Claude Lévi-Strauss Book order

"Through a fertile mixture of insights gleaned from linguistics and from sociology and ethnology, Lévi-Strauss elaborated his theory of structural unity in culture and became the preeminent representative of structural anthropology. La Pensée sauvage, 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. Fatefully titled The Savage Mind in English, the original translation nevertheless sparked a fascination with Lévi-Strauss's work among generations of Anglophone readers. Wild Thought: A New Translation of "La Pensée sauvage" rekindles that spark. An indispensable addition to any philosophical and anthropological library, this new translation, with critical annotations for the contemporary reader, restores the accuracy and integrity of the book that changed the course of twentieth-century thought"--

In this exploration of contemporary photography, David Levi Strauss questions the concept that “seeing is believing” Identifying a recent shift in the dominance of photography, David Levi Strauss looks at the power of the medium in the age of Photoshop, smart phones, and the internet, asking important questions about how we look and what we trust. In the first ekphrasis title on photography, Strauss challenges the aura of believability and highlights the potential dangers around this status. He examines how images produced on cameras gradually gained an inordinate power to influence public opinion, prompt action, comfort and assuage, and direct or even create desire. How and why do we believe technical images the way we do? Offering a poignant argument in the era of “fake news,” Strauss draws attention to new changes in the technology of seeing. Some uses of "technical images" are causing the connection between images and belief (between seeing and believing) to fray and pull apart. How is this shifting our relationship to images? Will this crisis in what we can believe come to threaten our very purchase on the real? This book is an inquiry into the history and future of our belief in images.

Two previously unpublished lectures charting the renowned anthropologist's intellectual engagement with the sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne In January 1937, between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.

Claude Lévi-Strauss invites us to think through the persistence of primitive thought in the rapid growth of rituals and forms of worship. By giving accounts of structure and history, he celebrates the architecture of mind, empowering facts not only for the pleasure of thinking but also for the diagnosis of unseen social transformations. The globalized celebration of Santa Claus - that commercialization of the sacred - has its origins in the Latin Saturnalia and Native American kachinas; the political philosophy of the French Revolution owes its foundations to the cannibals of New Guinea; and the mythic thinking of societies without writing rivals the most audacious fables of modern astrophysics. Lévi-Strauss was the austere author of The Elementary Structures of Kinship, but did he also become, with age, a novelist of ideas, like those French philosophes of the Enlightenment? I am not sure he would have appreciated this suggestion, but I can give him no higher praise: We Are All Cannibals reads like a novel. Julia Kristeva

The foremost anthropologist of the twentieth century uses compelling examples from history and contemporary life to challenge the criteria by which we judge others. Claude 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.

'One of the great books of our century . . . It speaks with a human voice' Susan Sontag Tristes Tropiques begins with the line 'I hate travelling and explorers', yet during his life Claude L�vi-Strauss travelled from wartime France to the Amazon basin and the dense upland jungles of Brazil, where he found 'human society reduced to its most basic expression'. His account of the people he encountered changed the field of anthropology, transforming Western notions of 'primitive' man. Tristes Tropiques is a major work of art as well as of scholarship. It is a memoir of exquisite beauty and a masterpiece of travel writing: funny, discursive, movingly detailing personal and cultural loss, and brilliantly connecting disparate fields of thought. Few books have had as powerful and broad an impact.

Presented here are 10 authentic retellings of traditional Haida myths and folktales. The stories range from bawdy tales of how the first Haida were brought to the Queen Charlotte Islands, to poignant narratives of the complexities of love in a world where animals speak, dreams come alive, and demigods, monsters, and people live side by side. 10 illustrations.

This text is a collection of illustrations of masks from the Northwest Coast.