The Scope of Anthropology

by Claude Lévi-Strauss

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One of the key texts of structuralism: "The importance of Claude Levi-Strauss's work extends well beyond the boundaries of his own discipline: social anthropology. On January 5th, 1960, he delivered his inaugural lecture as a Professor at the College de France. In this address, a pivotal statement made at the zenith of his career, Levi-Strauss looks back to his work on kinship, forward to his research on myths, and defines anthropology both as a philosophy and as a method. No one-student, teacher, or general reader-can afford to ignore this blueprint for a revolution in the social sciences."

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Claude Levi-Strauss, a French anthropologist, was the founder of structural anthropology. This theoretical position assumes that there are structural propensities in the human mind that lead unconsciously toward categorization of physical and social objects, hence such book titles as The Raw and the Cooked (1964) and such expositions of his work show more by others as The Unconscious in Culture and Elementary Structures Reconsidered. According to Levi-Strauss, the models of society that scholars create are often dual in nature:status-contract (Maine): Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft (Tonnies); mechanical-organic solidarity (Durkheim); folk-urban (Redfield); universalism-particularism (Parsons); and local-cosmopolitan (Merton). Levi-Strauss's writings---some of which have been described by Clifford Geertz as "theoretical treatises set out as travelogues"---have been enormously influential throughout the scholarly world. George Steiner has described him, along with Freud (see also Vol. 5) and Marx (see also Vol. 4), as one of the major architects of the thought of our times. Levi-Strauss died October 30, 2009. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

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Genres
Anthropology, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Science & Nature
DDC/MDS
390Society, government, & cultureCustoms, etiquette & folkloreCustoms, etiquette, folklore
LCC
GN325 .L4513Geography, Anthropology and RecreationAnthropologyAnthropologyEthnology. Social and cultural anthropology
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