The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologiques, Volume 1 (Raw & the Cooked)

Book Description

"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

Customer Reviews:

Genius, but no model.......2003-10-31

Claude Lévi-Strauss's Mythologiques, of which this is volume 1, are brutally difficult to work through, endlessly fascinating once you get the hang of them, and ultimately not something one ought to imitate or emulate. But until you have read The Raw and the Cooked, at the least, you are not really entitled to speak about the study of myth, and certainly not about structural anthropology (or its weaknesses).

The whole book-the whole four volumes, actually-is structured according to a complex musical metaphor, and the Overture to The Raw and the Cooked explicates this metaphor in detail. You'll need to know something about serialism (i.e. Schoenberg) to understand it, but once you do you'll really begin to see what Lévi-Strauss is up to. He thinks that myth is not like poetry, and is more like music than ordinary language. I think his comparison is misguided, based on a misunderstanding of serialism, but it's essential to understand why he correlates myth and music to understand the project.

In the main part of the book, he goes on to select a "key myth," a somewhat arbitrarily-chosen tale from the Bororo, a people he has studied fairly intensively (and did some fieldwork among). He then begins a massive project of connecting this myth to other myths from South America, breaking down and analyzing all the little bits and pieces as he goes. The logic can be hard to follow at times; his little diagrams don't help much, and in fact he seems to see this and ditches them in later volumes. But if you lose the thread, you can lose track of the whole book.

Ultimately, he's going to link up a thousand-odd myths from both Americas, demonstrating how each transforms and adds to other themes, until we get a vast complex of American mythical thought laid out in a mesmerizing sort of crystalline web of relations.

In short, Lévi-Strauss thinks that myths are a way of thinking, using concrete objects, about such problems as self and other, social relations, kinship, cooking, culture and nature, and so forth. He argues that each myth demonstrates a particular thinking-through of such problems by what amounts to cultures as intellectual entities. This may seem hard to believe, but if you've read The Savage Mind, this is the bricoleur at work.

The big problem, as various people have noted, is that his readings are necessarily somewhat subjective; he could be breaking the myths down incorrectly, splitting up whole units or lumping discrete pieces. What we really see is Lévi-Strauss giving it a shot, not a conclusion. Indeed, he calls this a "prolegomenon to a science of mythology," which hits the nail on the head.

I doubt very much whether anyone ought to continue the work, correcting the readings on the basis of further fieldwork or computerized analysis, as he seems to want. Once you've read through this series, you really have to wonder whether it's worth going further, or whether there aren't more interesting questions to ask about mythology. But his point really does stand: myth cannot be taken as a bunch of moral tales and ritual foundations; it must be recognized as thought enacted, or action thought-through.

The big question he doesn't address is history; as in The Savage Mind, he wants to exclude the historical from analysis. Thus the next big step would be someone like Sahlins, who tries to build an appreciation of the historical into structural analysis. Nevertheless, these books really do deserve serious study. If you want to see what mythology really is about "in the raw," as it were, you need to read this. As far as I'm concerned, those who haven't read The Raw and the Cooked have no business saying that structuralism is dead, or that it's unhelpful; they don't know what they're talking about.

Customer Reviews:

An introduction to anthropology and Levi-Strauss.......2006-07-16

The book is a recommended introduction to anthropology and the theories of Levi-Strauss. Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture describes, among other things, how some myths have certain attributes common in between them and how they would evolve. The author describes how in certain cultures twins are viewed as evil and theories how that might have evolved. At the end, the book discusses how myths should be interpreted.

A very readable introduction to Claude Lévi-Strauss .......2004-11-25

MYTH AND MEANING is a short and easily-digestible work based on a series of interviews and discussions delivered by the venerable French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and broadcast by Canadian radio in 1977. Its informal and conversational style (based on his responses to a series of questions posed by the CBC producer who is interviewing him) allows us broad-stroke insight into Lévi-Strauss's development of structuralism and his theories about science.

A self-professed "non-scientist" with a strong interest in science, Lévi-Strauss begins by outlining the divergence between science and "mythical and mystical thought" which began to occur around the 17th century in European intellectual traditions. The result is, we are lead to believe, that we have somehow lost something: something we may yet strive to regain or at least try to understand better.

Lévi-Strauss makes the argument that `primitive' thought is as rich and complex as so-called `civilized' thought, debunking various functionalist and traditional viewpoints that deny the savage mind has the ability to think both disinterestedly and intellectually. "In order for a culture to be really itself... its members must be convinced of their originality and even... of their superiority over the others." Mythical thinking may be the originality that we have lost in modern life.

One gets the sense that Lévi-Strauss develops his theories as he speaks-extemporaneously. He almost admits as much in his introduction: "I forget what I have written practically as soon as it is finished... I have the feeling that my books get written through me and that once [finished], I feel empty and nothing is left." Some of his explanations of particular myths, though entertaining, are a bit "out there" and border implausibility. One may reproach him for his methods or dispute his theories, but no one can deny that MYTH AND MEANING provides a fascinating glimpse into the mind of this original and controversial thinker.

Jeremy W. Forstadt

Good Introduction to Levi-Strauss but falters at the end.......2003-02-01

This book, based on interviews Levi-Strauss conducted with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the late '70s, is extremely clear and easy to understand for non-anthropologists like myself. He explains his views about how rational science and mythology branched off from each other in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, leading us to a situation where today we experience life differently that do 'primitive' tribes who use myths to explain the world around them. Levi-Strauss notes, however, that, while these peoples may not be as accurate in describing the world as we are with our modern science, they do possess a great deal of knowledge which we have lost on an individual level, i.e., knowledge about plants and stars. Mythology, he claims, functions like history and science for these people; for an example Levi-Strauss focuses his attention on the meaning of American myths about twins, hare(lips) and babies born feet first.

All this is quite well laid out and easy to read. However, the last chapter deals with music and mythology, and here Levi-Strauss badly missteps. He postulates that the decline in mythology that accompanied the rise of modern science coincided with the creation of great music by the likes of Bach, Haydn and Mozart that drew upon the same sources of inspiration as mythology. He spends several pages in a structural critique of Wagner's Ring which, albeit fascinating, is highly questionable. Furthermore, at the end of the book he suggests, quite wildly, that serial music is now poised to overtake the modern novel, which arose at the same time as modern science, in importance.

This weak section at the end notwithstanding, however, this is a good book for anyone interested in Levi-Strauss's groundbreaking work.

Great Infro to Levi-Strauss.......2002-04-14

If you trying to understand what drives Levi-Srauss to write, then this is the book you've been looking for...

A good short intro to Levi-Strauss.......2001-01-09

This is an excellent and very short intro to the work the of famed anthropologist Levi-Strauss. It breaks down to a large extent his basic ideas about the structural analysis of myth and provides an opportunity into the thoughts and opinions of the father of structural anthropology. It's mostly taken as a transcript from a series of lectures he gave outlining major themes he's covered in his work.

Book Description

"The Origin of Table Manners is the third volume of a tetralogy devoted to American Indian mythology. Unlike the first two volumes (The Raw and the Cooked, From Honey to Ashes), which are devoted to South American myths, the present one establishes relations with North America, which is the subject of the fourth (The Naked Man). . . . In the course of the analysis, the myths link up with ideas of more general interest. Thus, we find discussions of numeration, of morals, and of the origin of the novel. . . . The Origin of Table Manners is thus of special interest to students of American Indian mythology, although it contains ideas of interest to other fields and even to the general reader."—Daniel C. Raffalovich, American Anthropologist

"An immense anthropological erudition is here wielded by one of the world's finest minds, and the myths themselves have never been taken more seriously. . . . [Lévi-Strauss] raises issues and then resolves them with the suspenseful cunning of a mystery novelist."—John Updike, New Yorker

The Savage Mind (Nature of Human Society)

Average customer rating:

Ado About Much
Much Ado
The Manifesto of Structuralism
a mind provoking anthropology book

The Savage Mind (Nature of Human Society)
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Psychology & Counseling | Health, Mind & Body | Subjects | Books

General | Health, Mind & Body | Subjects | Books

General | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

ASIN: 0226474844

Book Description

"Every word, like a sacred object, has its place. No précis is possible. This extraordinary book must be read."—Edmund Carpenter, New York Times Book Review

"No outline is possible; I can only say that reading this book is a most exciting intellectual exercise in which dialectic, wit, and imagination combine to stimulate and provoke at every page."—Edmund Leach, Man

"Lévi-Strauss's books are tough: very scholarly, very dense, very rapid in argument. But once you have mastered him, human history can never be the same, nor indeed can one's view of contemporary society. And his latest book, The Savage Mind, is his most comprehensive and certainly his most profound. Everyone interested in the history of ideas must read it; everyone interested in human institutions should read it."—J. H. Plumb, Saturday Review

"A constantly stimulating, informative and suggestive intellectual challenge."—Geoffrey Gorer, The Observer, London

Customer Reviews:

Ado About Much.......2003-10-24

Academic scholarship does not generally lend itself to masterpieces. One tends to balance detail and complexity against efficiency, to narrow one's audience while deepening argumentation. Thus the truly great books of a particular discipline are often incomprehensible outside it, while the wonderfully accessible books rarely do more than describe what others have done.

The Savage Mind is one of a small number of exceptions to this rule. In a book that requires no prior knowledge of anthropology, Lévi-Strauss succeeds in leveling a major challenge to his discipline and simultaneously to every reader. In elegant, graceful prose, he meticulously dissects his objects, formulates his arguments, and stretches the range of theoretical speculation to cover an extraordinary range of material from all over the world-including the modern.

In the nearly fifty years since this book first appeared, however, much has changed. Structuralism, for which The Savage Mind served as something of a manifesto, has collapsed beneath the weight of its own logical formation and the critical assaults of various respondents-not all of them well-informed. But even that most scathing critic of structuralism, Jacques Derrida, has noted repeatedly that we can never really go back: structuralism is part of our thinking now, and the only way out is through. To put it simply, if you never read this book, you will never gain the right to criticize structuralism as a method for studying culture.

Another thing that has changed is basic education. Lévi-Strauss takes it for granted that we all know quite a bit about European literature, music, and art; that we know who the painter Clouet was, and the difference between Mannerism and Impressionism. He doesn't assume expertise, but a kind of general cultural education no longer usual. This can make some of his analyses opaque, where they are intended to be illustrative. Just as you can skim these arguments, which are often problematic anyway, you don't actually need to know much about totemic practices to understand; he summarizes what's important, and so long as you don't intend to challenge through data, you need no background.

Lévi-Strauss's arguments proceed methodically and exceedingly rapidly. Their weight lies in their logic, not their particulars; that is, it really doesn't matter whether his interpretation of any one myth or ritual is correct, but rather whether the means of going about it makes rigorous sense. He is not expert on everything, and he often inserts such phrases as, "Without presuming to decide this issue...." This is not mere qualification: he distinguishes between illustration of method and rigorous analysis of particular material. If you want him to analyze material, go read The Raw and the Cooked; if you want to know how he does it, read The Savage Mind.

To put this differently, to pick on trivia here is to miss the point. Perhaps you do name your pets differently than he does. Perhaps the Murngin creation-myth has a step he forgets to mention. Perhaps the interpretation of Clouet doesn't really quite make sense if you know much about Clouet. So what? These are illustrations, not proofs. The same happens with the famous essay "The Structural Study of Myth": Lévi-Strauss proposes a reading of Oedipus which, though wildly suggestive and interesting, really doesn't make a lot of sense for Oedipus, and leads to a stunningly silly conclusion. No matter: the point is to demonstrate how the method works. Again, if you want to see him analyze something, you don't read his pure theory books; you read The Raw and the Cooked, or Totemism, or (especially) The Elementary Structures of Kinship. So long as you can work out how the method functions, Lévi-Strauss thinks you should go test it yourself, on material you know. Then, if it doesn't work, you can come back and criticize.

As we read The Savage Mind, we are constantly forced to slow down. Lévi-Strauss has a tendency to condense an enormous argument into a paragraph, then move on; unlike his best American and English counterparts, who make their analyses as explicit as possible, Lévi-Strauss takes the classically French approach of hitting the highlights in the topic and concluding sentences of a paragraph, then putting all the illustrative detail of logic and material into the middle. This is a matter of style, a choice and not a vice. So if you really want to understand the book, you actually have to work through his examples very slowly and carefully. Otherwise one has a tendency to lose the thread and simply become bewildered.

Unfortunately, this translation is, as Clifford Geertz and everyone else has noticed, execrable. Some sentences are not even acceptable English grammar, to say nothing of their failures to render Lévi-Strauss's beautiful, dense French. Mercifully, the various translators involved all recognized their failures and refused to sign their names. Some day, a really good translation will come along, I suppose, but in the meantime at least this one is hyper-literalist-far better than simply wandering off course. If you read French perfectly, read La pensée sauvage; it's genius!

The Savage Mind is an endlessly fascinating, stimulating, brilliant book, a true masterpiece of the human sciences. It happens that Lévi-Strauss is quite often wrong, but the fact remains that this is a landmark of scholarship and a book everyone seriously interested in culture needs to read. Durkheim, Weber, Freud, and Marx are all wrong too. So are Eliade, Geertz, and Turner, for that matter. Does this mean we shouldn't read them? To think we can simply jump to the most recent people and skip what came before is to submit to ignorance and laziness. Lévi-Strauss is perhaps the last of the great French intellectuals, and his work will stand for a long time as a challenge and a landmark; you must take up his challenge, read him, and thoroughly master his thought. Only then can you move on.

Read now, and see a (slightly misguided) genius at work.

Much Ado.......2003-10-20

Claude Levi - Strauss' The Savage Mind (1962) is a densely - composed book that winds a circuitous path through several important thematic areas of the anthropological minefield. As multiple passages attest, Levi - Strauss was capable of writing and thinking clearly. Quoted passages - many of admirable simplicity - reveal that Levi - Strauss also appreciated straightforward writing, thinking, and scholarship in others.

Nonetheless, much of the book's content is bogged down in miasmic discussions concerning simplistic points of fact or interpretation that are obvious in many cases ("the principle underlying a classification can never be postulated in advance," or the unsurprising fact that Indian tribes from opposite regions of North America regarded the crow in entirely different lights), thus further obscuring his already ambiguous theses. Levi - Strauss conjures up extended metaphors which he manipulates haphazardly (the most prominent being the comparison of the myth - making process to the 'bricoleur'), and makes outright, seemingly willful mistakes of logic, such as the passage in which he refers to an eagle hunter cleverly hidden within a self - devised trap as "both the hunter and the hunted" merely because the man has situated himself on the inside of the trapping mechanism: within the trap he may be, but hunted by the eagle, or by anything else, he is not. That the hunter remains in firm control over the successful capture of the eagle is a fact Levi - Strauss slyly chooses to look away from.

Elsewhere, Levi - Strauss makes laughably incorrect suppositions when attempting to correct the broad generalizations of others, stating, for instance, after tacitly acknowledging the existence of such dietary cravings, that "there is no evidence that pregnant women the world over have cravings." Moving from literal to figurative meaning and jumping from objective fact to subjective interpretation without restraint ("Nature is not in itself contradictory. It can become so only in terms of some specific human activity which takes part in it; and the characteristics of the environment take on a different meaning according to the particular historical and technical form assumed in it by this or that type of activity"), the author's sentences intertwine recklessly together until the reader can reasonably conclude that entire passages are dazzlingly free of definite, cohesive content of any kind. Though he has literally hundreds of objective facts at his fingertips, Levi - Strauss' confidence in his ability to build them into a sustained, persuasive presentation seems illusory at best.

Readers who have thus far found the book almost impossible to absorb will find their judgment richly rewarded when Levi - Strauss discusses the role of domesticated animals in Western civilization - a subject most readers have had some degree of everyday familiarity with - in Chapter Seven, "The Individual As A Species." Beginning with the absurd statement that "birds are given human christian [sic] names in accordance with the species to which they belong more easily than any other zoological classes, because they can be permitted to resemble men for the very reason that they are so different," and continuing "consequently everything objective conspires to make us think of the bird world as a metaphorical human society: is it not after all literally parallel to it on another level?", the author's discussion of what he believes constitutes the underlying processes in naming dogs, cows, and horses in the West is so transparently ludicrous that it exposes everything that has come before as the intellectual hokum that it is.

The main supporting audience for The Savage Mind has been masochistic American academics who bow reflexively to European theorists, particularly French theorists, as if on command, building author cults small and large in the process, and thus entering suicidally into intellectual perdition. For such academics, the more obtuse a work, the better; most esteemed is a book completely beyond comprehension. The Savage Mind, a work of anti - knowledge, warrants that level of criticism: it completely fails to succinctly outline its ideas, or prove, finally, that its incommunicable "theories" have any appreciable merit whatsoever.

The Manifesto of Structuralism.......2002-01-02

hmmmm..... I can't see why this book has got such humble and unskilled review till now. This book is the easiest material to understand the tenet of structuralism. Personally I don't like the disposition of structuralism at all and I suspect whether in 50 years, anybody remember that kind of school existed at all except writers of history of philosophy.
Anyway, this book made structuralism floating on the vogue with its ease to understand and constructed the intellectual fashion of structuralsim which dominated the whether of discourse in human science in the 1960s and 1970s. Yep. now nobody read Levi-Strauss, even anthropolgists don't read his books. But if you want to understand structuralism, post-structuralsim and postmodernism, you'd better begin with this book for it's the easiest and fun to read.

a mind provoking anthropology book.......2000-04-05

This is the first anthropology book I read. It may be considered difficult to read this book. A scholarly and heavy description however very rewarding in my opinion. Spanning a real wide scope.

Average customer rating:

Inspiring
Foundational Text
Great work by a forerunner of Anthropology!

Structural Anthropology
Claude Levi-Strauss
Manufacturer: Basic Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Politics | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

General | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

All Titles | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books

Nonfiction | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

ASIN: 046509516X

Book Description

This modern classic provides an introduction to Levi-Strauss' distinctive approach to anthropology.

Customer Reviews:

Inspiring.......2003-06-08

Levi-Strauss ranks with Darwin for being hugely misunderstood. Like Darwin, what people say about Levi-Strauss is so often completely wrong that I strongly doubt he's ever really read.

Levi-Strauss believed that all cultures share the same basic characteristics. "Struturalism is the search for hidden harmonies," he said. One of my favorite quips from him is how interesting it is to see how the same personality type will be cast in different cultural roles--how the same basic humanity signifies radically different things to different cultures.

Levi-Strauss believed it is not important to try and figure out when a culture branched off from another, or what preceeded what: culture should be considered on its own terms. If a pot is interesting, it's interesting, no matter what its context.

The reason this physicist is curious about a dead anthropologist is that many of the misunderstandings of regular old evolution can be cleared up, as Saussure recommended, by considering both evolutionary history--how dinosaurs turned into birds--and evolutionary structure--why, at any given step in evolution, the dino-bird was best adapted to its enviornment. Gould has made a career out of clearing up this confusion; too bad our schools leave students in the dark.

And it's also interesting from the point of view of physics. Clouds, for instance, have a structure which is determined by wiggling water vapor. By looking at the shape of the clouds, we can determine just how the vapor is wiggling.

All cloud shapes can be predicted--not by solving deterministic physical laws (i.e. time evolution) but by making strucutral predictions based on guesses. It is a sort of physical law which corresponds to the structuralist view of evolution: at any given time, a cloud looks the way it does because it solves a kind of 'best fit' problem. It does *not* look that way because we can solve the time evolution; those equations are in principle unsolvable because the degrees of freedom is so high. The cause of cloud shape is not force or energy (which in physics are used to solve the time evolution of single or few bodies--vertical evolution), but information and order (which are used when the number of interacting elements is so high that only statistical arguments can be made--horizontal evolution).

A perfect example of structuralism was made by Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace. In it, he argued that the course of Russia's history was not written by Napoleon, and that following Napoleon's motivations (vertical evolution) gave one the illusion that he was in control of his own decisions. In fact, Russia's history was written by the sum total of its people, each influenced into their decisions by their immediate surroundings (horizontal evolution). History then emerges in the same manner as an ant society: one person puts down a pebble, only to have it picked up and put down again somewhere else, seemingly at random. Yet the colony has certain well-defined traits. In physics the colony would be said to be a self-organizing structure, what Stuart Kauffman calls 'order for free'. So too is human history, and attempting to ground it around Churchills and Napoleons is hen-picking.

Prigogine (a chemist) pointed Levi-Strauss out in his Nobel lecture. There's only a handful of people in the world who really understand why. I encourage you to find out!

PS: I remind the writer below of the Elements of Style rule: never enclose words in quotations, as though you were admitted to a secret world that knows better. Quotation marks are the authors' indication either that he knows the word he uses is poorly chosen, or that he doesn't actually know what it means.

Foundational Text.......2002-03-21

Structural Anthropology is a translation of Claude Levi-Strauss's well-known collection of essays, Anthropologie Structurale. I am hopeful that I can do him and this translation justice through this short review but I could well be accused of doing to Levi-Strauss what Levi-Strauss is accused of doing himself - reductionism. Despite it all looking like a kind of psychological reductionism, and since I am particular about reduction, I would really like to know what everything is being reduced to.

The essays contained in this collection deal with a variety of topics covering the whole range of Levi-Strauss's interests. They include the classical "Social Structure" which is now canon reading along with "The Structural Study of Myth". What is this thing called "structure"? Levi-Strauss refers fairly often to structural linguistics (see Course in General Linguistics by Ferdinand De Saussure) to give form to his concepts; for sociologists, maybe, reference to what has come to be known as the "cybernetic model" might be more communicative. Systematic interaction has two "hierarchies," an energic one and an informational one, conceived as counter "flows." Information controls energy and energy is the condition of actualization of information. This is the sense of Levi-Strauss's "structure": it is information, ultimately, a "code." Levi-Strauss is not interested in what is but rather in what gives form to and controls what is. Levi-Strauss searches for the formative codes of interaction. These he calls "structure." What he seems to be looking for are "unconscious processes" which somehow underlie the manifestations we call institutions. That they are located in the "mind" seems clear. It seems that certain mental operations (association, contradiction, dichotomization, resolution of dissonance, etc.) are at the back of the "structure" of societies, language, kinship systems, myths, art forms and all other aspects of culture. Thus analysis consists of taking varying manifestations and reducing them to a structural base such as the resolution of opposites or something like that. The model, method is that of De Saussure, et al.

What is really astonishing is that despite the profound nature of his infusing Anthropology with the findings of Structural Linguistics and making a fetish of inexactness and possibility, Levi-Strauss may have stumbled into a method that has proven useful in its critique and the doors with which it has opened. He has stumbled on a method, which pays dividends without actually knowing why it is paying dividends. We can all benefit from the works of Levi-Strauss, De Saussure and Foucault, as we need to know more about this unconscious. Structural Anthropology has become canon reading and is a classic for all times.

Miguel Llora

Great work by a forerunner of Anthropology!.......2000-03-18

I personally consider this book to be one of the greatest works in the field of Anthropology. It is an exhaustive treatment on a particular way of looking at how Anthropology is performed. Through various examples from different cultures the author attempts to show how this *structural* approach to Anthropology is viewed. This book changed how many social Anthropologists did their work. Written by one of the most pre-eminent Anthropologists of our time it will most undoubtly stand the test of time for many decades to come.

Average customer rating:

Into the remote parts of South America
A journey down the savage river of mind and memory
Idea overload and totally interesting
Grounding Levi-Strauss's Structuralism
Parrot Flambee

Tristes Tropiques
Claude Levi-Strauss
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

French | Foreign Language Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

French | Foreign Language Nonfiction | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

History | French | Foreign Language Books | Specialty Stores | Books

Nonfiction | French | Foreign Language Books | Specialty Stores | Books

All French Books | French | Foreign Language Books | Specialty Stores | Books
Similar Items:

ASIN: 0140165622

Amazon.com

"I hate travelling and explorers," famously declared Claude Lévi-Strauss, but how fortunate for readers that he should overcome his loathing to write about his experiences among the indigenous peoples of the Brazilian interior, including the Caduveo, Bororo, and Nambikwara tribes. Those who know Lévi-Strauss and Tristes Tropiques by reputation only will be pleasantly surprised by the intimate tone that colors even its most precise anthropological sections, as well as the autobiographical passages at the beginning, in which the author recounts how he fell into his career and how, shortly after the Nazis occupied Paris, he was forced to flee to America in a grueling sea voyage. Twenty-five black-and-white photographs of tribespeople, as well as numerous line drawings, accompany the text.

Book Description

Tristes Tropiques is one of the great books of our century," said Susan Sontag. "It is rigorous, subtle, and bold in thought. It is beauti-
fully written. And, like all great books, it bears an absolutely personal stamp; it speaks with a human voice."
Tristes Tropiques was an immensely popular bestseller when it was first published in
France in 1955. Claude Lévi-Strauss's ground-
breaking study of the societies of a number of Amazonian peoples is a cornerstone of structural anthropology and an exploration by the author of his own intellectual roots as a professor of philosophy in Brazil before the Second World War, as a Jewish exile from Nazi-occupied Europe, and later as a world-renowned academic (he taught at New York's New School for Social Research and was French cultural attaché to the United States). Lévi-Strauss's central journey leads from the Amazon basin through the dense upland jungles of Brazil. There, among the Amerindian tribes--the Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib--he found "a human society reduced to its most basic expression." Lévi-Strauss's discussion of his fieldwork in Tristes Tropiques endures as a milestone of anthropology, but the book is also, in its brilliant diversions on other, more familiar cultures, a great work of literature, a vivid travelogue, and an engaging memoir--a demonstration of the marvelous mental agility of one of the century
's most important thinkers.
Presented here is the translation by John and Doreen Weightman of the complete text of the revised French edition of 1968, together with the original photographs and illustrations.

The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun-dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hard-bound editions of important works of liter-ature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurat-
ing a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.

Customer Reviews:

Into the remote parts of South America.......2007-08-27

I like to travel and to observe the cities, landscapes, the plants and animals and the human inhabitants of the countries I go to. So does Levy-Strauss, and he is a fantastic observer, much more sharp-eyed than I could ever hope to be, and a highly entertaining writer. In this classic he talks about a wide range of observations from a number of corners of the world, but mainly about South America.
The book deals with Levi-Strauss' time as a teacher in Brazil and his trips into the South American hinterland; his escape from Nazi-occupied France; His later expeditions to visit remote tribes in the Amazon; and an assortment of observations about such diverse topics as the frustration of the traveler to never encounter the true, pristine state of a culture, the Indian caste system and the division of public and private space in different parts of the world. The book is full of fascinating anecdotes: My favorite one is how a native chief from observing Levy-Strauss grasped the social importance of writing, but not its role in information storage and transmission. He bluffed to impress his underlings and drew freshly invented line configurations on a paper. This leads Levy-Strauss to observe that from the invention of writing to its universal knowledge a few millennia passed, during which it did not serve to liberate the masses, but to control them. Such wide-ranging philosophical associations are frequent and were very enjoyable to me. The book is, however, definitely not only a collection of anecdotes, but in parts a very detailed description of the life of some of the native tribes he visited in the Amazon. Drawings of artifacts, patterns used in body-painting and photographs supplement the text. We are given both anthropological descriptions of the lifes of these peoples, their social organization, attitudes and material culture, as well as Levy-Strauss' personal experiences when living among them, sometimes his friendships with members of these tribes. Of course these people were strongly affected by the contact with European civilization, often to the worse. We also learn about these developments. There isn't really much direct explanation about his theoretical approaches to anthropology. This is the kind of book which made me wish that I could have been an expedition member of Levy-Strauss' team. Highly recommended.

A journey down the savage river of mind and memory.......2005-06-28

I often review works which I have read long ago. Upon beginning to write about them I invariably discover how much time I gave to something which seemed so worthwhile at the time, and which I have almost completely forgotten. I then ordinarily do some catch- up learning about the book. And my review becomes an amalgalm of distant past and most recent present impression. And meanwhile the heart of the book is forever unknown to me and lost. And my review is only a minor tracing an impression both of the book itself and what of my mind knew when reading through it.
This certainly applies to my reading of this particular work, ,the one work of Levi- Strauss which I remember reading with any degree of real understanding and pleasure. His making of a life and career as an anthropologist which are a good part of the first part of the work interested me then.
The long travelogue and explorations into Amerindian society and mind, interested me less.
I understand though that the real voyage is into and along with the mind of Levi- Strauss itself, a mind much more complicated than I was ordinarily used to meeting and ingesting .
I do remember however the somewhat majestic tone, the tone of restrained sadness of quiet mourning which seemed to go through the work as Levi- Strauss met with worlds being lost and deterorating , in part through their meetings with the very kind of Western mind he himself exemplified. It is the mind destroying the object in the process of knowing it , as the Western explorers of these tribal societies transformed them out of their own natural state by meeting with them.
For Levi- Strauss and this I remember, the ' primitive mind' is not ' primitive at all' and may be in its linguistic complexity and social structure far more intricate than the ' civilized ' as it were sophisticated worlds we believe we live in.
I read this work as a way of being acquainted with a great mind, a mind which to my mind proved to be quite elusive and even distant.
But clearly the exploration made by Levi- Strauss of his own inner and external worlds is one which calls to the curious human mind and heart in its quest for understanding ' of the other'
Montaigne took a trip in the Brazilian jungle in the twentieth
century, looked in the mirror and saw the face of Levi- Strauss.

Idea overload and totally interesting.......2005-05-24

Tristes Tropiques, surely one of the great books of the twentieth century, is Levi-Strauss at his intoxicating, idea-overloaded best and an elegy for a world that colonialism and then globalisation have doen their rational best to annihilate.

Levi-Strauss, like most thinkers who come up with new ways of describing the world-- those who Richard Rorty calls "inventors of philosophical vocabularies"-- has of course been mis-read and his ideas mis-applied, as we see with the much-hyped "creation" and then "demise" of "structural anthropology." The real pleasure of this book, which mixes fascinating accounts of Levi-Strauss' travels in Brazil in the '30s with autobiography, and adds chapters on the Maya and ancient Hindu (Indian) civilisations, is in its sheer mass of artfully arranged detail and its endless, provocative play of ideas.

Levi-Strauss stays conversational, descriptive and straightforward, avoiding academic jargon and obscure references. He assumes you know the basics about people like Freud, Marx, Darwin and the Buddha, and then shows you a trip through largely non-industrial societies which unfolds from anthropological description into deep philosophical speculation on the meaning of society and life.

In Brazil, Levi-Strauss watches an illiterate but canny chieftain use his anthropological fieldnotes to intimidate his illiterate tribesmen subordinates, and speculates on the parallel origins of writing and slavery. In Matto Grosso, he meets a butcher fascinated with elephants, since "he could not imagine so much meat in one place." On the banks of the Amazon, a non-industrial tribe is dying, hypnotically lost in the symbolic intricacies of an ancient social system that makes its citizens inbreed. In India, Levi-Strauss watches Islam and Hinduism-- the "locker room" and "mother" religions-- wage symbolic and then real war post-Independence.

The book starts as anthropology, turns into philosophy, and ultimately becomes a critique of the West, driven by "reason" and technology to shake off what Levi-Strauss calls the "thick blanket of dreams" with which non-industrial civilisation arranges the Universe into Meaning, which remains for the industrialised world the greatest and unanswered question.

But Levi-Strauss does not idealise the primitive. His point is that through the study of those and that which are different, a kind of "ideal model" of society-- one which will never exist-- can be built in the imagination, and people can evaluate their world by reference to this community of mind.

This is a remarkable book-- easy to read, engrossing, and endlessly thought-provoking.

Grounding Levi-Strauss's Structuralism.......2004-01-21

This is Levi-Strauss most readable book, and it is a fantastic introduction to the "why" behind his interest in structuralism. There are hints of the various methods and approaches that he uses in later works, but this book shows why he was to develop structuralism in later works. The writing is clever and eloquent, and various conclusions he made about cultural diversity address contemporary concerns in a highly articulate and responsible manner. Read this book before delving into the other writings of one of the 20th Century's most important anthropologists.

Parrot Flambee.......2003-12-30

One way to gauge who's in among fashionable academics is to read the catalog for the "Writers and Readers' Documentary Comic Book" series. Sartre has an entry, and so does Derrida, and Lacan. Thirty years ago, you would have expected to find an entry in this index for Claude Levi-Strauss. No more. Translations of his principal works appear to persist in print, but the sales numbers are look low, and he seems almost to have disappeared from the trendy book reviews and such. This is perhaps a matter for at least idle curiosity: Levi-Strauss is surely no more abstruse than his magisterial contemporaries - but no less so; one is perfectly willing to be relieved the obligation of ever picking him up again.

With one exception. In style and temperament, Tristes Tropiques is so different from almost everything else Levi-Strauss wrote that it is hard to believe it is written by the same man. Oh, the primitive tribes are there, and a brief personal intellectual history, that offers a bow to Freud, and Bergeson, and Saussure. In my own copy, which I first read about 1980, I even have a pencilled notation "structuralism" - this at page 375 (Pocket Books edition, 1977). But there is almost none of the portentous vacuity that you had to cope with in the so-called "serious" works.

What you get instead is Levi Strauss the raconteur, full of travelers' tales. He dines on roasted parrot, flamed with whisky. The termites make the earth rumble. Virgins are made to spit in pots of corn, to provoke fermentation - but "as the delicious drink, at once nutritious and refreshing, was consumed that very evening, the process of fermentation was not very advanced." You almost expect the anthropophagi and the men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders, that you meet in the Voyages of Sir John Mandeville, Knight.

Laced through it all, you get a kind of austere sadness which is either (a) a tragic view of life; or (b) a kind of self-indulgent posturing, depending on your temperament for skepticism. "Every effort to understand," he says, "destroys the object studied in favor of another object of a different nature." Or: "Anthropology could with advantage be changed into 'entropology', as the name of the discipline concerned with the study of the highest manifestations of [a] process of disintegration."

Book Description

"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

Average customer rating:

Excellent
An awakener from Anthropology

Totemism
Claude Levi-Strauss
Manufacturer: Beacon Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Philosophy | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Customs & Traditions | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

ASIN: 080704671X

Customer Reviews:

Excellent.......2006-05-25

This was a pretty important source for the totemism chapter for "Fang and Fur, Blood and Bone". It's a classic anthropological text on the subject as pertains to indigenous cultures around the globe.

Strauus spends muchof the time discussing and comparing the various theories about totemism that developed in the first half of the 20th century. One can trace the development of theories from detached observer to analgous cultural participant, ie, from 'This is what these people here do, but we are above such primitive notions" to"This is what we do and how it is similar to what they do." The book first came out in 1962, and it's interesting to trace the deveopment of social anthropology through contemporary quotes.

One may think, as I did, at first that all these theoricians were just trying too hard, and being too patronizing. However, cultural objectivity works both ways, and we must remember that the anthropologists were themselves a product of their own times.

This is not the easiest read in the world, written as a textbook. However, it's well worth slogging through the lingo (if you aren't already familiar) and the translation by Rodney Needham is excellent.

Highly, highly recommended for anyone interested in totemism from any angle, particularly the metaphysical crowd who may yearn for deeper sources not published by Llewellyn.

An awakener from Anthropology.......2002-02-02

A classic of 20th Century intellectual creativity, that has been recognized as such, but that has not yet received the full attention it deserves. It has momentarelly be dispensed of as "old fashioned", when social sciences based on neuro-sciences has clearly not yet integrated the vast webb of implications the formulations of this volume generate.
An absolute must, even - or because - many formulations are arguable. It is not a book that proposes conclusions, but awakens our intelligence.

Savage Mind: Chicago Collector's Edition (Nature of Human Society Ser)

Average customer rating:

Savage Mind: Chicago Collector's Edition (Nature of Human Society Ser)
Claude Levi-Strauss
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: 0226474852

The Intelligence of Art (Bettie Allison Rand Lectures in Art History)

Average customer rating:

The Intelligence of Art (Bettie Allison Rand Lectures in Art History)
Thomas Crow
Manufacturer: The University of North Carolina Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | History & Criticism | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

Criticism | History & Criticism | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

Romanesque | Schools, Periods & Styles | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

General | Arts & Photography | Subjects | Books

All Titles | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books

Arts & Photography | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

ASIN: 0807849006
Release Date: 2000-08-02

Book Description

With this book, Thomas Crow contributes a refreshing analysis of the present state of art history, the practice of interpreting art and making it "intelligible." He aims to relocate the discussion of theory and method in art history away from models borrowed from other disciplines by presenting what he considers three of the most successful and challenging works in the literature of art history: Meyer Schapiro on the Romanesque portal sculpture of the abbey church of Sainte Marie in the French town of Souillac, Claude Levi-Strauss on the Native American masks of the Northwest Coast, and Michael Baxandall on the limewood sculptors of Renaissance Germany.

Sketching the history of trends in art history—from description and biography, to more recent social-historical methods, to the latest wave of postmodernist approaches—Crow sets out a course that affirms the rich and valuable tools of language and methodology developed by generations of art historians while recognizing the important contribution of recent theory in raising the interpretive stakes.The Intelligence of Art offers nothing less than a concrete new way to grasp the infinitely complex operations of human intelligence in artistic form.

Books:

Books Index

Books Home

Recommended Books