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

1. The Field of Research
2. Mythologics
3. Inquiries into Mythology and Ritual
4. Current Controversies and Social Organization and Kinship
5. Clan, Lineage, House

Appendix: 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.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, who retired recently from his chair at the Collège de France, is a member of the Académie FranÇaise. Among his most important books are The Elementary Structures of Kinship, The Savage Mind and The Raw and the Cooked. Roy Willis teaches anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.