Claude Levi-Strauss: A Critical Study of His Thought

Description

Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss was among the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. In this rigorous study, Maurice Godelier traces the evolution of his thought. Focusing primarily on Levi-Strauss's analysis of kinship and myth, Godelier provides an assessment of his intellectual achievements and legacy. Meticulously researched, Levi-Strauss is written in a clear and accessible style. The culmination of decades of engagement with Levi-Strauss's work, this book will prove indispensible to students of his thought and structural anthropology more generally.

Maurice Godelier is Professor of Anthropology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. One of the world's most influential anthropologists, Godelier has written numerous works including Rationality and Irrationality in Economics, The Mental and the Material, The Making of Great Men and The Metamorphoses of Kinship.

Praise for The Metamorphoses of Kinship This is a blockbuster of a book. Nothing like it has been written since Levi-Strauss's Structures elementaires de la parente (1949) or Meyer Fortes's Kinship and the Social Order (1969). Yet in the sweep of its evidence and argument, Godelier's summa is more ambitious and far-reaching than either of these. It is at once a major intervention in the discipline of anthropology, and a work of the widest human interest. Kinship has the reputation of being the most technical department of anthropology, the least accessible to a general public. But while Metamorphoses synthesizes a huge range of complex materials, it is written in an unfailingly lucid style that makes no assumptions of professional familiarity with terms and debates about kinship, but always takes care to explain them in language anyone can understand. The book is both a monument of scholarship and agripping set of reflections on universal experience. It is certain to be read and discussed for years to come. -- Jack Goody * New Left Review * Praise for The Metamorphoses of Kinship Godelier has reasserted the value of our rich tradition of discussions of kinship matters. He has also shown how the category has metamorphosed as it has drawn in new issues of pressing current importance in modern life and made his case that, far from being genuinely in decline, the study of kinship is central to our understanding of what it means to be human. -- Robert H. Barnes * Comparative Studies in Society and History * Praise for The Metamorphoses of Kinship It is this constellation of world views and ways of being that we meet in Maurice Godelier's powerful and often provocative new book, The Metamorphoses of Kinship. In this timely and challenging study, Godelier heralds the revival of kinship studies within the discipline of anthropology. In striking and elucidating prose, Godelier writes both for the trained anthropologist and for the general public. This is a book that aims to introduce the merits of anthropology to a broader readership. With singular conviction and remarkable depth, Godelier traces anthropology's long courtship with kinship studies.a hopeful and compelling read. -- Fiona Murphy * Irish Times * Praise for The Metamorphoses of Kinship A truly monumental work * Times Higher Education Supplement * Praise forThe Mental and the Material Engaging and intriguing - Anthropology, it would seem, may yet return from the graveyard of structuralism to stir up some debate in the social sciences. * New Statesman * Praise for The Enigma of the Gift This book restores one's faith in the anthropological project and will, I hope, mark the beginning of a new era of anthropological argumentation. one marvels at the clarity of Godelier's thought. He does not mask his central propositions in obscurantist post-modern prose. His use of abstruse concepts such as the 'real', the 'imaginary', and the 'symbolic' is not obtuse. He knows what he wants to say and his persuasive rhetoric is captivating... his use of the criticalmethod sets new standards for scholarly disputation. Godelier does not dismiss. He carefully criticises, modifies and transcends. The argument is forceful but always intellectually generous. But what really sets him apart is that the 'native point of view' is just as much the raw material for critique as is the point of view of fellow academics. As such, there is enough in this book to upset just about everybody. This provocative book is of interest not only to anthropologists and Pacific specialists, but also to historians, political scientists, religious studies specialists. Indeed, it should be read and debated by all scholars concerned with developing a critical stance on the human condition. -- Chris Gregory * Journal of Pacific History * Today, in his authoritative and unrivalled study, Maurice Godelier returns to Levi-Strauss, the theoretician. Laying out his production in chronological order and examining it, Levi-Strauss' former assistant at the College de France, and acclaimed anthropologist in his own right, Maurice Godelier has less appreciation for his style than his contemporaries: "The formulas are superb, but they are literally meaningless." At least the reader is forewarned. We are not here to chat. The book is divided in two parts: "Kinship" and "The myths". It is the first time the entire corpus of Levi-Strauss' work has been presented in chronological order, by topic, and compared with recent research. Step by step, Godelier retraces sixty years of scholarship: we watch his thinking emerge and change, a laborer not content with a disorderly series of phenomena but who seeks the underlying rule, anonymous and silent - the rule of exchange, of marriage, of mind processes. In passing, Godelier clarifies the famous but misunderstood universality of the incest taboo and gives us access to little-known studies such as those concerning the notion of "house". But more than producing an inventory, Godelier takes stock. Against a background of unfailing admiration, Godelier points out Levi-Strauss' deliberate omissions, his denial of the role of descent in the analysis of kinship systems, the absence of the political and religious domains in his understanding of the myths. But instead of eroding the monument, the criticism picks out its bone structure, reveals its formidable coherence and provides a better understanding of its singularity, of what makes this body of work seem such a stubborn undertaking, sometimes so sure of itself: the desire to make anthropology into a hard science that carries its reasoning through to its logical conclusions. -- Philippe Chevallier * L'Express * One would dream of seeing a study devoted to Godelier's production the likes of the one he himself has just published on Levi-Strauss, whose assistant he was at the College de France after having first worked under Fernand Braudel. Godelier's Levi-Strauss is like a Bourdieu that might have been written by Michel Foucault, a Jankelevitch by Emmanuel Levinas or a Dumezil by Jean-Pierre Vernant: two minds viewing each other in a "mirror", the one illuminating the other. Godelier devotes himself to the most modest, attentive and insightful of critical readings (and clearly the best equipped from a scholarly standpoint). He runs Levi-Strauss work through a veritable IRM, terming it "immense, multiple, uncommonly creative",a work that has "fecundated" the entire field of the human and social sciences. He shows its unity, its delicate architecture, the possible rebounds and developments - and also the dead-ends, the "omissions" and sometimes the errors. Maurice Godelier's book is not a homage to Levi-Strauss; it is a homage to the scholarship, to the knowledge for which Levi-Strauss laid the cornerstone. -- Robert Maggiori * Liberation *