The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology: I

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 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 show more 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

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 into the relations between the “sensible” and the “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.