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Title: Tristes Tropiques by Claude Levi-Strauss, John Weightman, Doreen Weightman ISBN: 0-14-016562-2 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 August, 1992 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.71 (7 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Grounding Levi-Strauss's Structuralism
Comment: 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.
Rating: 4
Summary: Parrot Flambee
Comment: 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."
Well, call me anything the like, they say, as long as you call me for dinner. It might even be an elaborate con. But so, for that matter, might the stories of Herodotus were you get the same mix of the eclectic and the tolerant, the surreal and the sly. Herodotus, we may note, is one of the first great works of Western literature. Let's hope that Levi-Strauss is not one of the last.
Rating: 4
Summary: The only research by the founder of structuralist anthropolo
Comment: This is one of the funniest books ever written by french intellectuals. The only field work ever done by the founder of structuralist anthropology, who preferred to work from his Paris armchair, its centerpiece is an account of how Claude loses touch with the rest of the company and in the process of trying to find them by firing his revolver, also scares his pack-mule away and thereafter discovers the dangers of writing.
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Title: The Savage Mind (Nature of Human Society Series) by Claude Leevi Strauss ISBN: 0226474844 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 1966 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: Myth and Meaning by Claude Levi-Strauss ISBN: 0805210385 Publisher: Schocken Books Pub. Date: 01 March, 1995 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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Title: Structural Anthropology by Claude Levi-Strauss ISBN: 046509516X Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 01 May, 1974 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologiques (Raw & the Cooked) by Claude Levi-Strauss, John Weightman, Doreen Weightman ISBN: 0226474879 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 1983 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books Classics) by Clifford Geertz ISBN: 0465097197 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 01 April, 1977 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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