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

alchemy.” 10 Good chapter-length summaries of Lévi-Strauss’s work can also be found in Howard Gardner, The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution ; John Sturrock, Structuralism ; J. G. Merquior, From Prague to Paris: A Critique of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Thought ; and Boris Wiseman’s entry in the Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought . 11 Published in 1970, Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Anthropologist as Hero brings together an interesting selection of short review pieces by Susan Sontag, David Maybury-Lewis and Sanche de Gramont among others, written at the height of Lévi-Strauss’s fame. 12
    For those wishing to return to the original works, Lévi-Strauss’s classic memoir, Tristes Tropiques , remains by far the most accessible and enjoyable entry point into his oeuvre. 13 The narrative follows his early years as a disillusioned university student, through to his discovery of anthropology and fieldwork in Brazil. Strangely, it skips over his crucial period of exile in New York, though this gap was partially filled by a short, descriptive essay on his first impressions on arriving in Manhattan in the third volume of his essay anthologies, The View from Afar . 14 For a visual companion piece to Tristes Tropiques , the coffee-table book, Saudades do Brasil showcases Lévi-Strauss’s formidable talents as a field photographer. 15
    In his academic works, certain key chapters stand out as accessible encapsulations of his ideas. Lévi-Strauss often began and ended his books with clarity; it is the following through of the argument, demonstrated by hundreds of examples, that can be a slog for the general reader. The “Overture” and the “Finale” of the Mythologiques series, for instance, summarize the project in lucid prose; the intervening two thousand pages, though, require high levels of concentration to hold on to all the strands of Lévi-Strauss’s argument while remembering the twists and turns of an ever-accumulating stock of mythic material. 16 Similarly, The Savage Mind begins with a statement of key notions—the importance of disinterested classification, bricolage and the science of the concrete—but then drifts into complex ethnographic applications of these ideas. 17 The same could be said of The Elementary Structures of Kinship , which opens with a general discussion of the fundamental distinction between nature and culture and the power of the incest taboo, before becoming overladen with kinship diagrams and ethnographic minutiae. 18
    Lévi-Strauss is certainly easier to manage at essay length. “The Structural Study of Myth,” his classic early demonstration of his method using Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, is a key reference point. 19 For an easy overview of some of his more general ideas, Lévi-Strauss wrote short, popularizing essays for the UNESCO Courier , covering discussions on the illusory notion of the “primitive,” the relationship between shamans and psychoanalysis and structural analyses of cooking, that are now available online. 20
    For readers of French, the options are virtually limitless. However, a few of the more recently published titles stand out. Denis Bertholet’s 2003 biography, Claude Lévi-Strauss , is a detailed overview of his life and ideas. 21 Frédéric Keck has written a series of clear introductions to Lévi-Strauss’s work, including Lévi-Strauss et la pensée sauvage ; Claude Lévi-Strauss, une introduction ; and, with Vincent Debaene, Claude Lévi-Strauss: L’homme au regard éloigné . 22 The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of Oeuvres , published when Lévi-Strauss was ninety-nine, is a fitting conclusion to his life and work. 23 It contains not just the bulk of his oeuvre, but previously unpublished material from Lévi-Strauss’s recently opened archive at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, including excerpts from his aborted novel, the first acts of a play he wrote in Brazil and his field notes. All this is presented