The Raw and the Cooked

Mythologiques #1

by Claude Lévi-Strauss, John Weightman (Translator), Doreen Weightman (Translator)

"Lévi-Strauss is a French savant par excellence, a man of extraordinary sensitivity and human wisdom . . . a deliberate stylist with profound convictions and convincing arguments. . . . [The Raw and the Cooked] adds yet another chapter to the tireless quest for a scientifically accurate, esthetically viable, and philosophically relevant cultural anthropology. . . . [It is] indispensable reading."—Natural History

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Food, Science, France, Mythology

402 pages, Paperback

Published March 15, 1983

About the author

Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist, well-known for his development of structural anthropology. He was born in Belgium to French parents who were living in Brussels at the time, but he grew up in Paris. His father was an artist, and a member of an intellectual French Jewish family. Lévi-Strauss studied at the University of Paris. From 1935-9 he was Professor at the University of Sao Paulo making several expeditions to central Brazil. Between 1942-1945 he was Professor at the New School for Social Research. In 1950 he became Director of Studies at the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes. In 1959 Lévi-Strauss assumed the Chair of Social Anthroplogy at the College de France. His books include The Raw and the Cooked, The Savage Mind, Structural Anthropology and Totemism (Encyclopedia of World Biography).

Some of the reasons for his popularity are in his rejection of history and humanism, in his refusal to see Western civilization as privileged and unique, in his emphasis on form over content and in his insistence that the savage mind is equal to the civilized mind.

Lévi-Strauss did many things in his life including studying Law and Philosophy. He also did considerable reading among literary masterpieces, and was deeply immersed in classical and contemporary music.

Lévi-Strauss was awarded the Wenner-Gren Foundation's Viking Fund Medal for 1966 and the Erasmus Prize in 1975. He was also awarded four honorary degrees from Oxford, Yale, Havard and Columbia. Strauss held several memberships in institutions including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society (Encyclopedia of World Biography).

Reviews

[Linda Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why are the stars placed just this way? The stories of how humans are connected to animals - all peoples have stories and myths to explain the incomprehensible "why" of existence. Levi-Strauss was bucking traditional anthropological thought by contending that there isn't much distance between the primitive mind and the supposedly evolved mind.

It won't surprise anyone to know that many collected myths from oral tradition cultures were mutated by the missionaries who then brought the altered stories to our awareness. Levi-Strauss's dedication to truth using his philosophical humanitarian mind is a gift we all need to unwrap more thoroughly.

[Michael Greer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Claude Levi-Strauss is dangerous because once you have a taste for his work, you will return for a lot more.

In this review I offer a taste of this supreme feast of words in four volumes. The Bororo Song chapter includes one of my favorite stories, a story which transparently offers a tale of growing up and becoming mature. We will call it by the title, "The Bird-Nester's Aria."

1. In this tribe young men were on their way to manhood. They required a penis sheath to cover their organs and the women of the tribe were tasked with finding the right sort of palm branches to provide that covering. One day a young man followed his mother into the bush and witnessed her working on palm branches but decided to rape her. This violation of the incest taboo had positive and negative consequences.

2. That night the woman's husband, the boy's father, noticed feathers on the woman's belt, feathers that indicated sexual activity. The boys' father who was also the tribal chief ordered a dance for that evening to see whose feathers they were. Outrageously he discovered they belonged to his son. When the son violated his own mother he was also mocking his father, standing as it were in his place.

3. The father's remedy was to seek the death of his son by sending him on a long journey to the nest of souls, a place dangerous to enter. A hummingbird gained information of the father's plans and so entered the nest of souls and made it possible to displace the dance rattle the father wanted his son to find. The boy's grandmother, on his mother's side, informed him of the situation, of the plot against him.

4. After repeated attempts to place in son in danger, he finally abandons him on a ledge where he wastes away in hunger. Hideously the vultures tear away at his buttocks, removing the firm flesh that makes it possible to sit on a stool. Finally the boy recovered, however, and returned to his village unannounced where he deceived his father into a hunt for wild deer when he was able to ambush him, kill him with an arrow and then return to the village and take all his father's wives, including his own mother.

[Count Gravlax]

Abandonei em 3/4 pois não entendi nada

[Gary Bruff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book in the late 80s with the ambition of getting through all four volumes of mythologiques. That didn't happen. However, I did learn a lot about ethnographic paradigmatic structuralism from this book. The book starts out making an analogy between music and myth. A piece of music is only music when it has one or more motifs which repeat and vary in structured ways. So avant-garde atonal serial music is not music. Myth works exactly the same way; recurring motifs hold a story together. To L-S the motif itself is not meaningful, as only the patterning and arrangement of motifs in the composition of the music/myth gives the work significance. The notes of a song played on an instrument do not have meaning the same way that spoken words strung together in a sentence have meaning. But these instrumental or mythic performances do have meanings and comprise ideas.

However, there is much to dislike about this book. I feel I did not learn much about Native South Americans. Also, L-S ignores obvious psychoanalytical or ideological interpretations of mythic symbolism. They just are not what he is after. And the endless barrage of myths and their mutations, flayed out in purely structural terms, can be overwhelming not to mention tedious and boring at times.

But I am glad I had the discipline to read it. Better books by L-S are Totemism, Savage Mind, and Tristes Tropiques.

[Wilson prata · Rating 5 out of 5]

O que primeiro chama atenção nessa obra é o tamanho e a complexidade do objeto de estudo. Mais do que isso, esse é um ótimo exemplo de como ao colocar determinado problema, no fundo já carregamos a resposta para aquele problema. Ciente desse aspecto, L.S. dedica boa parte do tempo a especificar, construir e desconstruir seu objeto ao mesmo tempo que faz uso de metáforas e mimesis para ilustrar suas conclusões. A proposta do autor é discutir a passagem do continuo para o discreto, do estado de natureza para o estado de cultura, tendo como ponto de vista o pensamento mítico dos povos sem escrita da América. Mais do que dar significado a essa passagem, os mitos dão significado à significação, exprimem a estrutura do "pensamento selvagem" e como este organiza o mundo e seu lugar no mundo. A proposta de explicar um sujeito transcendental sem sujeito, apresentada na introdução, ao mesmo tempo que convence, caduca; afinal, se o mito consegue evidenciar a estrutura do espírito quando confrontado somente com ele mesmo, por outro lado, há de se considerar que esses espírito já foi estruturado no momento em que realiza esse confronto. Essa constatação abre espaço para um discussão fenomenológica no cerne do estruturalismo, algo que Bourdieu vai explorar com sua praxiologia, que ajuda em parte a resolver esse problema, mas essa abordagem complementar ser contextualizada quando focada em uma cultura mais perene, como é a cultura indígena, algo que Wagner (A Invenção da Cultura) e Manuela Carneiro da Cunha (Cultura com Aspas) conseguem resolver melhor. As críticas feministas ao trabalho de L.S., que coloca a mulher como mero objeto de troca nessas sociedade, devem atentar para a estrutura estruturante e a estrutura estruturada dessas sociedades e para o fato de que L.S. se dedica somente a segunda.

[Peisi Thanatos · Rating 1 out of 5]

insuportável

[Angellica Skrinos · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ll be honest I was genuinely so lost reading this until I realised the whole thing was a comparison of binaries in myths this version definitely needed a modern introduction but other than that it was super super interesting even tho I think I understood maybe a third of everything I read

[Ramey Moore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolute classic of anthropological literature. Dense for those unfamiliar with structural methodologies, but an interesting document and study with great insight, in spite of the current split with this methodology.

[Estep Nagy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is staggeringly brilliant. I read it for its deep insight into the mechanics of story, e.g. how the basic structure of a myth is more telling than the details. A one-book master class in close reading. Some technical language, which I profitably skipped.

[Susan Lester · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent study of the myth of food. This is my favorite book in Lévi-Strauss' series Mythologiques. Highly recommended for anyone interested in food studies and its applicability to literature.

[Jack Remick · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is essential to an understanding of story and why we write them.

[James F · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first volume of Lévi-Strauss' series Mythologiques, this long book in very small print (not enlargeable in the format Open Library uses) is a classic of twentieth-century anthropology (also available in English translation as The Raw and the Cooked.) He begins by analyzing a myth of the Bororo people (one of the central Brazilian tribes which were the subject of his own fieldwork, described in Les tristes tropiques) about the origins of destructive weather (heavy wind and rains). He then moves to a group of similar myths of neighboring tribes which speak languages of the Gé family, dealing with the origins of (domestic cooking) fire, which have elements in common with the Bororo myth. Throughout the book, he picks up new elements in certain myths and then seeks other myths which contain those elements, ending up discussing groups of myths about (inter alia) the origins of cultivated plants, fishing and hunting with poisons, death and diseases, and the differentiation of various species of animals and birds. In so doing, he also brings in many different regions of Brazil and the Amazon basin, and occasionally analogues from elsewhere in South and North America.

Lévi-Strauss' basic theory of structuralism is that myths (and other cultural traits), like language, are built up from underlying (and pre-conscious) structures of oppositions analogous to phonemes, which are expressed in various "codings" analogous to grammar, then modified by sytematic transformations to provide specific messages (content). Important oppositions include Nature/Culture (which can be coded as the raw and the cooked), Heaven/Earth/Water, Male/Female, Life/Death, Animal/Human/Plant, and so forth. Some categories "mediate" others; thus the cooked mediates between the raw and the spoiled (pourri). He explains the functions of particular birds and animals through the various myths in terms of the oppositions they represent (many myths are about opposums, vultures, jaguars, turtles and armadillos, for example.) His theory is much too complex to summarize in a short review.

Whatever one thinks of structuralism as a theory, this book would be worth reading just for the myths alone.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

not very impressive

[elisa day]

nie wiem

[Leonardo]

Derrida - Para Principiantes Pág.33

[Chris Antonsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think . . . because I have never made it all the way through!

[John Jr. · Rating 3 out of 5]

[Review to come, sooner or later.]

[toto · Rating 5 out of 5]

insane, awesome tho

[Rikke Jacobsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little bit hard to read!