Rating: 
Summary: Tristes tropiques
Review: For those who like to travel with books. In this book Levi Strauss bring us to remote areas where the time is not important. It is an incentive to become an anthropologist or ethnologist. We can say a trip back to our roots and an explaination to the misfits of our culture.
Rating:
Summary: A melancholic anthropology
Review: It comes as no surprise to students of L-S to find that the elegiac quality to his science (recherche des temps perdu, indeed!) starts in his formative years in the Amazon jungle. There L-S search for Comte's structure finds the romance of the human mystery, and it sings...a song that would continue through his complex studies of myths...the Immortal has a soul and that soul is the human condition, individual and ineffable; this book is a coda to the nostalgia of Rousseau's savage in Provident nature.
Rating: 
Summary: Parrot Flambee
Review: One way to gauge who's in among fashionable academics is to read the catalog for the "Writers and Readers' Documentary Comic Book" series. Sartre has an entry, and so does Derrida, and Lacan. Thirty years ago, you would have expected to find an entry in this index for Claude Levi-Strauss. No more. Translations of his principal works appear to persist in print, but the sales numbers are look low, and he seems almost to have disappeared from the trendy book reviews and such. This is perhaps a matter for at least idle curiosity: Levi-Strauss is surely no more abstruse than his magisterial contemporaries - but no less so; one is perfectly willing to be relieved the obligation of ever picking him up again.With one exception. In style and temperament, Tristes Tropiques is so different from almost everything else Levi-Strauss wrote that it is hard to believe it is written by the same man. Oh, the primitive tribes are there, and a brief personal intellectual history, that offers a bow to Freud, and Bergeson, and Saussure. In my own copy, which I first read about 1980, I even have a pencilled notation "structuralism" - this at page 375 (Pocket Books edition, 1977). But there is almost none of the portentous vacuity that you had to cope with in the so-called "serious" works. What you get instead is Levi Strauss the raconteur, full of travelers' tales. He dines on roasted parrot, flamed with whisky. The termites make the earth rumble. Virgins are made to spit in pots of corn, to provoke fermentation - but "as the delicious drink, at once nutritious and refreshing, was consumed that very evening, the process of fermentation was not very advanced." You almost expect the anthropophagi and the men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders, that you meet in the Voyages of Sir John Mandeville, Knight. Laced through it all, you get a kind of austere sadness which is either (a) a tragic view of life; or (b) a kind of self-indulgent posturing, depending on your temperament for skepticism. "Every effort to understand," he says, "destroys the object studied in favor of another object of a different nature." Or: "Anthropology could with advantage be changed into 'entropology', as the name of the discipline concerned with the study of the highest manifestations of [a] process of disintegration." Well, call me anything the like, they say, as long as you call me for dinner. It might even be an elaborate con. But so, for that matter, might the stories of Herodotus were you get the same mix of the eclectic and the tolerant, the surreal and the sly. Herodotus, we may note, is one of the first great works of Western literature. Let's hope that Levi-Strauss is not one of the last.
Rating:
Summary: Parrot Flambee
Review: One way to gauge who's in among fashionable academics is to read the catalog for the "Writers and Readers' Documentary Comic Book" series. Sartre has an entry, and so does Derrida, and Lacan. Thirty years ago, you would have expected to find an entry in this index for Claude Levi-Strauss. No more. Translations of his principal works appear to persist in print, but the sales numbers are look low, and he seems almost to have disappeared from the trendy book reviews and such. This is perhaps a matter for at least idle curiosity: Levi-Strauss is surely no more abstruse than his magisterial contemporaries - but no less so; one is perfectly willing to be relieved the obligation of ever picking him up again. With one exception. In style and temperament, Tristes Tropiques is so different from almost everything else Levi-Strauss wrote that it is hard to believe it is written by the same man. Oh, the primitive tribes are there, and a brief personal intellectual history, that offers a bow to Freud, and Bergeson, and Saussure. In my own copy, which I first read about 1980, I even have a pencilled notation "structuralism" - this at page 375 (Pocket Books edition, 1977). But there is almost none of the portentous vacuity that you had to cope with in the so-called "serious" works. What you get instead is Levi Strauss the raconteur, full of travelers' tales. He dines on roasted parrot, flamed with whisky. The termites make the earth rumble. Virgins are made to spit in pots of corn, to provoke fermentation - but "as the delicious drink, at once nutritious and refreshing, was consumed that very evening, the process of fermentation was not very advanced." You almost expect the anthropophagi and the men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders, that you meet in the Voyages of Sir John Mandeville, Knight. Laced through it all, you get a kind of austere sadness which is either (a) a tragic view of life; or (b) a kind of self-indulgent posturing, depending on your temperament for skepticism. "Every effort to understand," he says, "destroys the object studied in favor of another object of a different nature." Or: "Anthropology could with advantage be changed into 'entropology', as the name of the discipline concerned with the study of the highest manifestations of [a] process of disintegration." Well, call me anything the like, they say, as long as you call me for dinner. It might even be an elaborate con. But so, for that matter, might the stories of Herodotus were you get the same mix of the eclectic and the tolerant, the surreal and the sly. Herodotus, we may note, is one of the first great works of Western literature. Let's hope that Levi-Strauss is not one of the last.
Rating:
Summary: :Levi-Strauss, Armchair Anthropologist
Review: The traditional definition of anthropology is the study of man. And the activity immediately associated therewith are the field notes taken on the spot which the anthropologist then transcribes so the immediacy of his findings is preserved. Then there is Claude Levi-Strauss, often called the 'armchair anthropologist.' This literate personage journeyed through central Brazil in the 30s, only to record his findings some 20 later in his book Tristes Tropiques, an untranslated title because no equivalent can be found in English. Reminiscent of his forebear, Marcel Proust, Levi-Strauss presents us with memories distilled through time from which a structure emerges. Let me make clear that Tristes Tropiques is not a chronological account of Levi-Strauss' travels through South America. Recollections, filtered in Tristes Tropiques, are further distilled in subsequent works and become systems or units which can be analyzed structurally, resulting in the fundamental concept of structuralism, that of universal analogies whose 'differences resemble each other.' One social organization, one myth is without value. Compared to a multitude, they acquire meaning. Proust's universe is that of his personal recollections, whereas Levi-Strauss extends his own and from there goes on to establish cross-cultural analogies. But both are a product of the French intellectual tradition. The supremacy of the mind goes back to Rene Descartes, the 17th century French philosopher who said: "Je pense, donc je suis." "I think, therefore I am."
Rating:
Summary: Intellectual and stimulative!
Review: This book is the first of his writings and the easiest to read. As a sociologist, I estimate it as one of premier field works, while at the same time it is the intellectual and stimulative reading, which cultural relativism criticizes the Western rationalism. The story of the anthropological research begins at "The End of The Travel" and closes at "The Beginning of The New Trip." It suggests which culture seems home to him. If once you experience the field work of the different culture, this feeling will be easily sympathized. This composition implies this touch. I remember words of witches at MacBeth: "The beauty becomes the dirty, while the dirty turns out the beauty." Not only the students of the anthropology and sociology, but also the general educated people will enjoy the thought of this book.
Rating:
Summary: Intellectual and stimulative!
Review: This book is the first of his writings and the easiest to read. As a sociologist, I estimate it as one of premier field works, while at the same time it is the intellectual and stimulative reading, which cultural relativism criticizes the Western rationalism. The story of the anthropological research begins at "The End of The Travel" and closes at "The Beginning of The New Trip." It suggests which culture seems home to him. If once you experience the field work of the different culture, this feeling will be easily sympathized. This composition implies this touch. I remember words of witches at MacBeth: "The beauty becomes the dirty, while the dirty turns out the beauty." Not only the students of the anthropology and sociology, but also the general educated people will enjoy the thought of this book.
Rating:
Summary: Grounding Levi-Strauss's Structuralism
Review: This is Levi-Strauss most readable book, and it is a fantastic introduction to the "why" behind his interest in structuralism. There are hints of the various methods and approaches that he uses in later works, but this book shows why he was to develop structuralism in later works. The writing is clever and eloquent, and various conclusions he made about cultural diversity address contemporary concerns in a highly articulate and responsible manner. Read this book before delving into the other writings of one of the 20th Century's most important anthropologists.
Rating:
Summary: Grounding Levi-Strauss's Structuralism
Review: This is Levi-Strauss most readable book, and it is a fantastic introduction to the "why" behind his interest in structuralism. There are hints of the various methods and approaches that he uses in later works, but this book shows why he was to develop structuralism in later works. The writing is clever and eloquent, and various conclusions he made about cultural diversity address contemporary concerns in a highly articulate and responsible manner. Read this book before delving into the other writings of one of the 20th Century's most important anthropologists.
Rating:
Summary: Grounding Levi-Strauss's Structuralism
Review: This is Levi-Strauss most readable book, and it is a fantastic introduction to the "why" behind his interest in structuralism. There are hints of the various methods and approaches that he uses in later works, but this book shows why he was to develop structuralism in later works. The writing is clever and eloquent, and various conclusions he made about cultural diversity address contemporary concerns in a highly articulate and responsible manner. Read this book before delving into the other writings of one of the 20th Century's most important anthropologists.
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