MacCabe, Colin. Review of Patrick Wilcken, CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS: THE POET IN THE LABORATORY. NEW STATESMAN November 4, 2010.

Wilcken, Patrick.  Claude-Levi-Strauss: the Poet in the Laboratory.  London: Bloomsbury, 2010.

Between his own publication of Tristes tropiques in 1955 and Jacques Derrida's publication of De la grammatologie in 1967, Claude Lévi-Strauss bestrode western humanities and social sciences as no one has before or since. Unlike philosophy or literary criticism, his discipline, anthropology, was not divided between "Anglo-Saxon" and "Continental" approaches, and the promise of a method that would analyse the fundamental processes of the human mind was initially plausible.

From the beginning, Lévi-Strauss argued two theses, logically separate but inseparably linked in his own writing. His great idea - the fruit of a close friendship with Roman Jakobson forged in wartime exile in New York - was that both myth and kinship were to be analysed by a functional relationship not to social and physical reality, but to the most elementary processes of human thought. The establishment of difference - the distinction between animals with or without cloven hooves, say - was dictated by the need to structure the world into pairs of binary oppositions. This insight built on the greatest discovery of 20th-century linguistics: rather than analyse the positive features of sound across an infinite continuum, the Russian linguist Nikolai Trubetzkoy and his successors had focused simply on the differences (between "b" and "p", for example) that produced meaning.

Lévi-Strauss claimed to have discovered the fundamental differences on which all kinship and myth were based, and produced a simple combination of differential oppositions that, he thought, underpin even the most complex and apparently dissimilar myths. Myths were privileged insights into thought, and here his second thesis came into play: "primitive" societies or, as Lévi-Strauss termed them, "societies without writing" are more authentic than societies that have succumbed to writing. Ever since Montaigne, and receiving its fullest expression in Rousseau's noble savage, there had been a current in western thought which saw in "primitive" societies a richer, less alienated relationship between men and their world than that which obtained in "civilisation".

Lévi-Strauss thus promised two things: first, a combinatory schema that would reveal the basic operations of the human mind - all kinship systems would be conceived as variations on a single theme, and all myths would operate around a set of basic differences - and second, a demonstration of the superiority of forms of thought that came before writing, before the fundamental alienation that occurred when writing intruded into an authentic idyll.

However, Lévi-Strauss's dominance of western thought evaporated after Derrida devoted a 40-page analysis to the anthropologist's foray into the world of the Nambikwara Amazonians. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2010/11/levi-strauss-writing-thought.

Doxiadis, Apostolos, et al. "Exclusive Claude Lévi-Strauss Cartoon." FINANCIAL TIMES February 27, 2010.

The cartoon is here: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/5284373a-1f94-11df-8975-00144feab49a.html.

Sahlins, Marshall. "The Anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss." AANET.ORG July 8, 2009.

For ninety-nine percent of human history, Levi-Strauss once observed, a divided humanity did not know the other modes of life, the other beliefs and the other institutions that Anthropology since the end of the nineteenth century has been called upon to understand. More than any other science or discipline, Anthropology became the self-consciousness of the human species in all its varieties and all its similarities. There developed a line of global thinkers of human cultures — E.B. Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, Franz Boas, Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Bronislaw Malinowski — of whom, alas, it seems that Levi-Strauss is the last. Levi-Strauss is apparently the last with a pan-human vision, the last to embrace the study of all the cultural expressions of humanity as the only way of knowing what mankind is. More than once he has quoted Rousseau on that score: "When one proposes to study men, one only needs to look at those nearby; but in order to study man, one has to look afar; for it is necessary to observe the differences in order to discover the properties." Hence the title of an influential collection of Levi-Strauss's essays, The View from Afar (1988). Levi-Strauss's grand ambition has been to discover the universal laws of human thought underlying the great diversity of cultures known to Anthropology. In the pursuit of that ambition, he developed an ethnographic knowledge of the planet unparalleled by any scholar before and unlikely to be duplicated by anyone again. A master of Native American cultures North and South, he also supported his famous structuralist theories with detailed descriptions of indigenous customs from every other continent, as well as from remote islands of the South Seas and the nearby practices and histories of European societies. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.aaanet.org/issues/upload/Sahlins-Levi-Strauss-Blog-Post.pdf.

Cfp: "Savage Thoughts: Interdisciplinarity and the Challenge of Claude Lévi-Strauss," McGill University, September 24-26, 2010.

Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas. Claude Lévi-Strauss was one of the great interdisciplinary writers of the twentieth century whose influence has been felt far beyond his home discipline of anthropology. His inquiry illuminated the border lands between primitive and non-primitive, self and other, myth and history, human and animal, art and nature, and the dichotomies that give structure to culture. At the same time his method troubled those borders and dichotomies, through the bricolage he adopted that illuminated connections amongst literature, art, psychology, music, religion, and law. Our call for ‘savage thoughts’ seeks out new work influenced by this inquiry and these methods, and reflections on Levi-Strauss’ legacy across the whole range of the humanities and beyond, including: 1) Recent interdisciplinary research in the reception, critique, and development, of Lévi-Strauss’ work. How have these inquiries been transformed in recent years? Are the children of Lévi-Strauss as savage as he? 2) Consideration of Lévi-Strauss’ larger intellectual influence, explicit or otherwise, right across the humanities. Perhaps there is something savage at the heart of interdisciplinary thought itself—refusing to be tamed by the intellectual borders of a discipline, it forages at will. Where has Lévi-Strauss’ method spawned such wildness and hybridity? 3) Looking beyond the academy to consider how Lévi-Strauss’ ideas have embedded themselves in the culture, values, social organization, and framework of modern society. What is the public life and impact of these ideas? In what ways has our world been altered by his mode of apprehending it? Conference website: http://www.mcgill.ca/iplai/savagethoughts/.

DEATH: Claude Levi-Strauss (1908 - 2009).

Update: See the following obituaries:

• Anon.: Claude Lévi-Strauss Telegraph November 3, 2009
• Anon.: Claude Lévi-Strauss French Social Anthropologist Times November 4, 2009
• Bloch, Maurice: Claude Lévi-Strauss Obituary Guardian November 3, 2009
• Droit, Roger-Pol: L'Ethnologue Claude Lévi-Strauss est mort Le Monde November 3, 2009
• Kuper, Adam: Claude Levi-Strauss . . . Father of Modern Anthropology Independent November 4, 2009
• Rothstein, Edward: Claude Lévi-Strauss, 100, Dies New York Times November 4, 2009

Original Post (November 3, 2009): Claude Levi-Strauss, the eminent Structuralist anthropologist, died today, November 3. For more information on his life and career, see the Wikipedia entry in English here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_L%C3%A9vi-Strauss) or for information on his publications, visit his PhilWeb page here (http://www.phillwebb.net/History/TwentiethCentury/Continental/(Post)Structuralisms/Structuralism/Levi-Strauss/L%C3%A9vi-Strauss.htm). See also the BBC article on his passing here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8340936.stm.

Claude Levi-Strauss Awarded the James Smithson Bicentennial Medal.

Esteemed French anthropologist and father of structural anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss, was awarded the Smithsonian Institution’s James Smithson Bicentennial Medal last week. Lévi-Strauss was nominated by the National Museum of Natural History for his “fundamental contributions to understanding the human condition and passionate personal engagement in defense of the common humanity and dignity of all peoples.” Read the Smithsonian’s press release here. (From AAA Blog: http://blog.aaanet.org/)

Erlanger, Steven. "100th Birthday Tributes Pour in for Levi-Strauss." NEW YORK TIMES November 28, 2008.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, who altered the way Westerners look at other civilizations, turned 100 on Friday, and France celebrated with films, lectures and free admission to the museum he inspired, the Musée du Quai Branly. Mr. Lévi-Strauss is cherished in France, and is an additional reminder of the nation’s cultural significance in the year when another Frenchman, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Mr. Lévi-Strauss shot to prominence early, but with his 1955 book, Tristes Tropiques, a sort of anthropological meditation based on his travels in Brazil and elsewhere in the 1930s, he became a national treasure of a specially French kind. The jury of the Prix Goncourt, France’s most famous literary award, said that it would have given the prize to Tristes Tropiques had it been fiction. Mr. Lévi-Strauss, a Brussels-born and Paris-bred Jew, fled France after its capitulation to the Nazis in 1940. He spent the next eight years based in the United States, where he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York and was influenced by noted anthropologists like Franz Boas, who taught at Columbia. On Friday, the culmination of several days of celebration, there were no false notes. At the Quai Branly, 100 scholars and writers read from or lectured on the work of Mr. Lévi-Strauss, while documentaries about him were screened, and guided visits were provided to the collections, which include some of his own favorite artifacts. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/books/29levi.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all. See also:

• Banks, Eric. "100 Candles for Claude Levi-Strauss." Chronicle of Higher Education Brainstorm Blog November 25, 2008;
• "Bon anniversaire, M. Lévi-Strauss!" Le Monde November 25, 2008;
• Lichfield, John. "Grand Chieftain of Anthropology Lives to See his Centenary." Independent November 29, 2008;
• Ivry, Benjamin. "Claude of the Jungle." Forward November 6, 2008;
• Sperber, Dan. "Claude Lévi-Strauss at 100: Echo of the Future." Open Democracy November 28, 2008;
• Wilcken, Patrick. "The Century of Claude Levi-Strauss." Times Literary Supplement October 29, 2008.