The Savage Mind

This is a classic work by one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century. It is an original and brilliant examination of the structure of the thought of primitive' peoples, and has contributed significantly to our understanding of the way the human mind works. The English translation was originally published in 1966 and is now available from Oxford University Press.

"Every word, like a sacred object, has its place. No précis is possible. This extraordinary book must be read."—Edmund Carpenter, New York Times Book Review "No outline is possible; I can only say that reading this book is a most exciting intellectual exercise in which dialectic, wit, and imagination combine to stimulate and provoke at every page."—Edmund Leach, Man "Lévi-Strauss's books are tough: very scholarly, very dense, very rapid in argument. But once you have mastered him, human history can never be the same, nor indeed can one's view of contemporary society. And his latest book, The Savage Mind, is his most comprehensive and certainly his most profound. Everyone interested in the history of ideas must read it; everyone interested in human institutions should read it."—J. H. Plumb, Saturday Review "A constantly stimulating, informative and suggestive intellectual challenge."—Geoffrey Gorer, The Observer, London

Professor Goody's research in West Africa resulted in finding an alternative way of thinking about 'traditional' societies.

As the most influential anthropologist of his generation, Claude Lévi-Strauss left a profound mark on the development of twentieth-century thought. Through a mixture of insights gleaned from linguistics, sociology, and ethnology, Lévi-Strauss elaborated his theory of structural unity in culture and became the preeminent representative of structural anthropology. La Pensée sauvage, first published in French in 1962, was his crowning achievement. Ranging over philosophies, historical periods, and human societies, it challenged the prevailing assumption of the superiority of modern Western culture and sought to explain the unity of human intellection. Controversially titled The Savage Mind when it was first published in English in 1966, the original translation nevertheless sparked a fascination with Lévi-Strauss’s work among Anglophone readers. Wild Thought rekindles that spark with a fresh and accessible new translation. Including critical annotations for the contemporary reader, it restores the accuracy and integrity of the book that changed the course of intellectual life in the twentieth century, making it an indispensable addition to any philosophical or anthropological library.

We began as savages, and savagery has served us well—it got us where we are. But how do our tribal impulses, still in place and in play, fit in the highly complex, civilized world we inhabit today? This question, raised by thinkers from Freud to Lévi-Strauss, is fully explored in this book by the acclaimed anthropologist Robin Fox. It takes up what he sees as the main—and urgent—task of evolutionary science: not so much to explain what we do, as to explain what we do at our peril. Ranging from incest and arranged marriage to poetry and myth to human rights and pop icons, Fox sets out to show how a variety of human behaviors reveal traces of their tribal roots, and how this evolutionary past limits our capacity for action. Among the questions he raises: How real is our notion of time? Is there a human “right” to vengeance? Are we democratic by nature? Are cultural studies and fascism cousins under the skin? Is evolutionary history coming to an end—or just getting more interesting? In his famously informative and entertaining fashion, drawing links from Volkswagens to Bartók to Woody Guthrie, from Swinburne to Seinfeld, Fox traces our ongoing struggle to maintain open societies in the face of profoundly tribal human needs—needs which, paradoxically, hold the key to our survival.

From its humble beginnings as a video game launched in the mid-90s, Pokémon has become a global entertainment franchise, even reaching into the world via augmented reality with the mobile game Pokémon GO. In this book, the author argues that the Pokémon worldview is the best contemporary example of Claude Lévi-Strauss's "savage mind," suggesting that computer games can be viewed as attempts to reconnect the human unconscious with the true, hidden essence of nature. Video games are often thought to draw children out of nature and into isolated, closed spaces. However, the author asserts, the Pokémon series of games, far from standing in opposition to nature, actually seeks to represent the true, hidden essence of the natural world. As the natural environment is transformed around them, the author suggests, children that would once have directly observed and explored nature encounter it through technology instead. Video games and other digital narratives can often be viewed as attempts to reconnect the human unconscious with nature, undoing the separation effected by the scientific, rational thought of Western modernity. The author supports his argument through close analysis of the history and even prehistory of video games in Japanese culture. Drawing on mythology, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and other resources, he explores cultural touchstones like Space Invaders, Ultraman, and the RPG as a genre, showing how their rich, direct expression appeals directly to the urges and impulses within children themselves, helping them come to terms with their place in the world.--adapted from publisher's description.

An examination of how concepts of “the savage” facilitated technological approaches to modernist design Attempting to derive aesthetic systems from natural structures of human cognition, designers looked toward the “savage mind”—a way of thinking they associated with a racialized subaltern. In Savage Mind to Savage Machine, Ginger Nolan uncovers an enduring relationship between “the savage” and the development of technology and its wide-ranging impact on society, including in the fields of architecture and urbanism, the industrial arts, and digital design. Nolan focuses on the relationship between the applied arts and the structuralist social sciences, proposing that the late-nineteenth-century rise of Freudian psychology, ethnology, and structuralist linguistics offered innovations and new opportunities in studying human cognition. She looks at institutions ranging from the Public Industrial Arts School of Philadelphia and the Weimar Bauhaus to the MIT Media Lab and the Centre Mondial Informatique, revealing a persistent theme of twentieth-century design: to supplant language with more subliminal, aesthetic modes of communication, thereby inculcating a deep intimacy between human habit and new technologies of production, communication, and consumption. This book’s ultimate critique is of the development of the ergonomics of the spirit—the design of the human cognitive apparatus in relation to new aesthetic technologies. Nolan sees these ergonomics as a means of depoliticizing societies through aesthetic technologies intended to seamlessly integrate humans into the programs of capitalist modernity. Revising key modernist design narratives, Savage Mind to Savage Machine provides a deep historical foundation for understanding our contemporary world.