Promotional Information

Levi-Strauss measures the short distance between "complex" and "primitive" societies and finds a shared madness in the ways we enact myth, ritual, and custom. Yet he also locates a pure and persistent ethics that connects the center of Western civilization to far-flung societies and forces a reckoning with outmoded ideas of morality and reason.

Table of Contents

Foreword, by Maurice Olender Part 1: Santa Claus Burned as a Heretic, 1952 Part 2: We Are All Cannibals, 1989-2000 1. "Topsy-Turvydom" 2. Is There Only One Type of Development? 3. Social Problems: Ritual Female Excision and Medically Assisted Reproduction 4. Presentation of a Book by Its Author 5. The Ethnologist's Jewels 6. Portraits of Artists 7. Montaigne and America 8. Mythic Thought and Scientific Thought 9. We Are All Cannibals 10. Auguste Comte and Italy 11. Variations on the Theme of a Painting by Poussin 12. Female Sexuality and the Origin of Society 13. A Lesson in Wisdom from Mad Cows 14. The Return of the Maternal Uncle 15. Proof by New Myth 16. Corsi e ricorsi: In Vico's Wake Notes Index About the Author

About the Author

Claude Levi-Strauss was born in Brussels in 1908. He held the chair of social anthropology at the College de France from 1959 to 1982 and was elected a member of the Academie Francaise in 1973. He died in Paris on October 30, 2009. Maurice Olender is maitre de conferences at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Jane Marie Todd has translated more than seventy books, including Catherine Clement and Julia Kristeva's The Feminine and the Sacred.

Reviews

Claude Levi-Strauss invites us to think through the persistence of primitive thought in the rapid growth of rituals and forms of worship. By giving accounts of structure and history, he celebrates the architecture of mind, empowering facts not only for the pleasure of thinking but also for the diagnosis of unseen social transformations. The globalized celebration of Santa Claus-that commercialization of the sacred-has its origins in the Latin Saturnalia and Native American kachinas; the political philosophy of the French Revolution owes its foundations to the cannibals of New Guinea; and the mythic thinking of societies without writing rivals the most audacious fables of modern astrophysics. Levi-Strauss was the austere author of The Elementary Structures of Kinship, but did he also become, with age, a novelist of ideas, like those French philosophes of the Enlightenment? I am not sure he would have appreciated this suggestion, but I can give him no higher praise: We Are All Cannibals reads like a novel. -- Julia Kristeva Essential. CHOICE