Teaching L Vi Strauss

Claude L ́evi-Strauss's mid-twentieth-century work in structural anthropology revolutionized the study of myth, kinship, and totemism, with lasting effects in cultural studies generally and especially in religious studies. This book provides an introduction to this revolution through generous excerpts of some of L ́evi-Strauss's most important writing on religion. Reactions and responses, both positive and negative, to the revolution are also included, along with some of L ́evi-Strauss's replies to his critics. A general introduction by volume editor Hans Penner provides a framework for understanding the historical development and contemporary meaning of structuralism for religious studies. This volume provides an unparalleled resource for teaching about structuralism.

In 1847 an eighteen-year-old immigrant arrived in New York. He had little in his pockets and no knowledge of English. However, by 1874, people throughout the United States knew him as the man who made blue jeans with copper rivets. Even now Levi Strauss's name lives on as a mark of quality and style. In Mr. Blue Jeans, Maryann N. Weidt presents the history of this hardworking man, as he struggles through long, grueling days as a peddler and challenging times as a young businessman. His honesty, integrity, and generosity stand out as clearly as his name, making this rags-to-riches story well worth reading. The accurate and highly readable text is enriched by Lydia M. Anderson's dramatic black-and-white illustrations.

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, Lévi-Strauss left Paris in 1935 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 USA in 1941, where he became Professor Claude L. Strauss – to avoid confusion with the jeans manufacturer. Lévi-Strauss’s return to France, after the war, ushered in the period during which he produced his greatest works: several decades of intense labour in which he 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 French national monument, as well as a celebrity intellectual of global renown. 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. She portrays Lévi-Strauss less as a modern than as our own great and disquieted contemporary.

Retells, in tall-tale fashion, how Levi Strauss went to California during the Gold Rush, saw the need for a sturdier kind of trouser, and invented jeans.

The first comprehensive biography of 'the father of modern anthropology' 'An intellectual biography that briskly and brilliantly assesses the great, original, creative ideas and their origins in the context of Lévi-Strauss's life from the 1930s to the 1960s in Brazil, New York and Paris' The Times, Biographies of the Year 'Lays out the life with clarity, efficiency, readability and occasionally dissent ... A superbly thrilling life' Guardian Claude Lévi-Strauss, the 'father of modern anthropology' and author of the classic Tristes tropiques, was one of the most influential intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century. Dislodging Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir from the pinnacle of French intellectual life in the 1950s, he brought about a sea change in Western thought and inspired a generation of thinkers and writers, including Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan with his structuralist theories. Lévi-Strauss's bohemian childhood and later studies of the emerging discipline of anthropology in the field and the university led him to mix with intellectuals, artists and poets from all over Europe. Tracing the evolution of his ideas through interviews with the man himself, research into his archives and conversations with contemporary anthropologists, Wilcken explores and explains Lévi-Strauss's theories, revealing an artiste manqué who infused his academic writing with an artistic and poetic sensibility.

Traces the life of the immigrant Jewish peddler who went on to found Levi Strauss & Co., the world's first and largest manufacturer of denim jeans.

Lévi-Strauss is one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century yet he is a very private and isolated figure, who has been reticent about himself. This book, first published in 1983,provides a fascinating insight into his character through a careful reading of the more speculative passages of his books and interviews. His personal existential and psychological orientation is explored through a structural analysis of Tristes Tropiques, his most personal book, and his writings on art, nature and civilization and through a consideration of his debt to Rousseau. Dr Pace examines in depth Lévi-Strauss’s critique of cultural evolutionism and his attack on the notion of world history. He assesses the political implications of Lévi-Strauss’s own interpretation of human progress through an examination of his debates with Sartre and other Marxists in the 1950s and 1960s and his subsequent movement to the right. The author’s concern throughout is to place the world-view of this great French anthropologist in the context of twentieth-century intellectuals’ struggle to come to grips with cultural relativism and the ‘problem’ of the primitive.

In addresses written for a wide general audience, one of the twentieth century's most prominent thinkers, Claude Lévi-Strauss, here offers the insights of a lifetime on the crucial questions of human existence. Responding to questions as varied as 'Can there be meaning in chaos?', 'What can science learn from myth?' and 'What is structuralism?', Lévi-Strauss presents, in clear, precise language, essential guidance for those who want to learn more about the potential of the human mind.