Reviewed by Michelle de Kretser in The Monthly, April 2011 issue.Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory', By Patrick Wilcken, Bloomsbury, 384pp; A$59.99
In 1938 an obscure French anthropologist, sporting a topee and with a monkey clinging to his boot, led an expedition into deepest Brazil. Part scientific enterprise, part youthful lighting out for the territory, its fieldwork was patchy, impressionistic and largely outdated. But it brought Claude Lévi-Strauss into contact with indigenous people, producing a revolution that spread into every branch of the humanities.
No one has mythologised that ramshackle Brazilian jaunt more brilliantly than Lévi-Strauss himself in Tristes Tropiques (1955). In the first English-language life of this key twentieth-century thinker, Sydney-born Patrick Wilcken rightly accords equal weight to Lévi-Strauss’s North American sojourn, arguing that it was just as crucial to his intellectual development.
The Monthly, April 2011.
Footnote:
The Monthly is a monthly magazine dealing thoughtfully with politics, society and culture. It can be bought in NZ for $9.95 per issue at selected magazine outlets. ($8.95 in Australia). I recommend it to you.
No comments:
Post a Comment