Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss /

Claude Levi-Strauss has been one of the major minds at the core of 20th-century intellectualism. He identifies himself as an anthropologist; his greatest works have been innovative analyses in a framework he has called "structural anthropology" (cf. his two-volume work of that title, 1963-76; v. 2, CH, Jun'76). His most extensive contribution has come from taking concepts from the moving front of linguistics and reworking them to aid in the study of myth from non-Western societies, Amazonian Indians, North American Native Americans, even Japanese No, presented in books like The Raw and the Cooked (CH, Mar'70), From Honey to Ashes (CH, Oct'73), The Origin of Table Manners (1978), and The Naked Man (1981). Conversations is both an autobiography and a guide to the concepts and writings of this man of letters in the French language, this author on racism (Race and History, 1952), a person at home with graphic representation and music, a personification of the best of Bohemian intelligentsia. Conversations should be in the library of every institution of higher thought, every avant-garde high school, every college, university, and seminary, and every great public resource center. -A. R. Pilling, Wayne State University

In these kinetic, irreverent, engaging, unpredictable interviews with French journalist Eribon, eminent cultural anthropologist Levi-Strauss speaks with a rare degree of candor about his life and work. He confesses that his ethnological vocation is partly a flight from a century in which he does not feel at home. Mellowing at age 80, the structuralist recalls his childhood participation in rites conducted by his grandfather, a rabbi, and then confesses, ``I get along better with believers than with out-and-out rationalists.'' Levi-Strauss reviews his research on marriage and kinship patterns, argues that the incest prohibition is culturally imposed, and mourns the fate of so-called primitive tribes under callous Third World regimes as he discusses racism, politics, musical creativity, literature and painting. An intellectual event, this memoir-in-conversation records his encounters with a host of figures--Sartre (``a being unto himself''), De Beauvoir, Foucault, Max Ernst, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

The 1988 conversations between Levi-Strauss and Eribon (now translated into English) reveal the personal and historical currents that marked the life and work of one of the 20th century's most influential French intellectuals. Levi-Strauss's early attractions to the surrealists (Max Ernst and Andre Breton), encounters with existentialists (and his polemics with Jean-Paul Sartre), his friendship with Roman Jakobson, the influences of Anglo-American fieldwork methods, his travel to Brazil, and his years in New York are all recounted in candid, sometimes acerbic remarks. These conversations complement Levi-Strauss's voluminous contributions and shed light on his evaluation of his own work and the uses of his methods by others. They also cover his regrets, his perceived failures, and his caustic opinions on contemporary events and personalities. Recommended for larger public and academic library collections.-- Winnie Lambrecht, Brown Univ., Provi dence, R.I. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.