View from Afar

by Claude Lévi-Strauss

Book Overview

This collection touches on a wide range of anthropological issues, including family and marriage, myths, and rites, the environment and its representation, and constraint and freedom. The essays encompass more than forty years of analysis and constrain arguments that are as relevant today as they were thirty years ago. "Hardly a field remains untouched-sociobiology, linguistics, botany, genetics, psychiatry, esthetics, ecology, politics, neuroscience,...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0465090257
• ISBN13: 9780465090259
• Release Date: April 1985
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 311 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The dynamics of competing mythologies explained

I am a neophyte interpreter of Claude Levi-Strauss. When I took Anthropology (Introduction to Primitive Cultures) at the University of Michigan for the spring half-semester in 1967, my grade was a B. The dictionary's definition of neophyte is primarily religious, dating back to the primitive church, from Greek and Late Latin terms that modified what was newly planted in Greek. People who read THE VIEW FROM AFAR ought to expect their interest in words, myth, and the aura of insanity to be increased, particularly by Part III: The Environment and Its Representation: Chapter 7 Structuralism and Ecology Chapter 8 Structuralism and Empiricism Chapter 9 The Lessons of Linguistics Chapter 10 Religion, Language, and History: Concerning an Unpublished Text by Ferdinand de Saussure Chapter 11 From Mythical Possibility to Social Existence Part IV Beliefs, Myths, and Rites starts with Chapter 12 Cosmopolitanism and Schizophrenia. I am not totally unfamiliar with some concepts in this book, due to the feeling that I have had for a long time that when you go someplace new, the first person that you talk to is likely to be the village idiot. Intellectuals may attempt to avoid this problem by going first to works of people who have pristine reputations, pre-Platonic philosophers or leaders in their fields. Claude Levi-Strauss might be the pre-eminent name in French anthropology, but I am surprised how many links with American natives and educated society are revealed in THE VIEW FROM AFAR. Chapter 9 is a preface for the French translation of SIX LECTURES ON SOUND AND MEANING by Roman Jakobson, who died in 1982 at the age of 86. The lectures "were the first ones that I heard him give" (p. 138). Jakobson and Levi-Strauss attended each other's courses in New York during the 1942-43 year, when Levi-Strauss was teaching at Barnard. Chapter 21, New York in 1941, also contains a description of "Between 1946 and 1947, when I was cultural adviser to the French embassy, I would be visited by intermediaries carrying attaché cases full of pre-Columbian gold jewelry." (pp. 261-262). "I felt myself going back in time no less when I went to work every morning in the American room of the New York Public Library. There, under its neo-classical arcades and between walls paneled with old oak, I sat near an Indian in a feather headdress and a beaded buckskin jacket--who was taking notes with a Parker pen." (pp. 266-267). THE VIEW FROM AFAR was originally published in French in 1983, and the English edition from Basic Books, Inc. in 1985. It might be considered a continuation of the volumes of STRUCTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY which appeared in France in 1958 and 1973, but Levi-Strauss would prefer that he be considered older now. "Imitating a stretto, I devoted the little time available to touching rapidly on the major themes that have been the focus of my research--kinship, social organization, mythology, ritual, art--at the slower pace than was now permissible."