Anthropology and Myth

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Anthropology and Myth

Lectures 1951 – 1982

Translated by Roy Willis

The published work of Claude Lévi-Strauss over the last three and a half decades has established him as one of the word’s most innovative anthropologists. Yet throughout this period he was maintaining a full teaching commitment in Paris.

The pieces in Anthropology and Myth illustrate (in his own word) ‘the effort, the tentative advances and retreats and now and again the achievements of a thought process during some thirty-two years that amount to a large proportion of an individual life and the span of a generation’. Lévi-Strauss used the lecture theatre as a workshop in which to try out and develop new ideas, and many of the familiar themes of his book will be found here: analysis of myth and ritual, totemism, kinship, marriage social stucture. Offering a unique glimpse of the genesis of such subjects throughout his teaching career, this book provides a sketchbook of the themes painted elsewhere in larger, more finished form, and thus forms a document of vital importance for the history of anthropological thought.

Contents

Translator’s Note

Preface

The Field of ResearchMythologicsInquiries into Mythology and RitualCurrent Controversies and Social Organization and KinshipClan, Lineage, HouseAppendix: Nine Course Reports

Chronological Table

Index

Jacket illustrations: (Front) The Jungle, 1943, by Wifredo Lam, gouache on paper mounted on canvas. 7’10 1/4” x 7’6 1/2” (239.4 x 229.9 cm). Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Inter-American Fund. © DACS 1986 – Photograph © 1986, The Museum of Modern Art, New York is reproduced by kind permission. (Back) Photograph reproduced by kind permission of the Collège de France and Librairie Plon.