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Lévi-Strauss. A Biography

  • Book

  • 740 Pages
  • August 2018
  • John Wiley and Sons Ltd
  • ID: 4460852
Academic, writer, figure of melancholy, aesthete   Claude Lévi–Strauss (1908–2009) not only transformed his academic discipline, he also profoundly changed the way that we view ourselves and the world around us. 

In this award–winning biography, historian Emmanuelle Loyer recounts Lévi–Strauss s childhood in an assimilated Jewish household, his promising student years as well as his first forays into political and intellectual movements. As a young professor in 1935 Lévi–Strauss left Paris for São Paulo to teach sociology. His rugged expeditions into the Brazilian hinterland, where he discovered the Amerindian Other, made him into an anthropologist. The racial laws of the Vichy regime would force him to leave France yet again, this time for the US in 1941, where he became Professor Claude L. Strauss, to avoid confusion with the jeans manufacturer. 

His return to France, after the war, ushered in the period during which he produced his greatest works: several decades of intense labour in which Lévi–Strauss reinvented anthropology, establishing it as a discipline that offered a new view on the world. In 1955, Tristes Tropiques offered indisputable proof of this the world over. During those years, Lévi–Strauss became something of a national monument, a celebrity intellectual in France. But he always claimed his perspective was a view from afar, enabling him to deliver incisive and subversive diagnoses of our waning modernity. 

Loyer s outstanding biography tells the story of a true intellectual adventurer whose unforgettable voice invites us to rethink questions of the human and the meaning of progress. Lévi–Strauss was less of a modern than he was our own great and disquieted contemporary.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Foreword Adam Kuper Introduction. The Worlds of Claude Lévi–Strauss Part I Yesterday s Worlds (É–1935) Chapter 1 The Name of the Father Chapter 2 Revelations (1908–1924) Chapter 3 Revolutions (1924–1931): Politics vs. Philosophy Chapter 4 Redemption: Anthropology (1931–1935) Chapter 5 The Enigma of the World Part II New Worlds (1935–1947) Chapter 6 France in São Paulo Chapter 7 In the Heart of Brazil Chapter 8 Massimo Lévi with the Nambikwara Chapter 9 Crisis (1939–1941) Chapter 10 A Frenchman in New York City: Exile and Intellectual Invention (1941–1944) Chapter 11 Structuralism Ð the American Years Part III The Old World (1947–1971) Chapter 12 The Ghosts of Marcel Mauss Chapter 13 Manhood Chapter 14 The Confessions of Claude Lévi–Strauss Chapter 15 Structuralist Crystallization (1958–1962) Chapter 16 The Manufacture of Science Chapter 17 The Scholarly Life Chapter 18 The Politics of Discretion Part IV The World (1971–2009) Chapter 19 Immortal Chapter 20 Metamorphoses Chapter 21 Claude Lévi–Strauss, our Contemporary Notes Works by Lévi–Strauss Archives consulted Abbreviations of Works by Lévi–Strauss Illustration credits Index

Authors

Emmanuelle Loyer