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    Myth and Meaning

    Cracking the Code of Culture

    Author Claude Levi-Strauss
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    Paperback
    $15.00 US
    Knopf | Schocken
    On sale Mar 14, 1995 | 80 Pages | 9780805210385
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    With a Foreword by Wendy Doniger. In this expanded collection of five lectures originally delivered on the Canadian radio series "Ideas," Lévi-Strauss offers the insights of a lifetime spent interpreting myths and trying to discover their significance for human understanding.

    "Myth and Meaning touches upon all of Lévi-Strauss's great methodological paradoxes: the parallel tensions between myth and science, myth and history, myth and music, and "primitive" and "civilized"....The clarity and directness with which Lévi-Strauss explores these questions in Myth and Meaning is unprecedented."--Wendy Doniger, The University of Chicago, from the Foreword

    CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS was a leading social anthropologist and the author of Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Tristes Tropiques, Totemism, The Savage Mind, The Raw and the Cooked, From Honey to Ashes, and Structural Anthropology. Born in 1908, he was revered as the father of modern anthropology. He died in Paris in 2009.

    View titles by Claude Levi-Strauss
    “If someone who had just heard Lévi-Strauss’s name for the first time asked me to explain . . . what he was all about, I would pick up Myth and Meaning and start reading it out loud . . . Only here does one have a lucid, candid, personal exposition of the major ideas that have driven him all his life.”
    —from the Foreword by Wendy Doniger, University of Chicago
     
    “There is no easier or quicker way than through this book into that heart of darkness Lévi-Strauss calls the ‘totalitarian ambition of the savage mind’ as it throbs beneath the surface of the ‘civilized’ mind.”
    —Philip Rieff, Professor of Psychiatry, Medical College of Pennsylvania
     
    “‘If in the end you cannot tell everyone what you have been up to, your life’s work has been in vain,’ Edwin Schrödenger told us. In this eloquently slim volume, Lévi-Strauss delivers on Schrödinger’s implied request exquisitely. If every major thinker could summarize his or her conclusions this clearly, the fragmentation that threatens to reduce understanding to incoherence would be tempered considerably.”
    —Huston Smith, University, Berkeley, and author of Forgotten Truth and Beyond the Post-Modern Mind

    About

    With a Foreword by Wendy Doniger. In this expanded collection of five lectures originally delivered on the Canadian radio series "Ideas," Lévi-Strauss offers the insights of a lifetime spent interpreting myths and trying to discover their significance for human understanding.

    "Myth and Meaning touches upon all of Lévi-Strauss's great methodological paradoxes: the parallel tensions between myth and science, myth and history, myth and music, and "primitive" and "civilized"....The clarity and directness with which Lévi-Strauss explores these questions in Myth and Meaning is unprecedented."--Wendy Doniger, The University of Chicago, from the Foreword

    Author

    CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS was a leading social anthropologist and the author of Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Tristes Tropiques, Totemism, The Savage Mind, The Raw and the Cooked, From Honey to Ashes, and Structural Anthropology. Born in 1908, he was revered as the father of modern anthropology. He died in Paris in 2009.

    View titles by Claude Levi-Strauss

    Praise

    “If someone who had just heard Lévi-Strauss’s name for the first time asked me to explain . . . what he was all about, I would pick up Myth and Meaning and start reading it out loud . . . Only here does one have a lucid, candid, personal exposition of the major ideas that have driven him all his life.”
    —from the Foreword by Wendy Doniger, University of Chicago
     
    “There is no easier or quicker way than through this book into that heart of darkness Lévi-Strauss calls the ‘totalitarian ambition of the savage mind’ as it throbs beneath the surface of the ‘civilized’ mind.”
    —Philip Rieff, Professor of Psychiatry, Medical College of Pennsylvania
     
    “‘If in the end you cannot tell everyone what you have been up to, your life’s work has been in vain,’ Edwin Schrödenger told us. In this eloquently slim volume, Lévi-Strauss delivers on Schrödinger’s implied request exquisitely. If every major thinker could summarize his or her conclusions this clearly, the fragmentation that threatens to reduce understanding to incoherence would be tempered considerably.”
    —Huston Smith, University, Berkeley, and author of Forgotten Truth and Beyond the Post-Modern Mind

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