Lévi-Strauss
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. One of twentieth-century France’s most celebrated intellectuals, Levi-Strauss attempted to show in his work that thought processes were a feature universal to humans, whether they lived in tribal rainforest societies or in the rich intellectual life of Paris. During the 1930s he studied native Brazilian tribes in the Amazonian jungle, but for most of his long career he preferred the study to the field. He was the leading exponent of structuralism, a school of thought which was influential for decades, and was involved in a famous debate with his friend Jean-Paul Sartre, who resisted many of his ideas. His books about the nature of myth, human thought and kinship are now seen as some of the most important anthropological texts written in the twentieth century.
Guests
- Adam Kuper
3 episodes
Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Boston University - Christina Howells
5 episodes
Professor of French at Oxford University -
Vincent Debaene No other episodes
Associate Professor of French Literature at Columbia University
Reading list
-
Claude Levi-Strauss
Edmund Leach (University of Chicago Press, 1989) Google Books → -
Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture
Claude Levi-Strauss (Schocken Books, 1995) Google Books → -
Structural Anthropology
Claude Levi-Strauss (Basic Books, 1974) Google Books → -
The Savage Mind
Claude Levi-Strauss (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994) Google Books → -
Tristes Tropiques
Claude Levi-Strauss (Penguin Books, 1992) Google Books → -
Conversations with Claude Levi-Strauss
Claude Levi-Strauss and Didier Eribon (University of Chicago Press, 1991) Google Books → -
Claude Levi-Strauss: The Father of Modern Anthropology
Patrick Wilcken (Penguin Books, 2012) Google Books → -
Introducing Levi-Strauss and Structural Anthropology
Boris Wiseman (Icon Books Ltd, 2000) Google Books → -
The Cambridge Companion to Levi-Strauss
Boris Wiseman (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2009) Google Books →
Related episodes
-
Sartre
7 Oct, 2004 840 French and related literatures -
Phenomenology
22 Jan, 2015 190 Modern Western Philosophy -
Bergson and Time
9 May, 2019 110 Metaphysics -
Montaigne
25 Apr, 2013 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism -
David Hume
6 Oct, 2011 100 Philosophy -
Jung
2 Dec, 2004 150 Psychology -
Bertrand Russell
6 Dec, 2012 190 Modern Western Philosophy -
Wittgenstein
4 Dec, 2003 190 Modern Western Philosophy -
Linnaeus
20 Apr, 2023 580 Plants -
The Frankfurt School
14 Jan, 2010 300 Social sciences, sociology and anthropology -
Rousseau on Education
10 Oct, 2019 370 Education -
Walter Benjamin
10 Feb, 2022 190 Modern Western Philosophy -
Pitt-Rivers
28 Feb, 2013 930 History of the Ancient World -
Alfred Russel Wallace
21 Mar, 2013 570 Biology -
The Brain and Consciousness
19 Nov, 1998 150 Psychology -
The Continental-Analytic Split
10 Nov, 2011 100 Philosophy -
Hegel’s Philosophy of History
26 May, 2022 900 History -
Proust
17 Apr, 2003 840 French and related literatures -
Germaine de Stael
16 Nov, 2017 840 French and related literatures -
Edmund Burke
3 Jun, 2010 320 Political science
Programme ID: b01sjjxl
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01sjjxl
Auto-category: 301 (Sociology & anthropology)