Introducing Levi-Strauss
A Graphic Guide
Published on 3. September 2015
176 pages
978-1-78578-020-2 (ISBN)
Description
Introducing Lévi-Strauss is a guide to the work of the great French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009). The book brilliantly traces the development and influence of Lévi-Strauss' thought, from his early work on the function of the incest taboo to initiate an exchange of women between groups, to his identification of a timeless "wild" or "primitive" mode of thinking - a pensée sauvage - behind the processes of human culture.
Accessibly written by Boris Wiseman and beautifully illustrated by Judy Groves, Introducing Lévi-Strauss also explores the major contribution that Lévi-Strauss made to contemporary aesthetic history - his work on American-Indian mythology provides a key insight into the way in which art itself comes into being.
This is an essential introduction to a key thinker.
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06/2014
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Persons
Dr Wiseman studied in London at King's College and the London School of Economics and in Paris at the Sorbonne Nouvelle and the École Normale Supérieure. He had been a lecturer in the French Department at Durham University since 1997 and is currently at the University of Copenhagen.
Judy Groves is a painter, graphic designer and illustrator. She has illustrated numerous Introducing titles.
Content
- Intro
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- A Meeting with Lévi-Strauss
- Pioneers of Anthropology: Malinowski
- Mauss and the Rule of Reciprocity
- Cross-Cousin Marriages
- Exogamous and Endogamous Marriages
- What is the "Elementary Unit"?
- The Saussurian Model
- Kinship is Communication
- The Incest Taboo
- The Rule of Incest
- Totemism
- The Rise and Fall of Totemism
- Totemism and Hysteria
- Excluding and Classifying
- How is "Totemism" Explained?
- The Totemic Operator
- Species and Systems
- The Nature of Thinking
- The Instinct for Knowledge
- Anthropology is a Psychology
- Classification or Taxonomy
- Some Properties of Classificatory Systems
- What is Thinking?
- The Logic of the Concrete
- Thinking by Analogies
- How Concrete Logic Functions
- How Primitive Science Works
- Bricolage
- Working with Signs
- Lévi-Strauss and the Prague Connection
- Hot and Cold Societies
- Writing and Social Hierarchies
- A Writing Lesson
- How Cold Societies Resist Change
- Games, Rituals and Classifications
- History as Linear Time: Hot Societies
- Time as a Circle: Cold Societies
- Lévi-Straussian Aesthetics
- Signs Versus Mimesis
- Primitivism in Western Art
- Modernist Art
- The Relation of Art to Language
- The Art of Masks
- A System of Links
- The Meaning of Masks
- Masks and Cosmetics
- The Functions of Masks
- Symbols and Scale Models
- Reduced to Art
- Seeing the Whole Before the Parts
- The Analogous Object
- The Hidden Structure of Things
- Myths of the American Indians
- What is Myth?
- A Sample Myth
- Guidelines to a Study of Myths
- The Bororo Myth (M1)
- The Position of the Jaguar
- The Hidden Armatures
- Binary Oppositions
- From Nature to Culture
- Myths and Paradoxes
- Do Myths Have Meaning?
- The Oedipus Myth
- The Interpretation
- The Percival Legend
- The Interpretation
- Myth and Music
- Structuralism and the Body
- Further Reading
- Acknowledgements
- About the Author
- Index
