Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-p2v8j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-03T21:37:48.023Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Lévi-Strauss: Modern, Ultramodern, Antimodern

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Ugo EM Fabietti
Ugo EM Fabietti*
Affiliation:
University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
*
Ugo E. M. Fabietti, University of Milano-Bicocca, Piazza dell’Ateneo Nuovo, 1, 20126 Milano, Italy. Email: ugo.fabietti@unimib.it
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article develops the idea that Lévi-Strauss’ thought was shaped all at once in the encounter with structural linguistics. Nevertheless, Lévi-Strauss's readers know that his writings show blunt passages from a level of discourse that refers to the project of scientific modernity (accretion of knowledge and pursuit of generality) to one announcing the dissolution of culture into physicochemical phenomena (here defined as ultramodern level), and from these two to a language usually defined as “literary”. The latter corresponds to a language which articulates the themes of loss, memory, yearning for the primitive, the concerns about the demographic and environmental transformations of the planet, and an “exaggerated” contact of cultures: themes which all persist in Lévi-Strauss’ thought since its shaping as a “structuralist” one, which have been highly controversial and that could be defined as “antimodern”. Accordingly, this article tries to produce a reading of Lévi-Strauss’ work as articulated on three levels, which persist in Lévi-Strauss's thought since its early structuralist formation: three “musical staffs” on which his modernity, ultra-modernity and anti-modernity seem all to flow at the same time.

Type
Articles
Information
Diogenes , Volume 60 , Issue 2: Homage to Claude Lévi-Strauss , May 2013 , pp. 24 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Amselle, J-L (2001) Vers un multiculturalisme français: l’empire de la costume. Paris: Flammarion.Google Scholar
Bauman, Z (1997) Postmodernity and its Discontents. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Boas, F (1974) A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American Anthropology, ed. Stocking, GW. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Compagnon, A (2003) Baudelaire devant l’innombrable. Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne.Google Scholar
Compagnon, A (2005) Les antimodernes: de Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes. Paris: Gallimard.Google Scholar
Geertz, C (1973) The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. In Id., The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, pp. 345–359.Google Scholar
Geertz, C (1988) Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Hénaff, M (2004) Claude Lévi-Strauss: une anthropologie ‘bonne à penser’. Esprit 301: 145–168.Google Scholar
Hirschman, A (1991) The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, C (1953) Panorama of Ethnology (1950–1952). Diogenes 1(2): 69–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, C (1955a) Diogène couché. Les Temps Modernes 110: 1187–1220.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, C (1955b) The Structural Study of Myth. Journal of American Folklore 68(270): 428–444. Later republished in Lévi-Strauss (1963: 206–231).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, C (1963) Structural Anthropology, transl. Jacobson, C, Grundfest Schoepf, B. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, C (1966) The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, C (1969) The Elementary Structures of Kinship, transl. Bell, JH, von Sturmer, JR, Needham, R (ed.). Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, C (1979) Claude Lévi-Strauss Reconsiders: From Rousseau to Burke, interview with Jéan-Marie Benoist. Encounter July 1979: 19–26.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, C (1983a) The Scope of Anthropology. In Id., Structural Anthropology, vol. 2, transl. Layton, M. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 3–32.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, C (1983b) Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Founder of the Sciences of Man. In Id., Structural Anthropology, vol. 2, transl. Layton, M. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 33–43.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, C (1983c) Race and History. In Id., Structural Anthropology, vol. 2, transl. Layton, M. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 323–361.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, C (1987) Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, transl. Baker, F. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, C (1990) The Naked Man, transl. Weightman, J and D. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, C (1992a) Tristes Tropiques, transl. Weightman, J and D. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, C (1992b) Reflections on Liberty. In Id., The View from Afar, transl. Neugroschel, J, Hoss, Ph. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 279–288.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, C, Éribon, D (1991) Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, transl. Wissing, P. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Moravia, S (1969) La ragione nascosta: scienza e filosofia nel pensiero di Claude Lévi-Strauss. Florence: Sansoni.Google Scholar
Moravia, S (2004) Ragione strutturale e universi di senso: saggio sul pensiero di Claude Lévi-Strauss. Florence: Le Lettere (reed. of Moravia 1969).Google Scholar
Sontag, S (1966) The Anthropologist as Hero. In Ead., Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, pp. 69–81.Google Scholar
Todorov, T (1993) On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, transl. Porter, C. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Taguieff, P-A (2001) The Force of Prejudice: On Racism and its Doubles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Taguieff, P-A (ed) (1991) Face au racisme, vol. 2. Paris: La Découverte.Google Scholar