Levi-Strauss - A Biography

Loyer

Levi-Strauss - A Biography
Format
Hardback
Publisher
Polity Press
Country
United Kingdom
Published
5 October 2018
Pages
740
ISBN
9781509511983

Levi-Strauss - A Biography

Loyer

Academic, writer, figure of melancholy, aesthete - Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009) not only transformed his academic discipline, he also profoundly changed the way that we view ourselves and the world around us.

In this award-winning biography, historian Emmanuelle Loyer recounts Levi-Strauss’s childhood in an assimilated Jewish household, his promising student years as well as his first forays into political and intellectual movements. As a young professor, Levi-Strauss left Paris in 1935 for Sao Paulo to teach sociology. His rugged expeditions into the Brazilian hinterland, where he discovered the Amerindian Other, made him into an anthropologist. The racial laws of the Vichy regime would force him to leave France yet again, this time for the USA in 1941, where he became Professor Claude L. Strauss - to avoid confusion with the jeans manufacturer.

Levi-Strauss’s return to France, after the war, ushered in the period during which he produced his greatest works: several decades of intense labour in which he reinvented anthropology, establishing it as a discipline that offered a new view on the world. In 1955, Tristes Tropiques offered indisputable proof of this the world over. During those years, Levi-Strauss became something of a French national monument, as well as a celebrity intellectual of global renown. But he always claimed his perspective was a ‘view from afar’, enabling him to deliver incisive and subversive diagnoses of our waning modernity.

Loyer’s outstanding biography tells the story of a true intellectual adventurer whose unforgettable voice invites us to rethink questions of the human and the meaning of progress. She portrays Levi-Strauss less as a modern than as our own great and disquieted contemporary.

This item is not currently in-stock. It can be ordered online and is expected to ship in 10-14 days

Our stock data is updated periodically, and availability may change throughout the day for in-demand items. Please call the relevant shop for the most current stock information. Prices are subject to change without notice.

Sign in or become a Readings Member to add this title to a wishlist.