Lévi-Strauss

In Our Time: Culture

BBC

History

4.6 • 978 Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2013

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. One of twentieth-century France's most celebrated intellectuals, Lévi-Strauss attempted to show in his work that thought processes were a feature universal to humans, whether they lived in tribal rainforest societies or in the rich intellectual life of Paris. During the 1930s he studied native Brazilian tribes in the Amazonian jungle, but for most of his long career he preferred the study to the field. He was the leading exponent of structuralism, a school of thought which was influential for decades, and was involved in a famous debate with his friend Jean-Paul Sartre, who resisted many of his ideas. His books about the nature of myth, human thought and kinship are now seen as some of the most important anthropological texts written in the twentieth century.

With:

Adam Kuper Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Boston University

Christina Howells Professor of French at Oxford University

Vincent Debaene Associate Professor of French Literature at Columbia University

Producer: Thomas Morris.

Transcript

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0:44.0	Hello, a celebrated travel memoir published in 1955 begins with an unusual confession from its author.
0:51.0	I hate traveling and explorers he declared before
0:54.8	launching into a vivid account of his adventures in the jungles of Brazil. The book
0:59.0	is Trist Tropic by the French anthropologist Claude Le Vestras, a work described by Susan Sontag as one of the great books of the century.
1:07.0	Unusually for an anthropologist, Loez Strouse hated field work.
1:11.0	Why not admit it, he once told an interviewer, I was fairly quick to discover
1:14.8	that I was more a man for the study than for the field. And from his study in Paris he
1:19.6	produced a series of groundbreaking works which have been hugely influential.
1:24.0	His studies of traditional societies and their mythologies attempted to show that human thought
	...

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