Claude Levi-Strauss: The Father of Modern Anthropology
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.84 (944 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 014312062X |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 432 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-05-02 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
In the years that Lévi-Strauss published these pioneering works, Wilcken observes, tribal societies seemed to hold the answers to the most profound questions about the human mind. Following the great anthropologist from São Paulo to the Brazilian interior, and from New York to Paris, Patrick Wilcken’s Claude Lévi-Strauss is both an evocative journey and an intellectual biography of one of the 20th century’s most influential minds.. In his heyday, Levi-Strauss was both a hero to contemporary intellectuals, and an international celebrity. In Claude Levi-Strauss, Wilcken gives the reader a fascinating intellectual tour of the anthropologist’s landmark works: Tristes Tropiques, his most famous book, a literary meditation on his travels and fieldwork; The Savage Mind, which showed that “primitive” people are driven by the same intellectual curiosities as their Western counterparts, and finally his monumental four-volume Mythologiques, a study of the universal structures of native mythology in the Americas. In rich detail, Wilcken recreates Levi-Strauss’s peripatetic life: his groundbreaking fieldwork in some of the remotest reaches of the in the 1930s; his years as a Jew in Nazi-occupied France and an emigré in wartime New York; and his return to Paris in the late 1940s, where he clashed with Jean-Paul Sartre and fundamentally infl
Enthralling biography Clearly, even seductively written, this important book will answer the questions you have been dying to pose about the enigmatic French savant but were afraid to ask. That is, almost all the questions. Some passages are paraphrased from the autobiographical writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss, but the material is deftly chosen. The author was able to interview his subject just a few years before he died at the age of 100.Mr. Wilcken is an expert on Brazil, so that he casts new light on Lévi-Strauss's formative field work in that country in the late 1930s. Using other sources fro. French theorizing at its most abstruse Ralph Blumenau Lévi-Strauss (1908 to 2009) was an influential anthropologist and philosopher, one of the principal figures in Structuralism. Quite early on in his life, he was interested in geology, Marxism, and Freud - all three, he said, had taught him the importance of hidden structures underlying surface appearances, and he would apply this insight to his anthropological work. This began in 1935, when he was appointed to the University of São Paolo in Brazil as a sociology lecturer. He lectured there for only two terms, and then spent the next three and a half years on field work among. A 'must' for any collection containing his theories and studying his influence CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS; THE POET IN TE LABORATORY provides a fine prove into the anthropologist's life, revealing the influence that led him to his then-radical ideas. Original research conducted in France and Brazil and interviews with Levi-Strauss himself lend depth and perspective to this survey of his ideas and life, making this a 'must' for any collection containing his theories and studying his influence.
Patrick Wilckenis the author of Empire Adrift: The Portuguese court in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821. He lives in London. . He studied anthropology at Goldsmiths College, London University, and now works as a campaigner on the Brazil desk at Amnesty International
… Wilcken is also a gifted storyteller and thoughtful analyst.” — SCIENCE Magazine“Brilliantly assesses the great, original, creative ideas and their origins in the context of Lévi-Strauss’s life.” — THE TIMES (UK) Biographies of the Year “‘Wilcken lays out the life with clarity, efficiency, readability and occasionally dissent … A superbly thrilling life.” — THE GUARDIAN. Wilcken offers a clear explication and measured assessments of Lévi-Strauss’s works as well as setting them within the broader context of 20th-century French and European thought. … The book offers clear, analytical descriptions of the basic tenets for which Lévi-Strauss is known… This book, with an admiring but not slavish appreciation of its subject, thoughtfully