Press

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ISBN 10

1452962871

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9781452962870

Myth and Meaning

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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Myth and Meaning

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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.

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Routledge

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ISBN 10

1317914414

ISBN 13

9781317914419

Wild Thought

A New Translation of “La Pensée sauvage”

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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Wild Thought

A New Translation of “La Pensée sauvage”

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

As the most influential anthropologist of his generation, Claude Lévi-Strauss left a profound mark on the development of twentieth-century thought. Through a mixture of insights gleaned from linguistics, sociology, and ethnology, Lévi-Strauss elaborated his theory of structural unity in culture and became the preeminent representative of structural anthropology. La Pensée sauvage, first 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. Controversially titled The Savage Mind when it was first published in English in 1966, the original translation nevertheless sparked a fascination with Lévi-Strauss’s work among Anglophone readers. Wild Thought 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 intellectual life in the twentieth century, making it an indispensable addition to any philosophical or anthropological library.

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380

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University of Chicago Press

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ISBN 10

022641311X

ISBN 13

9780226413112

Structural Anthropology

By: Claude Levi-Strauss

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Structural Anthropology

By: Claude Levi-Strauss

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444

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Basic Books

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ISBN 10

0786724439

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9780786724437

Tristes Tropiques

By: Claude Levi-Strauss

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Tristes Tropiques

By: Claude Levi-Strauss

A magical masterpiece."—Robert Ardrey. A chronicle of the author's search for a civilization "reduced to its most basic expression.

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626

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Penguin

Published Date

ISBN 10

1101575603

ISBN 13

9781101575604

The Jealous Potter

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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The Jealous Potter

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

As Lévi-Strauss freely 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. Lévi-Strauss critiques psychoanalytic interpretation and defends the interpretive powers of structuralism. "Electrifying. . . . A brilliant demonstration of structural analysis in action. . . . Can be read with pleasure and profit by anyone interested in that aspect of self-discovery that comes through knowledge of the universal and timeless myths that live on in all of us."—Jonathan Sharp, San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle "A characteristic tour de force. . . . One remains awed by him."—Colin Thubron, Sunday Times "With all its epistemological depth, the book reads at times like a Simenon or a Lewis Carroll, fusing concise methodology with mastery of style."—Bernadette Bucher, American Ethnologist "[An] engagingly provocative exploration of mythology in the Americas. . . . Always a good read."—Choice "A playful, highly entertaining book, fluently and elegantly translated by Bénédicte Chorier."—Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, New York Times Book Review

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284

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University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226474801

ISBN 13

9780226474809

Race, Anthropology, and Politics in the Work of Wifredo Lam

By: Claude Cernuschi

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Race, Anthropology, and Politics in the Work of Wifredo Lam

By: Claude Cernuschi

This book reinterprets Wifredo Lam’s work with particular attention to its political implications, focusing on how these implications emerge from the artist’s critical engagement with 20th-century anthropology. Field work conducted in Cuba, including the witnessing of actual Afro-Cuban religious ritual ceremonies and information collected from informants, enhances the interpretive background against which we can construe the meanings of Lam's art. In the process, Claude Cernuschi argues that Lam hoped to fashion a new hybrid style to foster pride and dignity in the Afro-Cuban community, as well as counteract the acute racism of Cuban culture.

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239

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1351187856

ISBN 13

9781351187855

Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss

By: Claude Levi-Strauss

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Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss

By: Claude Levi-Strauss

First published in 1987. Claude Levi-Strauss is one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century, a leading exponent of structuralism and a great social anthropologist. His Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss , originally written to preface the earliest major collection of Mauss's writings, Sociologie et Anthropologie (1950), was hailed as a seminal text by leading structuralists such as Derrida, Lacan and Barthes. This edition, the first English translation to be published, should prove invaluable to anthropologists, philologists, psychologists, and all those interested in one of the most important intellectual movements generated by the twentieth century. Levi-Strauss uses an approach combining anthropology and structural linguistics to assess Marcel Mauss's achievements and intentions arguing that Mauss - who at the time represented the mainstream of French anthropology - was in fact structuralist manque. He goes on to formulate the central tenets of structuralist thought: the belief in societies being organised on immutable and unconscious laws, this foundation then providing the basis for true scientific study; multi-discplinary methodology combining anthropology, lingusitics and psychoanalysis; and a faith that a comprehensive science of communication can be made by the application of mathematical reasoning.

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Routledge

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ISBN 10

1136188878

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9781136188879

The Story of Lynx

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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The Story of Lynx

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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298

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University of Chicago Press

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ISBN 10

0226474720

ISBN 13

9780226474724

Structural Anthropology Zero

By: Claude Levi-Strauss

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Structural Anthropology Zero

By: Claude Levi-Strauss

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300

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John Wiley & Sons

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ISBN 10

1509544992

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9781509544998

The Jealous Potter

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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The Jealous Potter

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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284

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University of Chicago Press

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ISBN 10

0226474801

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9780226474809

More Lost Massey Lectures

Recovered Classics from Five Great Thinkers

By: Barbara Ward,Frank Underhill,Claude Levi-Strauss,Willy Brandt,George Grant

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More Lost Massey Lectures

Recovered Classics from Five Great Thinkers

By: Barbara Ward,Frank Underhill,Claude Levi-Strauss,Willy Brandt,George Grant

The CBC Massey Lectures, Canada's preeminent public lecture series, are for many of us a highly anticipated annual feast of ideas. However, some of the finest lectures, by some of the greatest minds of modern times, have been lost for many years -- unavailable to the public in any form. This is the second volume of recovered lectures, a follow-on to The Lost Massey Lectures, and features: Nobel Peace Prize recipient Willy Brandt on the dangerous inequities between developing and industrialized nations in Dangers and Options: The Matter of World Survival; George Grant on the worsening predicament of the West through an examination of the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche in Time as History; Claude Levi-Strauss on the nature and role of myth in human history in Myth and Meaning; Frank Underhill on the deficiencies of the Canadian constitution in The Image of Confederation; and Barbara Ward, in the very first Massey Lecture, on the origin and predicament of underdeveloped countries in The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations. More Lost Massey Lectures includes an introduction by Bernie Lucht, who has been the executive producer of CBC Radio's Ideas and the Massey Lectures since 1984.

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417

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House of Anansi

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ISBN 10

0887848664

ISBN 13

9780887848667

The Elementary Structures of Kinship

By: Claude Levi-Strauss

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The Elementary Structures of Kinship

By: Claude Levi-Strauss

Professor Lévi-Strauss’s first major work, Les Structures élémentaires de la Parenté, has acquired a classic reputation since its original publication in 1949; and it has become the constant focus of academic debate about central theoretical concerns in social anthropology. It is, however, a long and difficult book for many students to read in French, and its arguments have consequently become known, even among professional anthropologists, largely through critical analysis. It was republished in a revised French edition in 1967 with a new foreword by the author, and it is this text with his further emendations that has been used in this translation. Lévi-Strauss applies his intellectual powers to the perennial problem of incest, which he elucidates by means of the concept of exchange as formulated by Marcel Mauss in his famous analysis of the gift (Essai sur le don, 1925). He distinguishes two elementary modes of exchange which govern not only the conventional variety of goods and services but also the transfer of women in marriage: these are “restricted” and “generalized” exchange. With a mass of ethnographic evidence he demonstrates how the formidable intricacy of marriage customs, comprising moral and jural ideas and institutions (which appear to be essentially arbitrary), can be seen as local and historical rules of exchange. Charles Lévi-Strauss traces these rules throughout a vast range of simple societies, chiefly in Australia and mainland Southeast Asia but also in the Americas, in Oceania, and in other parts of the world. To this survey he adds two extended sections on the great civilizations of China and India. He continues with a briefer consideration of the passage from elementary to complex structures, with particular reference to African societies, and concludes with a stimulating chapter on the principles of kinship, exchange as the universal basis for marriage prohibitions, and the formal relations between the sexes as part of a universe of communication. Although much of the work is technical, consisting of detailed analyses of types of social organization with which social anthropologists will be most familiar, it also contains much that will be of interest to psychologists, linguists, and philosophers, and to all who are interested in the possibility and the technique of the structural analysis of human activity. After the successes, moreover, of Lévi-Strauss’s subsequent books—notably Structural Anthropology, Tristes Tropiques, Totemism, and The Savage Mind—this new edition of the work which founded his present outstanding reputation will have additional value as a further means of contact with one of the original minds of this century. The translation has been made by James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer, of the University of New England, Australia, and by Rodney Needham, of the University of Oxford. Dr. Needham also acted as general editor and supplied the work with a new general index. He is the translator of Lévi-Strauss’s Le Totemisme aujourd’hui and author of Structure and Sentiment (1962) and numerous papers which have contributed to the recognition of Professor Lévi-Strauss’s work in the English-speaking world.

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588

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Beacon Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807096806

ISBN 13

9780807096802

Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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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Harvard University Press

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ISBN 10

0674075145

ISBN 13

9780674075146

The Raw and the Cooked

Introduction to a Science of Mythology

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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The Raw and the Cooked

Introduction to a Science of Mythology

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

This book examines the myths of the South American Indians and demonstrates how these can be reduced to a comprehensible psychological pattern. Moving from minute detail to bold speculation, Levi-Strauss argues that there is no fundamental break between the primitive mind and more evolved attitudes. He analyzes 250 myths to reveal their interrelation and basic structure and, by cross-referencing to European customs, he sets them in a general cultural context.

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Page Count

387

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0712660496

ISBN 13

9780712660495

The Other Face of the Moon

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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The Other Face of the Moon

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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Page Count

101

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674075188

ISBN 13

9780674075184

We Are All Cannibals

And Other Essays

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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We Are All Cannibals

And Other Essays

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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 Lévi-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. Lévi-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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Page Count

173

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0231541260

ISBN 13

9780231541268

Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

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Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss

By: Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Levi-Strauss is one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century, a leading exponent of structuralism and a great social anthropologist. His Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, originally written to preface the earliest major collection of Mauss's writings, Sociologie et Anthropologie (1950), was hailed as a seminal text by leading structuralists such as Derrida, Lacan and Barthes. This edition, the first English translation to be published, should prove invaluable to anthropologists, philologists, psychologists, and all those interested in one of the most important intellectual movements generated by the twentieth century. Levi-Strauss uses an approach combining anthropology and structural linguistics to assess Marcel Mauss's achievements and intentions arguing that Mauss - who at the time represented the mainstream of French anthropology - was in fact structuralist manque.He goes on to formulate the central tenets of structuralist thought: the belief in societies being organised on immutable and unconscious laws, this foundation then providing the basis for true scientific study; multi-discplinary methodology combining anthropology, lingusitics and psychoanalysis; and a faith that a comprehensive science of communication can be made by the application of mathematical reasoning.

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