What Camus and Claude Lévi-Strauss teach us

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 19 September 2018

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Rana Mitter talks to poet and writer Ben Okri and writer and journalist Agnes Poirier about the contemporary resonance of The Outsider by Albert Camus (1913-1960), and as a new biography of the anthropological giant, Claude Levi-Strauss by Emmanuelle Loyer comes out in English, he talks to anthropologist, Adam Kuper about travel, anthropology and how we classify. Rana is also joined by Peter Moore who has written a history of the ship Endeavour which carried James Cook on his first explorations of the southern ocean.

The Outsider (L’Étranger publ 1942) by Albert Camus adapted for the stage by Ben Okri runs at Print Room at the Coronet in London 14 Sep – 13 Oct 2018. Agnes Poirier: The Left Bank: Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-50 is out now

Endeavour: The Ship and the Attitude that Changed the World by Peter Moore is out now. Oceania runs at the Royal Academy in London from 29 September — 10 December 2018.

Adam Kuper, Visiting Professor of Anthropology, LSE and Boston University.

Emmanuelle Loyer is a historian at Sciences Po. Lévi-Strauss : A Biography, by Emmanuelle Loyer, was awarded the 2015 Prix Femina Essai and has now been translated into English by Ninon Vinsonneau & Jonathan Magidoff. Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009).

Look for BBC Ideas or use this link - https://bbc.in/2xitWPt - to see a short film about the thoughts of post war Paris Philosophers and Existentialism on our programme notes. It’s part of their playlist of what different Isms mean

Transcript

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0:32.4	This is the BBC. Hello, I'm Ron Amitter with the BBC podcast called Arts and Ideas, where we bring writers,
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1:21.0	Hello, today we're going inside, inside the world of the outsiders, as we range from France's greatest anthropologist
1:28.5	to the British and Polynesian explorers who made their mark in the Pacific. But our first
1:33.5	outsider comes courtesy of the great novelist Albert Camus. His novel The Outsider, Le Tranger,
1:39.3	first published in 1942, is the story of a young, alienated man who shoots an Arab on the beach in
1:45.5	Algiers and is sentenced to death. It's a classic of existentialist Anami, which competes perhaps
1:51.2	only with Catcher in the Rye for misunderstood teenage boys, but its appeal, thankfully, goes much
1:56.8	wider. And now it's been put on stage by prize-winning author Ben Okre. This is Ben's first
2:02.5	adaptation for the stage, and it's opening this week at the Coronet Theatre in Notting Hill in London.
2:08.9	Ben, I have to say first of all, I'm a little disappointed you haven't come in for the interview
2:12.0	wearing a long trench coat and smoking a goulouse, but I forgive you, and I will go on to ask you,
2:18.4	why did you accept this invitation to adapt the outsider? Let's just say it's one of those offers that are impossible
	...

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