Did Claude Levi-Strauss pass away today?
Every two weeks, a prominent guest from the world of journalism, politics, academia, or the arts composed a blog entry responding to a key text that addresses the concept of “power”. You can view the daily responses from seminar participants, as well as the associated reading. GUEST BLOG Pankaj MishraPANKAJ MISHRA Tristes Tropiques opens with a denunciation of travel writing: ‘I hate traveling and explorers,’ Levi-Strauss declares. It closes more than five hundred pages later with a tribute to the ‘decisive wisdom’ of the Buddha, ‘to which my civilization could contribute only by confirming it.’ It is a strange book, consisting of ethnography, philosophical meditation, intellectual autobiography, and, yes, travel writing. It often seems held together only by a high literary style; swelling with multiple clauses, its long, sonorous sentences meander down the page with as much stateliness as the Amazon, among whose tribes Levi-Strauss did his fieldwork in the late 1930s. But above all, T
France was paying tribute tonight to one of its greatest intellectuals, the social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who has died at the age of 100. The structuralist thinker, who devoted his five-decade career to the study of the human species around the world, is credited with having revolutionised the study of anthropology for the 20th century. A statement from Paris’s School for the Advanced Studies of Social Sciences said Lévi-Strauss had passed away at the weekend. He was less than a month from marking his 101st birthday. Sources: http://www.guardian.co.
