Lévi-Strauss

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. One of twentieth-century France’s most celebrated intellectuals, Levi-Strauss attempted to show in his work that thought processes were a feature universal to humans, whether they lived in tribal rainforest societies or in the rich intellectual life of Paris. During the 1930s he studied native Brazilian tribes in the Amazonian jungle, but for most of his long career he preferred the study to the field. He was the leading exponent of structuralism, a school of thought which was influential for decades, and was involved in a famous debate with his friend Jean-Paul Sartre, who resisted many of his ideas. His books about the nature of myth, human thought and kinship are now seen as some of the most important anthropological texts written in the twentieth century.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Adam Kuper 3 episodes
  Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Boston University
• Christina Howells 5 episodes
  Professor of French at Oxford University
• Vincent Debaene No other episodes
  Associate Professor of French Literature at Columbia University

Reading list

• Claude Levi-Strauss
  Edmund Leach (University of Chicago Press, 1989) Google Books →
• Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture
  Claude Levi-Strauss (Schocken Books, 1995) Google Books →
• Structural Anthropology
  Claude Levi-Strauss (Basic Books, 1974) Google Books →
• The Savage Mind
  Claude Levi-Strauss (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994) Google Books →
• Tristes Tropiques
  Claude Levi-Strauss (Penguin Books, 1992) Google Books →
• Conversations with Claude Levi-Strauss
  Claude Levi-Strauss and Didier Eribon (University of Chicago Press, 1991) Google Books →
• Claude Levi-Strauss: The Father of Modern Anthropology
  Patrick Wilcken (Penguin Books, 2012) Google Books →
• Introducing Levi-Strauss and Structural Anthropology
  Boris Wiseman (Icon Books Ltd, 2000) Google Books →
• The Cambridge Companion to Levi-Strauss
  Boris Wiseman (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2009) Google Books →

Related episodes

• Sartre
  
  7 Oct, 2004 840 French and related literatures
• Bergson and Time
  
  9 May, 2019 110 Metaphysics
• Existentialism
  
  28 Jun, 2001 100 Philosophy
• The Continental-Analytic Split
  
  10 Nov, 2011 100 Philosophy
• Phenomenology
  
  22 Jan, 2015 190 Modern Western Philosophy
• Bohemianism
  
  9 Oct, 2003 700 Arts
• Montaigne
  
  25 Apr, 2013 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• Jung
  
  2 Dec, 2004 150 Psychology
• Surrealism
  
  15 Nov, 2001 700 Arts
• Modern Culture
  
  21 Jan, 1999 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: b01sjjxl

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01sjjxl

Auto-category: 301 (Sociology & anthropology)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. A celebrated travel memoir published in 1955 begins with an unusual confession from its author.