http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8340936.stm I remember reading Structural Anthropology as a freshman in college and thinking, "Is this what anthropology is? I don't think I could ever do this". A couple years later I started my PhD in anthropology. I saw Lévi-Strauss do an interview about 5 years ago on French TV. At like 95 years old, dude was sharper than I'll ever be.
Crap. If I'd known he was still alive, I would've taken him for my anthropology ghoul pool. Instead I took Michael Taussig. Okay, seriously: man did that guy have it going on: basically he reshaped an entire discipline, and he lived to be 100 with all of his faculties pretty much to the end. That's a life.
fyp (ok maybe I exaggerate but the cat was extremely influential in so many fields) I'm surprised that he was still alive. I had no idea!
Damn, one of the very last great thinker of the XXth century has just passed away. I remember reading Tristes tropiques - he was not only a great anthropologist but also a great writer.
One of those thinkers that you had to work with whether you wanted to or not. And every time I read his stuff I was convinced I'd completely misunderstood him the last time I read it. Mick Taussig is the possessor of the ugliest set of toenails I've ever seen protruding from a pair of sandals. Yeesh.
I was about to point out that his influence in the humanities was relatively short lived, but... well, after I thought about it a bit, I'm pretty sure that Derrida's critique of Levi-Strauss in Grammatology really just extended his influence, rather than put a stop to it (I heard a guy on NPR point out that Levi Strauss' study of culture as a symbolic system in which everything takes its meaning from its relationship to the rest of the system is pretty much how we study language and literature these days). So your FYP isn't that exaggerated. Bungadiri could definitely say a lot more about this than I could. Or the OP for that matter.
just stumbled on this (slow day for me)... i really should come around here more often! when this man died i wanted to do a thread like this in France NSR but words failed me. utterly. a couple of hours at the keyboard and came up with nothing to do justice to him, or to the effect his passing had on me. but i did this for his 100th birthday; by adding it i can bump this thread which deserves it. https://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?t=861412 seems to be on the fritz... googlecache to the rescue: Claude Levi-Strauss: a great man turns 100 guignol is 200 this year, but today is the 100th birthday of someone who is anything but a guignol: claude levi-strauss. funny thing, a 100th birthday: what attracts everyone's attention is that he’s still alive, but the articles all read like obituaries... not that he would be bothered by that; to paraphrase his epigram about man and the world, ethnology began without levi-strauss, and it will end without him. in case you don’t know, this levi-strauss had nothing to do with blue jeans: through his “serious” work (structures élémentaires de la parenté, anthropologie structurale, la pensée sauvage…) he was one of the most important intellectual figures of our time, as influential as freud, heidegger or sartre. His one book for the general public, tristes tropiques, is as elementary a part of the literature of the century as proust, celine or joyce. By century I mean the 20th. long gone of course, but his last work, histoire de lynx, was published in the 1990’s. when he felt he had had his say, he stopped talking. in his only public appearance of this century he simply reiterated things said earlier but no idle radotage, his remarks are more cogent today than ever: "What I note is is the damage we are doing; the horrifying disappearance of living species, whether vegetable or animal; and the fact that due to its present density, the human species is submitting itself to a kind of internal poisoning, like certain species of meal worms who die in the sack from their own toxins long before space and food runs out. I think of the present, and of the world in which I am coming to the end of my existence. It is not a world I love." giving the impression of a sour misanthropic curmudgeon which couldn’t be more mistaken. because like proust (or even céline in my mind), his scathing critique of man and his world springs from a deep love of same. his most ominous and pessimistic statements were uttered with the gleam of humor, and of hope, in his eye. another quote, one of my favorites: "the white man proclaimed the indians to be animals, the indians suspected the white men might be gods. ignorance for ignorance, the second reasoning is certainly more worthy of human beings."
true... but actually backwards: lévi-strauss realized the impact certain methods already used in linguistics could have on the social sciences in general. and he wasn't alone in that realization, but he was the first and best at applying those ideas.