Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory Read Online Free PDF Page A

(Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2004); Frédéric Keck, Claude Lévi-Strauss, une introduction (Paris: Pocket, 2005); Frédéric Keck and Vincent Debaene, Claude Lévi-Strauss : L’homme au regard éloigné (Paris: Gallimard, 2009).
    23. Claude Lévi-Strauss , Oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2007).

FURTHER READING
     
    Approaching the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss can be daunting. He was a prolific writer, active for over half a century, publishing several hundred essays and more than a dozen books—seven on mythology alone—throughout his long career. In the 1980s a book-length bibliography of secondary sources was published; since then, another library of Lévi-Strauss-related material has appeared with a late surge of publications to commemorate his centenary. Sheer quantity is at times matched by a density of ideas and material—indeed, some stretches of The Elementary Structures of Kinship and the Mythologiques quartet are not for the fainthearted.
    But for someone often considered an intellectual elitist, Lévi-Strauss had a popular touch, especially in the many interviews, radio broadcasts and documentary films in which he participated over the years. He was extremely articulate, effortlessly delivering potted summaries of his most demanding books. There was also an autobiographical strain to his work, which often interweaved incidents from his life with own thinking, the two sometimes merging into a kind of vital essence. And for readers unfamiliar with French, all of Lévi-Strauss’s books and most of his essays have been translated into English.
    Of the many interviews he gave, Didier Eribon’s book-length Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss is by far the most comprehensive and searching. 1 Divided into three parts, it covers his early travels; the rise of structuralism; and his ideas on art, politics and culture. Lévi-Strauss’s late 1950s radio interviews with Georges Charbonnier have also been published in book form. 2 In this encounter, Lévi-Strauss talked at length about contemporary art and music. On the subject of myth, the Massey lectures, later published as Myth and Meaning , are as clear as the originals are opaque. 3 A good compilation of his television interviews, as well as a highly watchable feature documentary, is Pierre-André Boutang and Annie Chevallay’s Lévi-Strauss: In His Own Words ; while the Canadian Film Board’s documentary, Behind the Masks, which covers his first trip to British Columbia in the 1970s, gives a flavor of his method, featuring a short lecture summarizing his analysis of myths and masks. 4
    One of the best summaries of his ideas in English is Edmund Leach’s Claude Lévi-Strauss , which, in a series of essays, takes the reader step-by-step through the complexities of Lévi-Strauss’s arguments. 5 Also interesting is David Pace’s Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Bearer of Ashes , a critical assessment of the development of his ideas. 6 François Dosse’s two-volume narrative account of the era, History of Structuralism , contextualizes Lévi-Strauss’s work and the enormous influence he had over his contemporaries. 7 For a witty, bare-bones summary, replete with cartoon figures of Lévi-Strauss expounding his theories in speech bubbles, Boris Wiseman and Judy Groves’s Introducing Lévi-Strauss and Structural Anthropology , offers a rapid, but by no means trivialized, introduction to Lévi-Strauss. 8
    French anthropologist Dan Sperber’s “Claude Lévi-Strauss Today,” which combines admiration and skepticism in the right measure, is one of the most balanced and intelligent essay-length assessments of his work. 9 Coming from a more literary perspective, American anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s “The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude Lévi-Strauss” is a critique of what he calls Lévi-Strauss’s “infernal culture machine,” ending up questioning whether Lévi-Strauss’s theories represent “science or