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Claude Lévi-Strauss, the 'father of modern anthropology' and author of the classic Tristes tropiques, was one of the most influential intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century. Dislodging Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir from the pinnacle of French intellectual life in the 1950s, he brought about a sea change in Western thought and inspired a generation of thinkers and writers, including Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan with his structuralist theories. Lévi-Strauss's bohemian childhood and later studies of the emerging discipline of anthropology in the field and the university led him to mix with intellectuals, artists and poets from all over Europe. Tracing the evolution of his ideas through interviews with the man himself, research into his archives and conversations with contemporary anthropologists, Wilcken explores and explains Lévi-Strauss's theories, revealing an artiste manqué who infused his academic writing with an artistic and poetic sensibility.
In 1807, the Portuguese prince regent Dom João made an extraordinary decision. Although horrified by the idea of sea travel, Napoleon's troops were closing in on Lisbon so he opted to transplant his entire court and government to Portugal's largest colony, Brazil. 10,000 aristocrats, ministers, priests and servants clambered aboard the rickety fleet. After a rough passage they spilled off their ships bedraggled and lice-ridden to the astonishment of their new-world subjects. Thus began a thirteen-year period of imperial rule from a 'tropical Versailles' set against the city's jungle-clad mountains. But this only partially obscured the brutal workings of what was then the largest slaving port in the Americas. While the court grappled with the dark side of its own empire, Brazil was coming of age. Patrick Wilcken brings this remarkable period to the life, blending vivid contemporary testament with a rich evocation of a time in history when European royalty went native.
In 1945, three young brothers joined and eventually led Brazil's first government-sponsored expedition into its Amazonian rainforests. After more expeditions into unknown terrain, they became South America's most famous explorers, spending the rest of their lives with the resilient tribal communities they found there. People of the Rainforest recounts the Villas Boas brothers' four thrilling and dangerous 'first contacts' with isolated indigenous people, and their lifelong mission to learn about their societies and, above all, help them adapt to modern Brazil without losing their cultural heritage, identity and pride. Author and explorer John Hemming vividly traces the unique adventures of these extraordinary brothers, who used their fame to change attitudes to native peoples and to help protect the world's surviving tropical rainforests, under threat again today.
The first comprehensive biography of 'the father of modern anthropology' 'An intellectual biography that briskly and brilliantly assesses the great, original, creative ideas and their origins in the context of Lévi-Strauss's life from the 1930s to the 1960s in Brazil, New York and Paris' The Times, Biographies of the Year 'Lays out the life with clarity, efficiency, readability and occasionally dissent ... A superbly thrilling life' Guardian Claude Lévi-Strauss, the 'father of modern anthropology' and author of the classic Tristes tropiques, was one of the most influential intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century. Dislodging Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir from the pinnacle ...
When Claude Lévi-Strauss passed away in 2009 at age 100, France celebrated the life and contributions of not only a preeminent anthropologist, but one of the defining intellectuals of the 20th century. Just as Freud had shaken up the antiquarian discipline of psychiatry, so had Lévi-Strauss revolutionized anthropology, transforming it from the colonial-era study of “exotic” tribes to one consumed with fundamental questions about the nature of humanity and civilization itself. Remarkably, there has never been a biography in English of the enigmatic Claude Lévi-Strauss. Drawing on a welter of original research and interviews with the anthropologist, Patrick Wilcken’s Claude Lévi-Stra...
W. H. Hudson was brought up on the pampas, where he learnt from gauchos about frontier life. After moving to London in 1874, Hudson lived in extreme poverty. Like his friend Joseph Conrad, Hudson was an exile, adapting to England. He never returned to Argentina. Wilson unravels Hudson’s English dream, his natural history rambles, and his work to protect birds. He remains both a complex witness to his homeland before mass immigration and to his England of the mind, before the urban sprawl. Praise for Jason Wilson: Tireless, shrewd, erudite Jason Wilson, mixing hard fact and anthology, provides the perfect outfit of allusion and comparative experience - Jonathan Keates, Observer Put his treasure trove into your pocket. - Anthony Sattin, Sunday Times The idea is so simple that it must be original. This inaugural book might prove to be a landmark. - Nicholas Shakespeare, Daily Telegraph
Gathering for the first time all of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s writings on Japanese civilization, The Other Face of the Moon forms a sustained meditation into the French anthropologist’s dictum that to understand one’s own culture, one must regard it from the point of view of another. Exposure to Japanese art was influential in Lévi-Strauss’s early intellectual growth, and between 1977 and 1988 he visited the country five times. The essays, lectures, and interviews of this volume, written between 1979 and 2001, are the product of these journeys. They investigate an astonishing range of subjects—among them Japan’s founding myths, Noh and Kabuki theater, the distinctiveness of the Jap...
The past decade has seen major political upheaval in Latin America--from Brazil to Chile to Venezuela to Bolivia--but to understand what happened, ask first where your quinoa and lithium batteries came from... The 21st century began optimistically in Latin America. Left-leaning leaders armed with programs to reduce poverty and reclaim national wealth were seeing results—but as the aughts gave way to the teens, they began to fall like dominos. Where did the dreams of this "pink tide" go? Look no further than the original culprits of Latin American disenfranchisement: resource-rich land and unscrupulous extraction. Recounting the story commodity by commodity, Andy Robinson reveals what oxen ...
In Against Remembrance, David Rieff provocatively argues that the business of remembrance, particularly of the great tragedies of the past, are policitised events of highly selective memory. Rather than ending injustices, as we expect it to, collective memory in so many cases dooms us to an endless cycle of vengeance. Humanity, he says, simply cannot cope with the true ambivalence of historical events. And if we remember only partially, how can our memories serve us, or our society, as well as we hope?
Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World is the first English translation of a series of lectures Claude Lévi-Strauss delivered in Tokyo in 1986. Written with an eye toward the future as his own distinguished career was drawing to a close, this volume presents a synthesis of the author’s major ideas about structural anthropology, a field he helped establish. Critiquing insights of his earlier writings on the relationship between race, history, and civilization, Lévi-Strauss revisits the social issues that never ceased to fascinate him. He begins with the observation that the cultural supremacy enjoyed by the West for over two centuries is at an end. Global wars and genocid...