Levi-Strauss, Anthropology, and Aesthetics

A wide-ranging 2007 study of Claude Lévi-Strauss's aesthetic thought.

Boris Wiseman (Author)

9780521123013, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 12 November 2009

264 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.39 kg

'Wiseman brings aesthetics back into anthropology as a philosophical dimension that returns to the romantic project of reconciling the intellect and the senses. This allows him to read together texts that Lévi-Strauss dedicated to art with proper production of anthropological science.' Frédéric Keck, Journal of the Royal Astronomical Institute

In a wide-ranging 2007 study of Claude Lévi-Strauss's aesthetic thought, Boris Wiseman demonstrates not only its centrality within his oeuvre but also the importance of Levi-Strauss for contemporary aesthetic enquiry. Reconstructing the internal logic of Lévi-Strauss's thinking on aesthetics, and showing how anthropological and aesthetic ideas intertwine at the most elemental levels in the elaboration of his system of thought, Wiseman demonstrates that Lévi-Strauss's aesthetic theory forms an integral part of his approach to Amerindian masks, body decoration and mythology. He reveals the significance of Lévi-Strauss's anthropological analysis of an 'untamed' mode of thinking (pensée sauvage) at work in totemism, classification and myth-making for his conception of art and aesthetic experience. In this way, structural anthropology is shown to lead to ethnoaesthetics. Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics adopts a broad-ranging approach that combines the different perspectives of anthropology, philosophy, aesthetic theory and literary criticism into an unusual and imaginative whole.

Introduction: Ethnoaesthetics
1. The reconciliation
2. Art and the logic of sensible qualities
3. The work of art as a system of signs
4. Structuralism, symbolist poetics and abstract art
5. The anthropologist as art critic
6. Nature, culture, chance
7. From myth to music
8. Lévi-Strauss' mytho-poem
Conclusion: between concept and metaphor.

Subject Areas: Anthropology [JHM], History of ideas [JFCX], Philosophy: aesthetics [HPN]