From Montaigne to Montaigne

From Montaigne to Montaigne collects two previously unpublished lectures charting the renowned anthropologist’s intellectual engagement with the sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne.

In January 1937, between the two ethnographic trips he would describe in Tristes Tropiques, Claude Levi-Strauss gave a talk to the Confederation Generale du Travail in Paris. Only recently discovered in the archives of the Bibliotheque National de France, this lecture, Ethnography: The Revolutionary Science, discussed the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, to whom Levi-Strauss would return in remarks delivered more than a half-century later, in the spring of 1992. Bracketing the career of one of the most celebrated anthropologists of the twentieth century, these two talks reveal how Levi-Strauss’s ethnography begins and ends with Montaigne-and how his reading of his intellectual forebear and his understanding of anthropology evolve along the way. Published here for the first time, these lectures offer new insight into the development of ethnography and the thinking of one of its most important practitioners.