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Lévi-Strauss
A Biography
Emmanuelle Loyer (Author), Ninon Vinsonneau (Translated by), Jonathan Magidoff (Translated by)
9781509511983, Polity Press
Hardback, published 5 October 2018
740 pages
23.1 x 16 x 6.4 cm, 1.383 kg
"Emmanuelle Loyer has produced a meticulously researched, intelligent and sensitive biography worthy of her subject, one of the greatest Francophone intellectuals of the twentieth century. Critical yet generous, her portrait of Claude Lévi-Strauss rings true and comes alive on the page." "The inspiration that continues to spring forth from the work of Lévi-Strauss is a mystery to many anthropologists. He has told us of the many influences on his work, and commentators have argued for yet others, but they don't really account for his extraordinary originality and independence. Emmanuelle Loyer's thorough account of his life and work may help us resolve this wonderful puzzle." "This is the first true biography of one of the greatest French intellectuals of the twentieth century, who lived to be 100 years old and who finished his life covered in glory and honours. Emmanuelle Loyer's book is a marvel of intelligence that holds the reader's attention from beginning to end." "Loyer's biography offers an unprecedentedly rich sense of the man." "Loyer offers a vivid portrait of the anthropologist and his time. But she also invites us to imagine how Lévi-Strauss might endure as a thinker for our century, as much for his own." "deeply researched . . . engaging and engaged"
—Michael Harkin, University of Wyoming
—Maurice Bloch, London School of Economics
—Élisabeth Roudinesco, Le Monde
—Financial Times
—Boston Review
—The New York Review of Books
"Emanuelle Loyer’s 744 page biography has achieved the seemingly impossible. This detailed, deeply researched, and relatively accessible volume makes it difficult to imagine that anyone will attempt a more exhaustive biography in the future. If they did, I am not sure what they could add to Loyer’s account. While many aspects of Lévi-Strauss’s life still await specialized treatment, I am confident that this book will become the definitive one-volume biography of Lévi-Strauss for the foreseeable future."
—History of Anthropology
Academic, writer, figure of melancholy, aesthete – Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) not only transformed his academic discipline, he also profoundly changed the way that we view ourselves and the world around us.
In this award-winning biography, historian Emmanuelle Loyer recounts Lévi-Strauss’s childhood in an assimilated Jewish household, his promising student years as well as his first forays into political and intellectual movements. As a young professor, Lévi-Strauss left Paris in 1935 for São Paulo to teach sociology. His rugged expeditions into the Brazilian hinterland, where he discovered the Amerindian Other, made him into an anthropologist. The racial laws of the Vichy regime would force him to leave France yet again, this time for the USA in 1941, where he became Professor Claude L. Strauss – to avoid confusion with the jeans manufacturer.
Lévi-Strauss’s return to France, after the war, ushered in the period during which he produced his greatest works: several decades of intense labour in which he reinvented anthropology, establishing it as a discipline that offered a new view on the world. In 1955, Tristes Tropiques offered indisputable proof of this the world over. During those years, Lévi-Strauss became something of a French national monument, as well as a celebrity intellectual of global renown. But he always claimed his perspective was a ‘view from afar’, enabling him to deliver incisive and subversive diagnoses of our waning modernity.
Loyer’s outstanding biography tells the story of a true intellectual adventurer whose unforgettable voice invites us to rethink questions of the human and the meaning of progress. She portrays Lévi-Strauss less as a modern than as our own great and disquieted contemporary.
Acknowledgements Foreword Adam Kuper Introduction. The Worlds of Claude Lévi-Strauss Part I Yesterday's Worlds (É-1935) Chapter 1 The Name of the Father Chapter 2 Revelations (1908-1924) Chapter 3 Revolutions (1924-1931): Politics vs. Philosophy Chapter 4 Redemption: Anthropology (1931-1935) Chapter 5 The Enigma of the World Part II New Worlds (1935-1947) Chapter 6 France in São Paulo Chapter 7 In the Heart of Brazil Chapter 8 Massimo Lévi with the Nambikwara Chapter 9 Crisis (1939-1941) Chapter 10 A Frenchman in New York City: Exile and Intellectual Invention (1941-1944) Chapter 11 Structuralism Ð the American Years Part III The Old World (1947-1971) Chapter 12 The Ghosts of Marcel Mauss Chapter 13 Manhood Chapter 14 The Confessions of Claude Lévi-Strauss Chapter 15 Structuralist Crystallization (1958-1962) Chapter 16 The Manufacture of Science Chapter 17 The Scholarly Life Chapter 18 The Politics of Discretion Part IV The World (1971-2009) Chapter 19 Immortal Chapter 20 Metamorphoses Chapter 21 Claude Lévi-Strauss, our Contemporary Notes Works by Lévi-Strauss Archives consulted Abbreviations of Works by Lévi-Strauss Illustration credits Index
Subject Areas: Archaeology [HD]
