Structural Anthropology
by Claude Lévi-Strauss · Anthropologie structurale
Assigned by 1 of the 9 reading lists, catalogue entry only
- Written
- 1958
- Form
- Treatise
- Language
- French
- Length
- Long · 410 pp300 to 700 pages
- Difficulty
- Difficult4 of 5 for a first-year reader
We recommendStructural Anthropology, translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest SchoepfBasic Books, 1974The standard English translation of the first volume, the one the Great Books set excerpts.
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Seventeen essays from 1944 to 1957 in which Lévi-Strauss proposes that kinship, myth, ritual and art can be analysed like language, as systems of relations among elements rather than as collections of things. Drawing on the structural linguistics of Jakobson and Saussure, he treats marriage rules as exchanges of women, myths as sets of transformations, and the shaman's cure as a kind of psychoanalysis. Includes The Structural Study of Myth, Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology, and the essays on the sorcerer and on split representation.
No reading guide yet
The catalogue entry above is complete: the dates, the form, the themes and every program that assigns Structural Anthropology are verified against each program's published list.
What is missing is the part that takes real work: the summary, the key passages, and a recommended translation. The edition named below is the one most programs assign, so the buy links are useful already.
