Status
Available
Call number
Series
Publication
University Of Chicago Press (1983), Paperback, 402 pages
Description
This book examines the myths of the South American Indians and demonstrates how these can be reduced to a comprehensible psychological pattern. Moving from minute detail to bold speculation, Levi-Strauss argues that there is no fundamental break between the primitive mind and more evolved attitudes. He analyzes 250 myths to reveal their interrelation and basic structure and, by cross-referencing to European customs, he sets them in a general cultural context.
User reviews
LibraryThing member skholiast
The four volumes of Mythologiques are the sort of thing the term "tour-de-force" was meant for. Levi-Strauss is a magician. While he's working, you follow wherever he leads your attention, and every step seems plausible; by the end you have seen such a display of synthesis that you really *want* to
Show More
be persuaded. Simply explicating, as he does, what is for most the wholly unfamiliar territory of native American mythology, from Patagonia to Alaska, would be accomplishment enough. But as he unpacks, he also enacts a complex account of how human culture works. One myth leads on to another, stories invert and turn inside-out like silk scarves becoming doves: heroes seduce, tricksters get fooled themselves, animals get their spots or lose their voices, and all the while each of several basic categories of human existence (male/female, sky/earth, clothes/nudity, and yes, raw/cooked) is shuffled, explicated and blended into a new tertium quid. Even when the innevitable delayed response of "hey, wait a minute..." eventually catches up with you, there lingers a sense of privilege and awe. Some may find the content of Levi-Strauss' message ultimately reductionist or ultimately empty; but his *style* alone will make you think about the human mind in a whole new way. Show Less
LibraryThing member keylawk
Controversy surrounds the translations. Sybil Wolfram has joked, paraphrasing Lévi-Strauss, that the editing process had miraculously succeeded in “turning the cooked into the raw”.
Reflects the lifelong exploration of C L-S to into relations between the “sensible” and the
Reflects the lifelong exploration of C L-S to into relations between the “sensible” and the
Show More
“intelligible” – from raw sensory perception, which is an especially rich experience in oral cultures, to abstract intellectual Aristotelianisms. C L-S writes with literary and naturalist allusions, from the encompassed conditions of the "field", lighting up what would otherwise be a dry academic exercise. Show Less
Subjects
Language
Original publication date
1964
Physical description
402 p.; 8.09 inches
ISBN
0226474879 / 9780226474878