Culturally significant mourning ritual for Claude Levi Strauss

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Culturally significant mourning ritual for Claude Levi Strauss

duck monster: Dec 15, 2004; THESE COLOURS DONT RUN

(That'd be a burial or perhaps a cremation btw)

Yeah. The old man has passed away. Father of modern Anthropology, and the guy who worked out that structuralism isn't just for the linguists, Claude Levi Strauss has died, aged 100. Levi Strauss in , heck I think it was the early 50s but perhaps as early as the 40s(?) was the guy in france who pretty much kicked off the Structuralist movement outside of formal linguistics. Strauss argued that the study of signification and myth provided clues as to the inner logics of societies whilst allowing, via a comparison of the deeper structures of myth, a broader search for what is common in humanity.

With the advent of post-structuralism ,however , Strauss came under attack from the twinned assaults of Derridas seemingly fatal attack on denotation, and more potently a direct attack on Levi-Strauss himself (in Writing and Difference) , and from the anti-humanism of Micheal Foucault, who argued that there is no fundamental human nature, and whilst Levi Strauss is correct in finding the determinants of behavior in culture, language is not a mirror of any deeper essence, because that deeper essence does not exist. So Levi Strauss fell from favor within academia, now replaced by the shiny jewels offered by the trickster Derida and the astonishing Foucault. But ironically without the foundation stones of Saussarian linguistics imported into the humanities as it where, by Strauss, it would seem neither strands of post-structuralism, and later post-modernism, would be possible.

Anyway, I'm by no means an expert on the guy, I just read structural anthropology and a couple of chapters of Raw and the Cooked, before realising he's just not taught anymore.

But I think to let this great man's death pass unnoticed would be a crime of sorts against an amazing thinker who changed the course of continental humanities thinking, perhaps forever.

Anyway.. On with the news articles!

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap...ECoGgwD9BO8P3O0

quote:

French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss dies

By ANGELA DOLAND (AP) – 10 hours ago

PARIS — Claude Levi-Strauss, widely considered the father of modern anthropology for work that included theories about commonalities between tribal and industrial societies, has died. He was 100.

The French intellectual was regarded as having reshaped the field of anthropology, introducing structuralism — concepts about common patterns of behavior and thought, especially myths, in a wide range of human societies. Defined as the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity, structuralism compared the formal relationships among elements in any given system.

During his six-decade career, Levi-Strauss authored literary and anthropological classics including "Tristes Tropiques" (1955), "The Savage Mind" (1963) and "The Raw and the Cooked" (1964).

Jean-Mathieu Pasqualini, chief of staff at the Academie Francaise, said an homage to Levi-Strauss was planned for Thursday, with members of the society — of which Levi-Strauss was a member — standing during a speech to honor his memory.

France reacted emotionally to Levi-Strauss' weekend death, with French President Nicolas Sarkozy joining government officials, politicians and ordinary citizens populating blogs with heartfelt tributes.

Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner praised his emphasis on a dialogue between cultures and said that France had lost a "visionary." Sarkozy honored the "indefatigable humanist."

Born on Nov. 28, 1908, in Brussels, Belgium, Levi-Strauss was the son of French parents of Jewish origin. He studied in Paris and went on to teach in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and conduct much of the research that led to his breakthrough books in the South American giant.

Beatriz Perrone Moises, an anthropology professor at the University of Sao Paulo, said "given his age, we were almost expecting this, but still I feel a kind of emptiness."

"The Brazil he described in "Tristes Tropiques" is a very particular world of the senses and as he himself said there, it was a bit like rediscovering Americans, like the explorers of the 17th century. He often spoke about this emotion, this feeling. (For him,) Brazil that was less about the county itself than about the Brazil of the Indians and the feeling of walking in the footsteps of the 17th century explorers," Perrone Moises told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Sao Paulo.

Levi-Strauss left France during as a result of the anti-Jewish laws of the collaborationist Vichy regime and during World War II joined the Free French Forces.

Levi-Strauss also won worldwide acclaim and was awarded honorary doctorates at universities, including Harvard, Yale and Oxford, as well as universities in Sweden, Mexico and Canada.

A skilled handyman who believed in the virtues of manual labor and outdoor life, Levi-Strauss was also an ardent music-lover who once said he would have liked to have been a composer had he not become an ethnologist.

He was married three times and had two sons, Matthieu and Laurent.

AP writer Jenny Barchfield in Paris contributed to this report.

A slightly more clued up blog post;-

http://savageminds.org/

quote:

Remembering Claude Lévi-Strauss
by Rex

The Internet is now full of the news that Lévi-Strauss has passed away, including an obituary at the New York Times and a collection of links at the AAA blog. Our blog—whose name is inspired by Lévi-Strauss—has discussed him in the past including some thoughts about his legacy on his 100th birthday. Many people have already shared their memories of him but what are we who never met him supposed to remember of his legacy? Perhaps it is time to be overly schematic and pare down the paeans to something more manageable for those who may be reading the news but find much of the veneration impenetrable. What, specifically, has Lévi-Strauss taught us? These are, to me, the things to take away from Lévi-Strauss’s writings:

First, Lévi-Strauss taught us that culture is a force in its own right. The idea that arbitrary and conventional systems of meaning are sui generis and have a determining force on our lives is one that is continually under assaults from various forms of reductionism. And yet Lévi-Strauss demonstrated forcefully and for all to see that the embarrassment of cultural riches found at our fingertips cannot be explained away as a result of protein or rational choice theory. Of course, we now have a much stronger understanding of how cultures work in practice than Lévi-Strauss had. But at a time when his work was interpreted at ‘intellectualist’ and people thought the etiolated visions of second-stringers like Marvin Harris were the ‘future of anthropology’, Lévi-Strauss demonstrated that it was impossible to ignore the power of culture.

Second, Lévi-Strauss taught us connoisseurship of culture. He treated cultures like works of art, and was in many sense the first person to analyze them—really analyze them—with the care that they deserved. Even today, when concrete analysis of culture has fallen by the wayside in the name of ‘theory’, Lévi-Strauss remains the great exemplar of how anthropologists work with cultural materials. The sources of his connoisseurship are varied—art appreciation, a French belle lettristic tradition, Boasian particularism—but there is no doubt that he was more or less single-handedly responsible for creating a mode of anthropological analysis that, while not universally practiced in our discipline, served both to create a distinct anthropological voice while demonstrating our utility and accessibility to other disciplines. Simply put, Lévi-Strauss taught us how to work with ethnographic materials.

More than that, Lévi-Strauss taught us to see anthropology as a work of art. He taught us that there was nothing wrong with writing beautifully—that in fact good analysis was itself beautiful, that its power to disclose new imaginative horizons was the result of its rhetorical power. Not everyone thinks this was a good idea—some see Lévi-Strauss as a harbinger of unobjective postmodernism, while others just bemoan the poor quality of the tremendous about of derivative work that followed in his wake. Whatever your stance on his position, no one can disagree that he showed us what a rigorous, humanistic anthropology looked like.

Finally, Lévi-Strauss got the relationship between the general and the particular right. He taught us to see the universal in small details. Boasian in his obsession with details, he also lifted us up to the highest and most abstract levels of thought, using little more than the detail on a piece of lace or the curve on the edge of a mask. Anthropology has always been haunted by its fierce commitment to the particular even as it strikes out towards general accounts of human society. Lévi-Strauss somehow knitted together ethnographic minutiae, comparative scope, and transcendent theorizing. This isn’t really an act that the rest of us can follow, but it was a vision that inspired others, and continues to set the tone as future generations of anthropologists try to imagine their own futures.

Of course—and I think this needs to be said despite the fact that this is a time for reverence—there was a lot wrong with Lévi-Strauss. While some pieces on the web hail mythologiques as his masterpiece, for many people it was a disappointment. The man is handed the world on a platter and the piece he produces to lead us on was… this? Its power was undeniable, and his positions much more complex than characterizations of his thought often presume (Marcel Henaff’s book Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Making of Structural Anthropology is the best (and extremely sympathetic) overview of his work). But still—there are points in the final chapters of Tristes Tropiques where I feel like my soul is being twisted by some titanic power to agree with a vision of the world that I find not just wrong but disturbing. His attempts to fit history and agency into his theoretical framework in his Introduction To The Work of Marcel Mauss always seemed painful and awkward to me. Nevertheless, the headlines are right—with Lévi-Strauss’s passing the world is watching one of its greatest intellectual move on. Will this spark a spate of fevered rereadings of Way of the Masks? Probably not—and we are probably worse off for it. And so now at the time of his passing we should celebrate him as he takes his leave from us to attain what is well and truly his regard éloignée.

And a pretty good take from Guy Rundle, a well respected Aust Journalist, although I think he slightly misses the critical diferences between strauss and his predecessors, not so much one of balance but a critical theoretical break regarding the very existance of a human nature.

quote:

5 . Rundle: Levi-Strauss survived to see that he had become an era
Guy Rundle writes:

Occasionally, among the small tribes and towns from whose myths the book of Genesis would ultimately come, there must have appeared someone who lived a life longer than anyone around them. Not just a measly 10 years more into their 60s, or even 70s, but well beyond that. Into their 80s, 90s. Everyone who knew them then had died. Their children had died. How old were they, the tribe muttered? The age became amplified in the retelling. They were a 100, 200, 400 years old. Thus was the legend of Methuselah born.

When he died, they must have felt the way many of us do today on hearing of the death of Claude Levi-Strauss, the anthropologist and founder of structuralism, at the age of 100. How was it possible that he was still alive? The work he did has been so influential that it is impossible to imagine a whole intellectual climate without it. Those who were influenced by him, such as the critic Roland Barthes, have been dead for 30 years. Even the second generation, such as the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, or the "nihilist" Jean Baudrillard, are gone. Levi-Strauss kept on.

A French Jew who did field work in Brazil, and spent WW2 in the US before returning to a life's teaching in Paris, his working life began at a time when an anthropologist's work still took him to colonies of the European empires. He was in living connection with the great 19th-century founders of sociology, such as Emile Durkheim -- a time when you could still take a boat down a river and find a tribe who had barely encountered a European.

He leaves at a time when the world is wreathed in layers of communication that have radically changed its nature.

Levi-Strauss' claim to fame is as the founder of "structural anthropology" or "structuralism" in the humanities. I am already feeling sick in contemplation at the moronic articles The Australian and Arts and Letters Daily will run on the occasion of his death -- but let's try and put it as simply as possible. The rise of serious anthropology in the late 19th century prompted study of the dynamics of tribal societies -- many of them Australian Aboriginal -- as legitimate forms in their own right, rather than simply people lacking modernity.

In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life Emile Durkheim produced a general theory from these studies -- all societies build worlds of meaning from binary oppositions, some of which are naturally given. Men and women is the key "given" one. Night and day, earth and sky, etc. These oppositions are lashed together in different ways -- man is night, woman is day, or vice versa -- and the different ways of doing this create distinct cultures.

Cultures explain the way they divide up the world by stories about how things came to be differentiated from a single whole -- or myths as we call them. The Eden myth, for example, differentiates men and women, humans and animals, god and humans, the sacred and the profane, etc.

These binaries are encoded in traditional languages (thus aboriginal languages have "classifiers" -- words or endings that tell us that something is of a class that may include women, trees, the sea, etc. This survives in vestigial form in noun "gender" in most European languages). In the 1910s the Swiss linguistician de Saussure adapted this to suggest that language could be understood as a series of oppositions, in which meaning was defined by difference -- the identity of a word or concept in a language came from what it was not, not what it was. Dog is not-cat, not-log, not-frog, etc.

It was among Levi-Strauss' strokes of genius to fold this observation back from language into the study of cultures. Cultures were like a language. They established themselves through complex systems of difference. Where anthropologists had looked for the function of certain cultural practices -- why were shellfish taboo in one culture, while scaled fish were taboo in another -- they now looked for the different systems of belief and meaning that made such judgements possible.

Levi-Strauss, at least in his earlier work, never intended that his "structuralism" would ignore the fact that there were certain anchoring points in nature, for the construction of cultural meaning. Every culture has to deal with the fact that there are men and women, birth and death, a sun and a moon, and so on. But what is built upon them can be substantially arbitrary. In the Raw and the Cooked, he looked at the way in which food cultures seem, from the inside, to have a logic to them, while from the outside they seem mad.

Of course we eat eggs for breakfast -- but not the meat of the animal from which they come. Of course we eat bacon -- but not pork. Of course red wine goes with meat, white wine with fish. And so on. Within broad limits, any system can be assembled in any combination, and make sense through a series of oppositions and differences.

Once you understand that every culture is working off such systems, you begin to see how fantastically interconnected they all are. Earlier anthropologists (OK some of them) had become the first to realise that tribal societies were as complex and articulated as modern ones. In his 40s book The Savage Mind Levi-Strauss put that in structuralist terms pre-writing societies, conduct their affairs in modes of thinking fundamentally different to the more abstract processes of science and formal philosophy that dominate our own public lives. They emphasise concrete interconnection, difference, fine distinctions. Crucially, however, those modes of thinking survive in our own cultures, as stuff we just "know" within distinct cultures.

Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, for example, are enormous catalogues of savage thinking -- why is it OK to bribe a waiter to get a good table, but not a chemist to get your prescription quicker? Whatever logical answer you come up with could equally justify the opposite.

Levi-Strauss, as his work developed, was wont to over-emphasise the structural in any cultural system -- but that was nothing compared to what would happen when a later generation got hold of it, and combined it with a radical anti-naturalism. His work can be fairly cited as laying the basis for that dread phrase "the social construction of ..." in which everything from aardvarks to zymurgy is worked through as a system of social codes, with no wider relation to history, material forces, or humanity's setting within nature.

"Post-structuralism" took this radical approach and ran with it -- most particularly in considerations of gender, the founding natural fact of social life. Or as the p-s's would say "natural", for, in the writings of people such as Judith Butler, gender would become a pure construct of language, systems and codes. Levi-Strauss had argued that men and women could be differently characterised in a wide range of ways in different cultural systems (consider, for example, by contemporary terms, what a bunch of neurotic gossip girls are the warrior-heroes of the Iliad). Butler and others argued that the whole idea of "men" and "women" was not a fixed given at all.

The humanities thus took the mad choo-choo turnoff to looneysville, just as the question of what it was to be human was coming back into full-force with the biotechnological revolutions of the 1980s. Structuralist ways of thinking came into disrepute, as both a certain type of gender-blind feminism faltered -- and women admitted they quite liked babies, weren't much interested in male centrefolds -- and as the new discipline of "evolutionary psychology" came to find some quite interesting things.

The result has been a vacuum into which an equally idiotic oversimplification has rushed – a neo-Darwinism that manages to find genes for everything from love to vanilla Coke -- and one which coincided with the disdain for "cultural relativism" expressed in the wake of 9/11. Levi-Strauss' work had been done in the decades when French colonialism had struggled, at great human cost, to perpetuate itself a few decades more -- his work was one way of explaining why the natives stubbornly failed to see the undeniable truth that Western culture was superior.

In the mad years of 9/11 and Iraq, even the idea that other people had cultural systems that were meaningful became a target. "Is Islam contrary to human nature?" Andrew Norton asked Francis Fukuyama in an interview in Policy magazine. "Aboriginal culture is the culture of the concentration camp," the late Peter Howson remarked in an issue of Quadrant. In The Culture Cult the recovering anthropologist Roger Sandall derided those who saw anything worth preserving in kinship-based ways of life. There was a sort of gleeful triumphalism developed in part as a hysterical response to 9/11. How good it felt to throw off that Chinese restaurant culture sh-t, and just roll in the Starbucks.

That the West is emerging bloody, beaten and diminished from Iraq and Afghanistan is a reminder, in part, of an insight to be gained from Levi-Strauss -- whatever looks crazy and arbitrary from the outside looks like something worth dying for from the inside, and you screw with other peoples' meanings at your peril. When a culture of modernity becomes partially dominant in the world that still runs on closed cultural systems, that raises all sorts of problems.

If we feel we must do something about female circumcision in Africa, why do we still allow Queensland to jail women for seeking a safe abortion? Is the way in which we impose modernity rationally steered – or running off a set of closed meanings no less arbitrary than a Dreaming myth. One of the first things the US did in Iraq was to institute an anti-smoking campaign -- rational, or simply a bunch of Plymouth Rock rejects recreating their puritan bodily rituals in a new setting?

Whatever will now be said in the ritual ceremonies of the Right, you can't understand the world without a working knowledge of Levi-Strauss, without understanding how necessary it is to think differently. Incredibly, he survived to see that he had become an era. But now Methuselah is dead, the lamps are extinguished and the tribe moves on.

Rip old fella. A good long life, but will be sorely missed.

# ? Nov 04, 2009 07:31

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? Nov 21, 2009 11:43

Dusseldorf: Mar 29, 2005

Just as an aside, isn't Durkheim usually considered the father of modern Anthropology?

# ? Nov 04, 2009 09:28

duck monster: Dec 15, 2004; THESE COLOURS DONT RUN

Dusseldorf posted:

Just as an aside, isn't Durkheim usually considered the father of modern Anthropology?

Depends what you mean by "modern". Durkheim died nearly a century ago.

duck monster fucked around with this message at Nov 04, 2009 around 11:07

# ? Nov 04, 2009 11:02

Grandmaster Goofy: May 28, 2007

This is very tragic. I feel kind of like a nerd that I'm more upset about this than any recent celebrity death. (Except Ingmar Bergman.)

# ? Nov 04, 2009 11:12

ZoCrowes: Nov 17, 2005; Reality leaves a lot to the imagination

Grandmaster Goofy posted:

This is very tragic. I feel kind of like a nerd that I'm more upset about this than any recent celebrity death. (Except Ingmar Bergman.)

I would not call it tragic he was over 100. However, his work in his field will live on past him. He was kind of passed over in the eighties and nineties in favor of post-modernist blah but a lot of the work I have read recently seems to draw pretty heavily from him.

In 100 years anthropologists will still be looking back to his work and building off of it. He is in pretty select company. Marx, Durkheim, Boas, Tylor and a few others. I can only think of two other anthropologists in the past 40 years or so who have had anywhere near the impact of Levi-Strauss.

# ? Nov 04, 2009 15:44

duck monster: Dec 15, 2004; THESE COLOURS DONT RUN

ZoCrowes posted:

I would not call it tragic he was over 100. However, his work in his field will live on past him. He was kind of passed over in the eighties and nineties in favor of post-modernist blah but a lot of the work I have read recently seems to draw pretty heavily from him.

In 100 years anthropologists will still be looking back to his work and building off of it. He is in pretty select company. Marx, Durkheim, Boas, Tylor and a few others. I can only think of two other anthropologists in the past 40 years or so who have had anywhere near the impact of Levi-Strauss.

I'm seeing that a bit as well outside anthropology too. In some respects the 80s assault on structuralism really rested on a somewhat academic argument around anti-humanism (for reference thats not 'humans bad', it means a refutation of the idea of a natural and essential human nature or essence, which I'd argue is at the core of post-modernist thought.) particularly arising out of Derrida (roughly, that without a signified, theres nothing to be essential about) and Foucault (if the individual is a socially constructed entity, there really isn't any substance for this essential nature to comprise of). Both arguments I've probably horribly mangled, as I do.

Now my take is, in the critical theory world, that with the like of Zizeck and whatnot, theres been bit of a resurgence in Lacanian structuralism, which like a snake with its tail and the biting therof, the grounds are somewhat open again for a return to Straus' method, even if perhaps hindight provides a little bit of caution regarding his more grander ambitions.

I have no idea whats happening in Anthropology however. Hows he being used over there?

# ? Nov 04, 2009 17:12

Grandmaster Goofy: May 28, 2007

I've just read about him from a cultural history perspective, where structuralism was a step away from Zeitgeist and mentalités-type history, where the uniqueness of historical events gave the historian a lot of freedom to interpret culture, without any real methodology. Of course he was not alone in this and to a certain extent the hermeneutic approach to history still exists.

# ? Nov 04, 2009 19:44

Gozinbulx: Feb 19, 2004; RESIDENT: LAISSEZ FAIR-SNEZHNEVSKY INSTITUTE FOR FORENSIC PSYCHIATRY

I've read tons of ethnographies and antrhopology books as an anthropology minor but gently caress all these movements and "schools" and stuff. I read what i find interesting and take from them what I can and what expands my understanding of the world. For that, levi strauss was a g gently caress the haters.

# ? Nov 05, 2009 06:34

duck monster: Dec 15, 2004; THESE COLOURS DONT RUN

Grandmaster Goofy posted:

I've just read about him from a cultural history perspective, where structuralism was a step away from Zeitgeist and mentalités-type history, where the uniqueness of historical events gave the historian a lot of freedom to interpret culture, without any real methodology. Of course he was not alone in this and to a certain extent the hermeneutic approach to history still exists.

Yeah I dunno man.

There was definately a method with Levi-Strauss, tied in with a fairly formal method of Semiotics, that seemed to start with identifying the binaries in the cultural systems he was analysing, and push into the deeper logics underlying the signification scheme.

Ultimately Structucturalism was really the continental lovechild of Marxism and Saussarian Linguistics (Freud was in the corner of this love-tiff kinda jacking off and gazing in his creepy manner). Marx bestowed a strong belief in dialecticism , the idea of contradictory logics of class or group interest ,that structuralism somewhat abstracted via Saussare into the idea that various forces within the social settings found a sort of explosion of meaning at the point where they collided. The myth in some ways was a stand in for the synthesis. The point being is that the seemingly absurd within culture, when viewed from within the inner logic of the culture actually was formally justifiable not from the logic of the western observer, but the logic of the culture participant himself. This of course meant that the Anthropologist really needed to roll his sleeves up and become part of the culture, and write from the perspective of that culture, rather than treating the culture as a quaint barbarian oddity.

I'm not really sure he was about writing histories, but presents. Or at least a history present to itself. If that makes any sense.

duck monster fucked around with this message at Nov 05, 2009 around 15:38

# ? Nov 05, 2009 15:33

Grandmaster Goofy: May 28, 2007

duck monster posted:

Yeah I dunno man.

There was definately a method with Levi-Strauss, tied in with a fairly formal method of Semiotics, that seemed to start with identifying the binaries in the cultural systems he was analysing, and push into the deeper logics underlying the signification scheme.

Ultimately Structucturalism was really the continental lovechild of Marxism and Saussarian Linguistics (Freud was in the corner of this love-tiff kinda jacking off and gazing in his creepy manner). Marx bestowed a strong belief in dialecticism , the idea of contradictory logics of class or group interest ,that structuralism somewhat abstracted via Saussare into the idea that various forces within the social settings found a sort of explosion of meaning at the point where they collided. The myth in some ways was a stand in for the synthesis. The point being is that the seemingly absurd within culture, when viewed from within the inner logic of the culture actually was formally justifiable not from the logic of the western observer, but the logic of the culture participant himself. This of course meant that the Anthropologist really needed to roll his sleeves up and become part of the culture, and write from the perspective of that culture, rather than treating the culture as a quaint barbarian oddity.

I'm not really sure he was about writing histories, but presents. Or at least a history present to itself. If that makes any sense.

Sorry, I meant that structuralism introduced methodology into history. It was Zeitgeist and mentalités-type history that was kind of loose.

I see what you mean though and of course Levi-Strauss wasn't a historian. However, anthropology and the linguistic turn in the 60's was very influential to historians. When studying cultural history, they had on one hand a Zeitgeist-type way of analyzing history, which basically amounted to "understanding history". You read enough books from the Renaissance and you eventually understand how they are thinking. On the other hand they had the Marxist school which were very rigid and fixed on how the world works, as well as very politicised. (Marxism would of course keep going into the 60's.)

So when anthropology began breaking through, historians had a way of analyzing symbols and the structure of societies, which I believe was a nice middle path. Even if Levi-Strauss analysed todays societies, historians could analyse the societies of yesterday. Of course that had to be treated quite differently, since they could not be a part of the culture in the same way. However, they could use the anthropological method of analysing other cultures to analyse the cultures of medieval Europe or 18th century France, so in that sense it was useful.

Linguistics became a HUGE part of this, since historians deal with a lot of written sources. This is also why many historians are now practically in love with Foucault. I wish I knew more about anthropology honestly, but this is my basic understanding of it.

# ? Nov 05, 2009 16:01

lilljonas: May 06, 2007; We got crabs? We got crabs!

Actually, I think Levi Strauss remained a bit bigger in Europe than in the US, even if I only have anectdotal evidence to back that claim. The professor at our department is a huge Levi Strauss buff so we read both a lot about him and quite a bit of his texts, both in undergrad and in our Masters courses. He is a bitch to understand at time (well duh, he was French), especially if you are a more practical anthropological field researcher rather than one of those more esotheric linguistical types. However, his ideas of the importance of binary oppositions are really interesting and lives on for example in Mary Douglas' writings such as Purity and Danger, one of my all time fav anthropologists.

RIP, old guy. It's difficult to exaggerate his importance to the field. I'll pour some rum for my S-man when I leave for my field work today. gently caress the haters, structuralism is awesome.

# ? Nov 08, 2009 05:45

Readman: Jun 15, 2005; These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others.

I think I learned a bit about structuralism in a jurisprudence class at law school.

If I wanted to read more, what are some good books/sources?

# ? Nov 08, 2009 07:47

TheQuietWilds: Sep 08, 2009

Readman posted:

I think I learned a bit about structuralism in a jurisprudence class at law school.

If I wanted to read more, what are some good books/sources?

Jeeze just read the thread, there are probably 10 or 12 good reads already mentioned.

# ? Nov 08, 2009 08:44

Peven Stan: Feb 01, 2006; de_panclan

My Anthro 100 class taught me Franz Boas was the father of modern psychology

# ? Nov 08, 2009 08:54

Readman: Jun 15, 2005; These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others.

TheQuietWilds posted:

Jeeze just read the thread, there are probably 10 or 12 good reads already mentioned.

The only books that have been mentioned are three by Levi-Strauss (and one by Durkheim who apparently died a century ago).

Are those good books for someone who has virtually no knowledge of the subject? Are they good entry-level books? Which of those books give the best representation of his work? Are there books that are more significant than others? If I read one of those books, am I getting an overview of the whole field, or just part of it? Are those books accepted as mainstream, or are they controversial?

Etc.

These are all perfectly reasonable questions and as far as I can see, none of them have been answered so far.

Readman fucked around with this message at Nov 08, 2009 around 10:12

# ? Nov 08, 2009 08:59

duck monster: Dec 15, 2004; THESE COLOURS DONT RUN

Readman posted:

I think I learned a bit about structuralism in a jurisprudence class at law school.

If I wanted to read more, what are some good books/sources?

Levi-Straus' Structural anthropology is probably the best one for the anthropological side of things.

Uh, Roland Barthes Mythologies is also excellent for the cultural studies/semiotics side of things. Its also a really fun book to read. All of his stuff is really well written.

Foucaults Discipline and Punish would be excellent if your a law student type, although its really post-structuralism. Foucault also is pretty enjoyable to read, because he's got a lot of really interesting history buried in his books.

poo poo, I guess Lacan and Althuser are in there somewhere too. I do like Althusers work on ideology, but I havent really read any since undergrad in the various readers we'd get.

Basically there where structuralists working in all sorts of social-science/humanities fields

Levi-Strauss - Anthropology - Read Structural anthropology, and maybe his Mythology trio.
Lacan - Psychology / Annoying topologists - Lecture transcripts always a good start.
Althuser - Political science / Sociology (Marxism really) - I dunno v

v
Roland Barthes - Lit / Photography/ Arts / being a chill dude who everyone should read. - Mythology, S/Z then Camera Lucida
Foucault - Philosophy / Sociology / Political theory /etc - Discipline and punish then History of the clinic
Derrida - Philosophy / Literature /

Blowing your mind. Of Grammatology, possibly with a good whiskey to calm the nerves, its a loving hard read.

Last 2 are really post-structuralists, but I include them because they where the thinkers that really marked the shift AWAY from structurism towards post-structuralism and post-modernism. Deleuze+Guattari would possibly belong in there by some accounts, but I'm not so sure they really count as being primarily saussarian. Then again, I'm not so sure if foucault counts either.

duck monster fucked around with this message at Nov 08, 2009 around 10:17

# ? Nov 08, 2009 10:08

franzkafka: Jun 30, 2006; kafkabot mk. II: stronger, faster & more alienated

You don't really find many introductory books to structuralism, but you might start with a reader of Ferdinand de Saussure's work, as background. Then move into Levi-Strauss and his critics.

The problem being the fact that these authors are drawing on a rich tradition spanning across varied and disparate disciplines. Add to that the fact that most of the works I'm referring to have been dubbed de facto "unscientific" [insufficiently rigorous] and thusly marginalized by our techno-fetishist tendencies in the organization of our institutions for higher learning... I guess I'm saying that its a major reading project to even get an abstract sense of the context that structuralism emerges from.

Especially in order to understand Derrida deconstructionist & Foucault's historiological attacks on "structuralism" you've gotta go back to the roots of phenomenology, psychoanalysis and social theory. I'd put it to you that most of the pop-postmod mess that gets published comes from people reading poststructuralism without the requisite background. However, I can point you in the direction of an excellent starting point:

Duncan Kennedy: A Semiotics of Critique

That's the best abstract-level articulation of the landscape that I've encountered, and from a legal scholar no less. If you're looking for a reading list, I would take each grouping of three as a project. I happen to be down with these more legitimate articulations of CLS, but regardless, I think he's dead on about the philosophical and theoretical context.

# ? Nov 08, 2009 10:27

franzkafka: Jun 30, 2006; kafkabot mk. II: stronger, faster & more alienated

duck monster posted:

Levi-Straus' Structural anthropology is probably the best one for the anthropological side of things.

Uh, Roland Barthes Mythologies is also excellent for the cultural studies/semiotics side of things. Its also a really fun book to read. All of his stuff is really well written.

Foucaults Discipline and Punish would be excellent if your a law student type, although its really post-structuralism. Foucault also is pretty enjoyable to read, because he's got a lot of really interesting history buried in his books.

poo poo, I guess Lacan and Althuser are in there somewhere too. I do like Althusers work on ideology, but I havent really read any since undergrad in the various readers we'd get.

Basically there where structuralists working in all sorts of social-science/humanities fields

Levi-Strauss - Anthropology - Read Structural anthropology, and maybe his Mythology trio.
Lacan - Psychology / Annoying topologists - Lecture transcripts always a good start.
Althuser - Political science / Sociology (Marxism really) - I dunno vv
Roland Barthes - Lit / Photography/ Arts / being a chill dude who everyone should read. - Mythology, S/Z then Camera Lucida
Foucault - Philosophy / Sociology / Political theory /etc - Discipline and punish then History of the clinic
Derrida - Philosophy / Literature / Blowing your mind. Of Grammatology, possibly with a good whiskey to calm the nerves, its a loving hard read.

Last 2 are really post-structuralists, but I include them because they where the thinkers that really marked the shift AWAY from structurism towards post-structuralism and post-modernism. Deleuze+Guattari would possibly belong in there by some accounts, but I'm not so sure they really count as being primarily saussarian. Then again, I'm not so sure if foucault counts either.

Foucault definitely does not count in my book. Check this debate out:

Noam Chomsky vs. Michel Foucault on Dutch TV in the 70s.
-especially funny because "Elders" the Dutch TV host obviously is a lot less familiar with Foucaults work; I'm guessing they prepped him with keywords and bullet points for an hour or so beforehand].

Especially considering the part about Foucault's "grille," I read Foucault coming down on the structuralist side of the debate, in the sense that the object of his archival discourse analysis was to expose a set of structural rules governing the production of truth/power underlying the history of systems of thought. On the other hand, I think he sees individual speakers as the historical effects of knowledge (defined as the set of rules by which the true is separated from the false and the specific effects of power are attached to the true), and he's got nothing but antipathy for the concept of the creative historical "author" in "What is an Author?," which squares with most interpretations of post-modernism or the idea of a fractured, socially constituted subject. So he's all over the place.

e:sp

franzkafka fucked around with this message at Nov 08, 2009 around 10:57

# ? Nov 08, 2009 10:50

Agreed: Dec 30, 2003; Make the drummer sound good!

I'm as much a Derridean as anything regarding anthropology, but Levi-Strauss was taught by my professors. I think his significance will live on, and the man himself had an extraordinary, profound life. If there is rest, his will certainly be in peace.

# ? Nov 11, 2009 00:21

ufarn: May 30, 2009

Jonathan Culler is probably the go-to guy for great recaps of literary theory. There's his Structuralist Poetics, Deconstruction and A Very Short Introduction to Literary Theory - and Roland Barthes, and others in the same series, too, I am sure - if you're interested.

# ? Nov 14, 2009 14:08

Flavahbeast: Jul 21, 2001

think I'll wear jeans tonight, RIP bro

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

# ? Nov 16, 2009 01:55

Sock on a Fish: Jul 17, 2004; What if that thing I said?

Flavahbeast posted:

think I'll wear jeans tonight, RIP bro

wear em at half mast

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

# ? Nov 16, 2009 02:41

duck monster: Dec 15, 2004; THESE COLOURS DONT RUN

franzkafka posted:

Foucault definitely does not count in my book. Check this debate out:

Hmm. Maybe. Historically he was part of that Tel Quel circle and was mentored by Althuser. His literary analysis feels distinctly saussarian, and the discussion around discourse central to his theories seems to be at least informed by the saussarian separation of denotation and connotation, plus I'd imagine a big dose of derridas moon saussarianism. I mean a big part of foucault seems to be the implication that connotation is central to the production of the subject, and the utter clusterfuck of implications that flow from that. And thats a very saussarian observation.

duck monster fucked around with this message at Nov 17, 2009 around 06:44

# ? Nov 17, 2009 06:39

Agreed: Dec 30, 2003; Make the drummer sound good!

Derrida is not moon Saussure

There are deep implications of the lack of a foundation in language. Derrida argues well and thoroughly, if you're willing to follow his brand of argumentation and put up with his literary asides and odd dips into psychoanalysis.

# ? Nov 17, 2009 07:27

duck monster: Dec 15, 2004; THESE COLOURS DONT RUN

Agreed posted:

Derrida is not moon Saussure There are deep implications of the lack of a foundation in language. Derrida argues well and thoroughly, if you're willing to follow his brand of argumentation and put up with his literary asides and odd dips into psychoanalysis.

I'm a big fan of Derrida, and I think the continent still has a long way to go before the full implication of derridas work is realised. The toppling of Logos has profound philosophical implications.

But dude, he's moon Saussure. Differance, the fundamental motor of his method, is basically Saussarian difference done pathological, such that when the full ad absurdum is mapped, your not talking about modernist philosophy as we knew it, but something very alien to recieved modernity. Its saussare from the moon. edit: Or at the very least france

# ? Nov 17, 2009 07:35

Rate Thread:

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Culturally significant mourning ritual for Claude Levi Strauss