Levi-Strauss: A Biography

Levi-Strauss: A Biography

Academic, writer, figure of melancholy, aesthete â€“ Claude LÃ©vi-Strauss (1908â€“2009) not only transformed his academic discipline, he also profoundly changed the way that we view ourselves and the world around us.Â

In this award-winning biography, historian Emmanuelle Loyer recounts LÃ©vi-Straussâ€™s childhood in an assimilated Jewish household, his promising student years as well as his first forays into political and intellectual movements. As a young professor, LÃ©vi-Strauss left Paris in 1935 for SÃ£o Paulo to teach sociology. His rugged expeditions into the Brazilian hinterland, where he discovered the Amerindian Other, made him into an anthropologist. The racial laws of the Vichy regime would force him to leave France yet again, this time for the USA in 1941, where he became Professor Claude L. Strauss â€“ to avoid confusion with the jeans manufacturer.

LÃ©vi-Straussâ€™s return to France, after the war, ushered in the period during which he produced his greatest works: several decades of intense labour in which he reinvented anthropology, establishing it as a discipline that offered a new view on the world. In 1955,Â Tristes TropiquesÂ offered indisputable proof of this the world over. During those years, LÃ©vi-Strauss became something of a French national monument, as well as a celebrity intellectual of global renown. But he always claimed his perspective was a â€˜view from afarâ€™, enabling him to deliver incisive and subversive diagnoses of our waning modernity.

Loyerâ€™s outstanding biography tells the story of a true intellectual adventurer whose unforgettable voice invites us to rethink questions of the human and the meaning of progress. She portrays LÃ©vi-Strauss less as a modern than as our own great and disquieted contemporary.

Country	USA
Author	Emmanuelle Loyer
Binding	Hardcover
EAN	9781509511983
Edition	1
ISBN	1509511989
Label	Polity
Manufacturer	Polity
MPN	51995572
NumberOfItems	1
NumberOfPages	740
PartNumber	51995572
PublicationDate	2018-11-05
Publisher	Polity
ReleaseDate	2018-11-26
Studio	Polity

Levi-Strauss: A Biography

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