Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1908 - 2009, his works as a practical anti-racist manifesto

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6/25/2010
Writer, critic and activist Carlos Monsiváis, 1938 - 2010

6/8/2010
He is totally unreproducible — he was sui generis — Martin Gardner, 1914 - 2010

4/6/2010
Anarchist, poet, publisher and chess-player, John Rety, 1930 - 2010

4/4/2010
"Literature was another victim of the war": Miguel Delibes, 1920 - 2010

3/7/2010
Translator, critic and BBC script editor, Barbara Bray, 1924 - 2010

1/30/2010
Tributes to People's Historian Howard Zinn, 1922 - 2010

1/2/2010
At 42, she was one of the best poets of her generation, Rachel Wetzsteon, 1967 - 2009

12/27/2009
You have to decide which side you are on: there is always a side. Commitment does not exist in an abstraction; it exists in action: Dennis Brutus, 1924 - 2009

11/8/2009
Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1908 - 2009, his works as a practical anti-racist manifesto

11/7/2009
Power exercised by man over his fellow man is always a usurpation, Francisco Ayala, 1906 - 2009

10/14/2009
The Potato that Became a Tomato, Playgiarist Raymond Federman, 1928 - 2009

9/30/2009
Milton Meltzer, 1915 – 2009

9/14/2009
Iconic poet and punk rocker, Jim Carroll, 1950 - 2009

8/9/2009
Israeli writer Amos Kenan, 1927 - 2009

7/30/2009
Angela's Ashes author Frank McCourt, 1930 - 2009

6/23/2009
Indian poet Kamal Das, 1934 - 2009

6/8/2009
Ethnic Studies Pioneer Ronald Takaki, 1939 - 2009

3/29/2009
Pioneer Historian and Scholar of African-American studies, John Hope Franklin, 1915 - 2009

2/20/2009
Sudan novelist Tayeb Salih, 1929 -2009

1/31/2009
John Updike, 1932 - 2009, David Margolick on John Updike's Adieu to Ted Williams

1/22/2009
Norwegian philosopher and founder of the Deep Ecology Movement, Arne Næss, 1912 – 2009

1/4/2009
English poet, novelist, playwright, socialist and pacifist, Adrian Mitchell, 1932 - 2008

12/28/2008
Art, Truth and Politics - Harold Pinter, 1930 - 2008

12/19/2008
Dorothy Porter, 1954 - 2008

11/17/2008
Jazz biographer Peter Levinson, 1934-2008

11/10/2008
'My epitaph will be 'Curiosity did not kill this cat'' – Studs Terkel, 1912 - 2008

9/15/2008
I think it's the best time to be alive ever and it's probably the best time to be a writer - David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008

8/15/2008
Mahmoud Darwish, 1942 - 2008

6/17/2008
Media Guru Tony Schwartz, 1923 - 2008

5/25/2008
David Rieff on a lying to his dying mother, Susan Sontag

5/18/2008
Swing Hammer Swing! author, Jeff Torrington, 1935-2008

3/25/2008
Arthur C. Clarke, 1917 - 2008

1/22/2008
Poet and translator or Icelandic literature, Bernard Scudder, 1955 – 2007

1/13/2008
George MacDonald Fraser, inventor of Flashman, 1925 – 2008

12/30/2007
Julien Gracq, 1910 - 2007

12/20/2007
Diane Middlebrook, 1939 - 2007

12/16/2007
Gay historian Allan Bérubé dies

12/2/2007
One of the greatest scientists of our era, Seymour Benzer, dies at age 86

11/21/2007
Vernon Scannell, 1922 - 2007

11/14/2007
Norman Mailer, 1923-2007. He went down swinging.

11/6/2007
James Michie 1927 - 2007

9/19/2007
Champion of science fiction for children, Douglas Hill, 1935 - 2007

9/8/2007
Newberry Medal winner Madeleine L'Engle dies

9/2/2007
Julia Briggs, 1943 - 2007

8/30/2007
American short-story writer and activist Grace Paley dies

8/26/2007
Once the Nuremberg Trials were over and a few people judged guilty, no one wanted to talk about it. But I was driven by a desire to know what happened. - Raul Hilberg 1926 - 2007

8/5/2007
Ingmar Bergman 1918 - 2007

6/11/2007
Poet and translator Michael Hamburger, 1924 - 2007

6/3/2007
Classical scholar and archaeologist, Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, dies at 62

5/16/2007
Dickens scholar Philip Collins, 1923 - 2007

11/8/2009 Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1908 - 2009, his works as a practical anti-racist manifesto

"I don't know if everyone read the works of Lévi-Strauss as some sort of practical anti-racist manifesto, infinitely more efficient than big Satre-like declarations. But for me, his works had this effect. Given my working conditions, what I was doing, I was bound to be touched by his work. There was his beautiful text "Race and History", which was an important text and theoretical manifesto. What I see as even more potent, are the analysis operations themselves, which abstract from absurdity the things that were most stigmatized in particular by racism: things like rituals, wedding practices, or sexual traditions, etc... Without Lévi-Strauss's intention to rehabilitate anyone, the mere fact of making science was also a political act. In that way, it's the new figure of the intellectual who doesn't speak about everything, as a prophet would. Max Weber says: "A prophet is the one answering in a total way to total questions." Philosophers such as Satre are still admirable and can be also important: "The prophet speaks when nobody knows what to say anymore." Periods of crisis, etc. But at the same time, we were a bit tired of that kind of discourse, as prophets can often speak in the void, at the wrong time. So, someone telling us: "See, we can understand. We can analyse. There are conceptual tools, for understanding things that seemed incomprehensible, unjustifiable, absurd..." I think it was a very important thing." - Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu on Claude Lévi-Strauss from youtube (translation).

"Lévi-Straussian structuralism turned on the notion that the human brain is essentially a computerlike organ operable only by a binary code. And Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that this basic binary logic is always the same everywhere, a universalist argument if ever there was one, framed in terms somewhat narrower than what anyone has ever attributed to Chomsky. And yet Lévi-Strauss--a student of Franz Boas, Ferdinand de Saussure and Karl Marx--understood his emperical investigations, collectively, as a demonstration of relativist, semiotic and Marxian principles. That is, his work tracks the same binary oppositions (up/down, high/low, in/out, hot/cold) across cultures and through history, but it also shows that those basic building blocks of human existence can be put together in any number of patterns, that they can be mobilized to very different ends. In Lévi-Strauss's opus, then,one encounters basic similarities in the context of larger differences: The irreducible element of culture are everywhere the same, but cultures are everywhere different." - from The Trouble with Nature by Roger N. Lancaster.

Tristes Tropiques
Claude Levi-Strauss
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Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture
Claude Levi-Strauss
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The Savage Mind
Claude Lévi-Strauss
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Conversations with Claude Levi-Strauss
Claude Levi-Strauss
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