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李維史陀：實驗室裡的詩人
他畢生致力於擺脫西方文化的侷限，
越過科學的界線，進入野性的思維，
探究感官與邏輯事物融合為一完整整體的可能性----
二十一世紀的今天，是時候重新認識李維史陀。
科學思維是分析性和抽象的，喜歡把世界打破為一系列的難題。
而野性的思維則尋求總體的解決辦法。
科學家習慣站在距離之外量度、建立模型。
野性的思維卻直接處理周遭環境的感官經驗，並在神話性--詩性的公式裡排出秩序。
李維史陀一生的執念，即是追求感官事物和邏輯事物的融合。
他獨特的思考方式，與他所奠定的結構主義人類學，深深影響了多位二十世紀的思想大師：包括傅柯、羅蘭巴特、拉岡等人。
李維史陀在1908年出生在一個猶太人家庭。求學時代熱切參與政治，投入學運。1935年應聘於巴西聖保羅大學，啟程遠赴南美，接觸到歐洲以外的世界，包括1930年代正在發掘自身文化根源的巴西知識與藝術圈。他踏入田野，接觸南美洲印地安部落，這些經歷後來寫入了《憂鬱的熱帶》。
二次大戰爆發後，李維史陀流寓紐約，與流亡知識圈包括語言學家雅各布森、超現實主義者布勒東等人密切往來，戰後甚至還曾短暫擔任法國外交部文化參贊。豐富的半生經歷塑造出這位二十世紀學術大師。然而當李維史陀獨樹一幟的理論架構成形，整個戰後法國的知識圈都深受其影響。
李維史陀的人生在二十世紀的動盪中展開，他既在亞馬遜土著社會中看到文明，也西方文明中看到野蠻。這使得他終身都在追問；
人類是甚麼？人性是甚麼？
從荒野到文明，在人類多元的表面下，是否存在普世共同的深層結構？
人類的感受與邏輯必然是分開的嗎？能合而為一嗎？
如何在渾沌中看出秩序？
人類的前景是甚麼？
李維史陀曾是二十世紀最重要的思想家之一，開創了「結構主義」的人類學研究，在他過世後十年的今天，他的名字似乎漸漸被淡忘。但是，倘若我們回頭看李維史陀當年提出的問題，這些問題在二十一世紀的今天更顯意義。
對於這些問題，李維史陀並非書房裡的人類學家。他曾經親歷幾乎摧毀文明的戰爭，且深入走進荒野與非歐洲文明的旅程，讓他跳脫歐洲本位的思考，他自己就曾說：「把我造就為一個結構主義者的，與其說是畢卡索、布拉克、萊熱和康丁斯基的作品，不如說是石頭、花朵、蝴蝶或飛鳥帶給我的啟發。」對李維史陀來說，人類學紀錄原住民文化並不是目的自身，而是為了要從人類的思想、文化產品、社會關係、甚至物理世界中探詢出「結構的回聲」。
本書不只是一本精采的傳記，更是二十世紀一場動人的思想壯遊。作者威肯曾兩度親訪李維史陀，並和他規律通信。在這本書中，我們會跟隨李維史陀一生的壯遊，隨他的視線遊蕩文明與荒野，看到他在學術中注入藝術的感性，凝視人類民族繽紛多樣的表象，並傾聽底層結構性的回聲。
如今，世界到處浮現衝突，文明再一次面臨了考驗。或許是時候我們該重新認識李維史陀，繼承他留下的精神遺產。在當下二十一世紀的時空脈絡中，重新閱讀李維史陀的價值：這位思想巨人曾經在上個世紀文明衝突中，探詢何為人類、人性中普世的共性﹔如今我們又能如何繼承他的遺產，提出答案？
越過科學的界線，進入野性的思維，
探究感官與邏輯事物融合為一完整整體的可能性----
二十一世紀的今天，是時候重新認識李維史陀。
科學思維是分析性和抽象的，喜歡把世界打破為一系列的難題。
而野性的思維則尋求總體的解決辦法。
科學家習慣站在距離之外量度、建立模型。
野性的思維卻直接處理周遭環境的感官經驗，並在神話性--詩性的公式裡排出秩序。
李維史陀一生的執念，即是追求感官事物和邏輯事物的融合。
他獨特的思考方式，與他所奠定的結構主義人類學，深深影響了多位二十世紀的思想大師：包括傅柯、羅蘭巴特、拉岡等人。
李維史陀在1908年出生在一個猶太人家庭。求學時代熱切參與政治，投入學運。1935年應聘於巴西聖保羅大學，啟程遠赴南美，接觸到歐洲以外的世界，包括1930年代正在發掘自身文化根源的巴西知識與藝術圈。他踏入田野，接觸南美洲印地安部落，這些經歷後來寫入了《憂鬱的熱帶》。
二次大戰爆發後，李維史陀流寓紐約，與流亡知識圈包括語言學家雅各布森、超現實主義者布勒東等人密切往來，戰後甚至還曾短暫擔任法國外交部文化參贊。豐富的半生經歷塑造出這位二十世紀學術大師。然而當李維史陀獨樹一幟的理論架構成形，整個戰後法國的知識圈都深受其影響。
李維史陀的人生在二十世紀的動盪中展開，他既在亞馬遜土著社會中看到文明，也西方文明中看到野蠻。這使得他終身都在追問；
人類是甚麼？人性是甚麼？
從荒野到文明，在人類多元的表面下，是否存在普世共同的深層結構？
人類的感受與邏輯必然是分開的嗎？能合而為一嗎？
如何在渾沌中看出秩序？
人類的前景是甚麼？
李維史陀曾是二十世紀最重要的思想家之一，開創了「結構主義」的人類學研究，在他過世後十年的今天，他的名字似乎漸漸被淡忘。但是，倘若我們回頭看李維史陀當年提出的問題，這些問題在二十一世紀的今天更顯意義。
對於這些問題，李維史陀並非書房裡的人類學家。他曾經親歷幾乎摧毀文明的戰爭，且深入走進荒野與非歐洲文明的旅程，讓他跳脫歐洲本位的思考，他自己就曾說：「把我造就為一個結構主義者的，與其說是畢卡索、布拉克、萊熱和康丁斯基的作品，不如說是石頭、花朵、蝴蝶或飛鳥帶給我的啟發。」對李維史陀來說，人類學紀錄原住民文化並不是目的自身，而是為了要從人類的思想、文化產品、社會關係、甚至物理世界中探詢出「結構的回聲」。
本書不只是一本精采的傳記，更是二十世紀一場動人的思想壯遊。作者威肯曾兩度親訪李維史陀，並和他規律通信。在這本書中，我們會跟隨李維史陀一生的壯遊，隨他的視線遊蕩文明與荒野，看到他在學術中注入藝術的感性，凝視人類民族繽紛多樣的表象，並傾聽底層結構性的回聲。
如今，世界到處浮現衝突，文明再一次面臨了考驗。或許是時候我們該重新認識李維史陀，繼承他留下的精神遺產。在當下二十一世紀的時空脈絡中，重新閱讀李維史陀的價值：這位思想巨人曾經在上個世紀文明衝突中，探詢何為人類、人性中普世的共性﹔如今我們又能如何繼承他的遺產，提出答案？
400 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
July 8, 2012
If there was one reason why I tend to shy away from biographies, it would be because many biographers tend to be either hagiographers or attack dog hacks. Patrick Wilcken’s biography of Claude Levi-Strauss, maybe the most influential anthropologist of the twentieth century, avoids both of these. The result is a beautiful book that takes Levi-Strauss seriously and gives him the due consideration he deserves, but never becomes obsequious toward its subject.
Aside from presenting the arch of Levi-Strauss’s life, he does the same thing for the place of academic anthropology in both the United States and Europe. In fact, as Levi-Strauss was doing his fieldwork in Brazil among the Bororo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib peoples, anthropology departments were just in their infancy. The giants in the field at the time were Malinowski, Mauss, and Boas, all of whose work seems oddly anachronistic now in the light of Levi-Strauss’s and his students’ influence.
Levi-Strauss’s training was in law and philosophy, but during his youth was constantly engaged with art (his father was a portraitist), music, and politics. While he was mostly interested in mythography and kinship studies, he occasionally wrote on art and music, which also maintained his interest. He was an avowed leftist during the interwar years, but he later turned inward and became apolitical. In his old age, he would become disgruntled at the growing multicultural nature of France, especially with Islam.
In 1955, Levi-Strauss’s best-known book “Tristes Tropiques” appeared, a memoir which recounted his time spent among the aboriginal peoples of Brazil, and his only non-academic book. In it, he began to show the first signs of pessimism about the preservation of native peoples and traditions, and how Brazilian “civilization” was destroying them.
Because of Levi-Strauss’s peculiar path – he chose to interrupt his formal work by accepting an invitation to do fieldwork in Brazil – he had difficulty reentering the academic world when he returned to France at the end of the 1940s. The eruption of World War II, during which he fled to New York City, didn’t help him getting back on track, either. While in the U.S., he found work at the New School for Social Research, where he would first gain contact with one of his biggest influences, Russian-born linguist Roman Jacobson. It was only after Levi-Strauss borrowed from Jacobson’s linguistic structuralism that he himself became known as the father of structuralist anthropology. Structuralism is a theoretical paradigm that suggests culture – or language, or myth, or whatever else – can only be fully understand as an interrelationship between its smaller parts. This idea would be absolutely fundamental to Levi-Strauss’s later analysis of mythology and kinship systems. Wilcken seems to have a particular interest in showing how Levi-Strauss’s interest in structuralism as a formal method developed in tandem with his interests in Freud, Jacobson, art and literature.
Levi-Stauss’s work, while sometimes known for its cold formalism, was just as often attacked for its lyricism and overly subjective, aestheticized approach, especially in his mythography. I find this duality appropriate for a thinker who himself was always splitting things into twos and fours, and building n-dimensional matrices to suss out the true complexities hidden in the permutations that he spun out of his mythemes.
Wilcken discusses Levi-Strauss’s most important work in a fair, even-handed way, devoting a whole chapter to “Tristes Tropiques” and quite a bit of time considering his epic, four-volume, two-thousand page “Mythologiques” quartet, the masterpiece of his middle career. With the exception of “Tristes Tropiques,” Levi-Strauss’s work has the reputation of being fantastically difficult, replete with charts and graphs of endogamous and exogenous kinship relations that probably only the fully anthropologically initiated can fully understand. And while Wilcken never really scratches the surface of Levi-Strauss’s ideas – this, while a wonderful biography, is by no means a form presentation of his ideas – the way he talks about his development goads the reader (or at least me) to want to learn more about him. To that end, I’ve dusted off a few related books in my library, including Levi-Strauss’s “Myth and Meaning,” Christopher Johnson’s “Levi-Strauss: The Formative Years,” and even “Tristes Tropiques” itself.
Aside from presenting the arch of Levi-Strauss’s life, he does the same thing for the place of academic anthropology in both the United States and Europe. In fact, as Levi-Strauss was doing his fieldwork in Brazil among the Bororo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib peoples, anthropology departments were just in their infancy. The giants in the field at the time were Malinowski, Mauss, and Boas, all of whose work seems oddly anachronistic now in the light of Levi-Strauss’s and his students’ influence.
Levi-Strauss’s training was in law and philosophy, but during his youth was constantly engaged with art (his father was a portraitist), music, and politics. While he was mostly interested in mythography and kinship studies, he occasionally wrote on art and music, which also maintained his interest. He was an avowed leftist during the interwar years, but he later turned inward and became apolitical. In his old age, he would become disgruntled at the growing multicultural nature of France, especially with Islam.
In 1955, Levi-Strauss’s best-known book “Tristes Tropiques” appeared, a memoir which recounted his time spent among the aboriginal peoples of Brazil, and his only non-academic book. In it, he began to show the first signs of pessimism about the preservation of native peoples and traditions, and how Brazilian “civilization” was destroying them.
Because of Levi-Strauss’s peculiar path – he chose to interrupt his formal work by accepting an invitation to do fieldwork in Brazil – he had difficulty reentering the academic world when he returned to France at the end of the 1940s. The eruption of World War II, during which he fled to New York City, didn’t help him getting back on track, either. While in the U.S., he found work at the New School for Social Research, where he would first gain contact with one of his biggest influences, Russian-born linguist Roman Jacobson. It was only after Levi-Strauss borrowed from Jacobson’s linguistic structuralism that he himself became known as the father of structuralist anthropology. Structuralism is a theoretical paradigm that suggests culture – or language, or myth, or whatever else – can only be fully understand as an interrelationship between its smaller parts. This idea would be absolutely fundamental to Levi-Strauss’s later analysis of mythology and kinship systems. Wilcken seems to have a particular interest in showing how Levi-Strauss’s interest in structuralism as a formal method developed in tandem with his interests in Freud, Jacobson, art and literature.
Levi-Stauss’s work, while sometimes known for its cold formalism, was just as often attacked for its lyricism and overly subjective, aestheticized approach, especially in his mythography. I find this duality appropriate for a thinker who himself was always splitting things into twos and fours, and building n-dimensional matrices to suss out the true complexities hidden in the permutations that he spun out of his mythemes.
Wilcken discusses Levi-Strauss’s most important work in a fair, even-handed way, devoting a whole chapter to “Tristes Tropiques” and quite a bit of time considering his epic, four-volume, two-thousand page “Mythologiques” quartet, the masterpiece of his middle career. With the exception of “Tristes Tropiques,” Levi-Strauss’s work has the reputation of being fantastically difficult, replete with charts and graphs of endogamous and exogenous kinship relations that probably only the fully anthropologically initiated can fully understand. And while Wilcken never really scratches the surface of Levi-Strauss’s ideas – this, while a wonderful biography, is by no means a form presentation of his ideas – the way he talks about his development goads the reader (or at least me) to want to learn more about him. To that end, I’ve dusted off a few related books in my library, including Levi-Strauss’s “Myth and Meaning,” Christopher Johnson’s “Levi-Strauss: The Formative Years,” and even “Tristes Tropiques” itself.
October 30, 2014
Where did structuralism go? And for that matter where did it come from? Anyone who encountered it (as I did in the 70s) and wants to know more can learn a lot from this biography of its chief exponent, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who became a veritable mythic figure as the result of a succession of works ranging from Tristes Tropiques (1955) through his dense, four-volume analysis of Amerindian myths, collectively known as the Mythologiques (1969–81).
I won’t attempt to summarize the book; you can get a decent picture from the New York Times review, from some Goodreads reviews, and no doubt elsewhere. I’ll just mention a couple of notes in passing. First, the dislocations of war sometimes lead to lucky accidents; Lévi-Strauss, who fled the Nazi occupation of France during WWII, landed in New York City, where he met (among a host of others) linguist Roman Jakobson. Jakobson was developing a structuralist approach in his field, and his encounter with Lévi-Strauss was possibly the most important meeting in the latter’s life. Second, to speak merely personally, learning that Lévi-Strauss lived near the corner of 11th Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan gave me one of those shivers one sometimes gets when learning about the past. For much of the 2000s, I lived about a block away and now know yet another illustrious figure who must’ve trod the same sidewalks as I had.
I won’t attempt to summarize the book; you can get a decent picture from the New York Times review, from some Goodreads reviews, and no doubt elsewhere. I’ll just mention a couple of notes in passing. First, the dislocations of war sometimes lead to lucky accidents; Lévi-Strauss, who fled the Nazi occupation of France during WWII, landed in New York City, where he met (among a host of others) linguist Roman Jakobson. Jakobson was developing a structuralist approach in his field, and his encounter with Lévi-Strauss was possibly the most important meeting in the latter’s life. Second, to speak merely personally, learning that Lévi-Strauss lived near the corner of 11th Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan gave me one of those shivers one sometimes gets when learning about the past. For much of the 2000s, I lived about a block away and now know yet another illustrious figure who must’ve trod the same sidewalks as I had.
April 14, 2019
Makes me want to read more L-S, and critics of L-S. So that’s high praise!
Subtitle: aside from the excellent descriptions in Tristes Tropiques and occasional references to L-S’s dry wit, the man doesn’t seem to have been much of a poet. And he hardly spent any time in labs, almost all of it in Libraries.
The book is very definitely an intellectual not an intimate bio, but it left me curious about the women in his life. We hear lots about his dad but next to nothing about his mother, who surely was the greater influence. And I’m dying to learn more about his first wife, Dina Dreyfus, who was a big hit as a teacher with him in Brazil, an equal partner in his dangerous journeys there, much braver (though Jewish, she spurned his offer to leave WWII France and joined the Resistance). Judging from the sole pic in book of her, vivacious as a Hollywood heroine.
And what kind of dad was he?
Subtitle: aside from the excellent descriptions in Tristes Tropiques and occasional references to L-S’s dry wit, the man doesn’t seem to have been much of a poet. And he hardly spent any time in labs, almost all of it in Libraries.
The book is very definitely an intellectual not an intimate bio, but it left me curious about the women in his life. We hear lots about his dad but next to nothing about his mother, who surely was the greater influence. And I’m dying to learn more about his first wife, Dina Dreyfus, who was a big hit as a teacher with him in Brazil, an equal partner in his dangerous journeys there, much braver (though Jewish, she spurned his offer to leave WWII France and joined the Resistance). Judging from the sole pic in book of her, vivacious as a Hollywood heroine.
And what kind of dad was he?
Read
July 29, 2011In the middle of the intersection of psychoanalysis, linguistics, and critical theory stands Levi-Strauss, tightening his scarf in the breeze and and quietly saying "yes" to the swirl about him. Starting with an anthropological expedition to Brazil in the 1930's, Wilcken tells of Levi-Strauss' growth and the development of those three, key disciplines through the twentieth century. This book is for anyone who has mused on the weaving of vibrant cultural fabrics, and mourned the gray flannel we relentlessly produce.
September 27, 2012
Patrick Wilcken's biography enables us to experience structuralism from its inception. Here we see Claude Levi-Strauss, not as a revered intellectual icon but as a working anthropologist, jumping in and out of canoes much the same way that Jacques Lacan jumped in and out of taxi cabs. In the process, he discovers the sweeping patterns that under-gird the human psyche, the binary patterns that apply to all of intellectual life, from digital technology to spoken language. He leaves the collection of the boring ethnographic details to the more plodding anthropologists.
November 3, 2010
A great example of successfully blending straight autobiography with intellectual history. Not only do you get a 'behind the scenes' look at the fieldwork that led to Levi-Strauss' Tristes Tropiques, but Wilcken does an excellent job of tracing Levi-Strauss' work throughout his career and its connection/interaction with other philosophical and cultural bodies of thought, including surrealism, existentialism, and post-structuralism.
January 6, 2012
A skeptical yet appreciative look at Levi-Strauss' work. “Structuralism was, however, a strange kind of science, one that built its proofs out of poetic interpretations and refused definitive conclusions at every turn.” 283 He did remarkably little field work for such a famous anthropologist. But his work still managed to bring forth interesting ideas. Structuralism seems to me a heuristic device--what I call a "toy for thinking."
May 24, 2012
The book is a subtle biography not so much of the man's life (though there's that too), but his thought, how it evolved, twisted, and even contradicted itself. What a wonderfully gifted and complex thinker he was. I've long appreciated and even enjoyed Levi-Strauss's writing. Now I feel I've been let in on the back story. Anyone interested in Levi-Strauss and his legacy ought to read this book.
March 21, 2024
An extensive and intriguing overview of Lévi-Strauss's life and philosophy. The book elegantly laid down the historical background of structuralism at the nexus between psychoanalysis, critical theory, and linguistics and the figures behind (Lacan, Saussure, Foucault, etc). It also provides a well-balanced view of Lévi-Strauss's work. While Strauss replaced Sartre as the contemporary intellectual icon of that era, a decent amount of some fair and fundamental critiques of his work are well cited in the book.
In general, it is a good book as an introduction to Lévi-Strauss, his books, and his era. Interestingly, his lifestyle and personality reminded me of Bon Iver a couple of times while reading the book.
In general, it is a good book as an introduction to Lévi-Strauss, his books, and his era. Interestingly, his lifestyle and personality reminded me of Bon Iver a couple of times while reading the book.
April 17, 2022
The book accomplished the goal I had set for it - to give me a small taste of why CLS is such a famous figure even though his ‘philosophy’ could be called indescribable. I can’t say I understood it all, but this book helped. It hits the right note in terms of the person, his writings, historical context, intersections with post-modernism, etc
December 19, 2014
The biographer writes with an enchanting lyricism and a natural flair for the dramatic. Wonderfully paced, rigorous and adept at setting Strauss solidly within (and without) his intellectual legacy. A must for fans of structuralism and this philosophical heavyweight.
September 1, 2018
Inspiring, complex and a great insight into the workings of a true thinker's mental process
April 11, 2011
Brilliant biography that doesn't fall back on the lazy trick of psychologizing the subject too much.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews