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This volume of Lévi-Strauss's writings from 1941 to 1947 bears witness to a period of his work which is often overlooked but which was the crucible for the structural anthropology that he would go on to develop in the years that followed.
Like many European Jewish intellectuals, Lévi-Strauss had sought refuge in New York while the Nazis overran and occupied much of Europe. He had already been introduced to Jakobson and structural linguistics but he had not yet laid out an agenda for structuralism, which he would do in the 1950s and 60s. At the same time, these American years were the time when Lévi-Strauss would learn of some of the world's most devastating historical catastrophes - the genocide of the indigenous American peoples and of European Jews. From the beginning of the 1950s, Lévi-Strauss's anthropology tacitly bears the heavy weight of the memory and possibility of the Shoah. To speak of 'structural anthropology zero' is therefore to refer to the source of a way of thinking which turned our conception of the human on its head. But this prequel to Structural Anthropology also underlines the sense of a tabula rasa which animated its author at the end of the war as well as the project - shared with others - of a civilizational rebirth on novel grounds.
Published here in English for the first time, this volume of Lévi-Strauss's texts from the 1940s will be of great interest to students and scholars in anthropology, sociology and the social sciences generally.
List of contents
Note on the French Edition
List of Illustrations
Introduction by Vincent Debaene
History and method
I. French Sociology
II. In Memory of Malinowski
III. The Work of Edward Westermarck
IV. The Name of the Nambikuara
Individual and society
V. Five Book Reviews
VI. Techniques for Happiness
Reciprocity and hierarchy
VII. War and Trade among the Indians of South America
VIII. The Theory of Power in a Primitive Society
IX. Reciprocity and Hierarchy
X. The Foreign Policy of a Primitive Society
Art
XI. Indian Cosmetics
XII. The Art of the Northwest Coast at the American Museum of Natural History
South American ethnography
XIII. The Social Use of Kinship Terms among Brazilian Indians
XIV. On Dual Organization in South America
XV. The Tupí-Cawahíb
XVI. The Nambicuara
XVII. Tribes of the Right Bank of the Guaporé River
Map
Sources
Notes
Index
About the author
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) was one of the most influential anthropologists of the twentieth century. He held the Chair of Social Anthropology at the College de France from 1959 to 1982 and was the author of many books including
Tristes Tropiques and
Structural Anthropology.
Summary
This volume of Lévi-Strauss's writings from 1941 to 1947 bears witness to a period of his work which is often overlooked but which was the crucible for the structural anthropology that he would go on to develop in the years that followed.
Like many European Jewish intellectuals, Lévi-Strauss had sought refuge in New York while the Nazis overran and occupied much of Europe. He had already been introduced to Jakobson and structural linguistics but he had not yet laid out an agenda for structuralism, which he would do in the 1950s and 60s. At the same time, these American years were the time when Lévi-Strauss would learn of some of the world's most devastating historical catastrophes - the genocide of the indigenous American peoples and of European Jews. From the beginning of the 1950s, Lévi-Strauss's anthropology tacitly bears the heavy weight of the memory and possibility of the Shoah. To speak of 'structural anthropology zero' is therefore to refer to the source of a way of thinking which turned our conception of the human on its head. But this prequel to Structural Anthropology also underlines the sense of a tabula rasa which animated its author at the end of the war as well as the project - shared with others - of a civilizational rebirth on novel grounds.
Published here in English for the first time, this volume of Lévi-Strauss's texts from the 1940s will be of great interest to students and scholars in anthropology, sociology and the social sciences generally.
