Claude Lévi-Strauss: classic or dud?

you're probably right re '...kinship', but 'mythologies' isn't structuralist, or, it isn't linguistic-structuralist, as he says in the closing essay. 'tt' was definitely the breakout book, a bit hit.

http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27006.shtml

metonymy in action amirite?

The funny thing is that structuralism's heyday was so brief. Foucault I think initially called himself a structuralist but quickly renounced it - so that by the time structuralism had hit the intellectual consciousness, post-structuralism was already upon us.

I'm attracted to those structuralist ideas of focusing on form and difference rather than content and symbolism. Maybe where Lévi-Strauss went wrong was in trying to make a deterministic, rigorous science of it.

form and difference vs content and symbolism (or whatever) make more sense in analysing literature than analysing social systems.

re. poststructuralism -- the literary bias was retained, even if the binary thing at the core of l-s era structuralism was not.

but will he produce one of those straussian squares this time?

Dude's turning 100 in 2 and a half weeks. How should I celebrate? (i.e. what works to look into)

oh wow, good for him. to be honest, i don't remember what i've read by him, but i remember it being CLASSIC. not something i'd actually draw upon much in anthropology, but very beautiful theory.

Yeah, I think I moreso wanted to just draw attention the fact he's turning 100.

What is that novel (IIRC by a British author who is IIRC a woman) set in S. America wherein Levi-Strauss is hell of viillianized? And there's a shaman who turns into a jaguar and a semi-erotic tapir scene and (IIRC) incest?

This book is from the second half of the 20th century.

The Pelican Brief

I don't know but your description made me think of Wilbur Smith's SUNBIRD for a second

Do you ever wish there was a google where you could be like, "you know, that one book I had to read in British Lit that I hated, the one that wasn't about Nazis and wasn't by James Joyce?"

Oh-HOH, it is The Ventriloquist's Tale by Pauline Mellville, published in 1997.

100 today

joyeux anniversaire Claude

RIP :-(

triste topique

aw really? :(

BBC reporting it.

Shoot, I loved the fact that he was STILL alive.

A nice cheery headline from Bloomberg

Le Monde

Le Figaro

No story up at Libération yet but they have a headline running.

"A qui doit-on cette pensée immense ? Un philosophe ? Un ethnologue, un anthropologue, un savant, un logicien, un détective ? Ou encore un bricoleur, un écrivain, un poète, un moraliste, un esthète, voire un sage ? Seule réponse possible : toutes ces figures ensemble se nomment Claude Lévi-Strauss."

Libération

100 years old, people

RIP

100 years is a damn good run.

loved the jeans

live till 100, you definitely gotta have good genes

NYT obit

RIP

RIP

rip indeed. incidentally, i learned a few days ago that franz boas died in his arms....

R.I.P

BUMP because I've never read any Levi-Strauss and I don't know where to start. Tristes Tropiques seems to be generally well-regarded, but I'm wondering if that's just because it's the most enjoyable -- at the risk of sounding like a jerk, I'm less interested in finding a "good read" (I have plenty of those in my queue, thanks!) than in getting a better handle on this whole 'structuralism' thingamajig. Which is not to say that I need a systematic presentation of the sort that I would expect to find in the promisingly dry-sounding Structural Anthropology, Vol. 1; if Tristes Tropiques manages to get across the important bits while remaining relatively painless, then I'll gladly read it! Alternately, The Savage Mind tantalizes me with the prospect of some sort of middle ground between the two antipodes I've projected here, but I read somewhere that the English translation is awful.

(maybe I shoulda just started a new thread in I Love Books...?)

Structural Anthropology is really great. I'm teaching it right now and tho it can be dry (mostly when he's speaking to institutional histories - like the difference between ethnology and ethnography which is where he opens the book) it's also super brilliant and an incredibly important book.