BBC news: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8340936.stm
Obituary: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8341489.stm
Obituary: Claude Levi-Strauss
Claude Levi-Strauss, who died a few weeks short of his 101st birthday, was widely regarded as a founder of modern anthropology and one of France's foremost thinkers.
He introduced structuralism to anthropology, an approach that seeks to identify common patterns of behaviour and thought in all human societies.
Levi-Strauss was born in 1908 in Brussels, Belgium, to French parents of Jewish origin. He grew up in Paris and studied at the Sorbonne.
In the mid-1930s he went to Sao Paulo, Brazil, where he taught sociology before turning to anthropology. He conducted research in the Mato Grosso and Amazon regions.
Later critics pointed out that Levi-Strauss had spent limited time with the tribes he studied and had limited knowledge of their language.
However his fieldwork strengthened his academic credentials and would later form the substance of the book that made his name, Tristes Tropiques.
Free French link
In 1939 he returned to France to take part in the war effort, and spent a few months behind the Maginot Line.
I hate travels and explorers
Tristes Tropiques
After capitulation in 1940, Levi-Strauss worked as a teacher but was dismissed under racial laws introduced by the collaborationist Vichy regime, and left for the US.
While teaching in New York City, he befriended and was influenced by the famous anthropologist Franz Boas.
In 1942, he joined the Free French movement and worked for the US Office of War Information.
Levi-Strauss returned to France in 1948 to complete his doctorate.
A year later he published his thesis as a book, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, which cemented his reputation among scholars.
In 1955 he published Tristes Tropiques, an account of his time as an expatriate doubling as a philosophical meditation.
The book - which starts with the arresting sentence: "I hate travels and explorers" - was immediately hailed as a masterpiece and turned the author into one of France's best-known intellectuals.
Fun and games
He went on to publish hugely influential books, including Structural Anthropology (1958), the Savage Mind (1962), and The Raw and the Cooked (1964).
Not a year goes by without my receiving an order for jeans
The latter led to a series of works entitled Mythologies, in which Levi-Strauss found common threads underlying seemingly arbitrary myths across cultures.
By then Levi-Strauss was a worldwide celebrity and taught in the prestigious College de France.
He would later become a member of the Academie Francaise, the ultimate accolade for a French intellectual.
Although his ideas, like those of other structuralist thinkers, influenced the student rebels of 1968, he ultimately took a dim view of the rioters.
"After an initial reaction of curiosity, once I had grown weary of the fun and games, I was repulsed by May 68," he wrote.
Although not best-known for his sense of humour, Levi-Strauss did remark on the US garment company of the same name.
"That unfortunate homonymy has never ceased to haunt me - like a ghost" he once wrote. "Not a year goes by without my receiving an order for jeans - usually from Africa."
Paying tribute to Levy-Strauss, French President Nicolas Sarkozy described him as a "very great scholar, always open to the world, who created modern anthropology".
- posted on 11/04/2009
老列维也够寿了,昨天还在跟赋格讨论Abor Vitae(生命树)的事,看
来是一个很好的诗名。老列维是赋格介绍给我的,赋格怕是读的朱天
文,朱天文是迷的张爱玲,可怕只得到胡兰成的传承。
朱天文的“巫言”写得简直是一塌糊涂。
言归正传,说点什么呢。我还是抄一段他录的“哀歌”,其实一点也
不哀。是钻石工人与妓女们的生计,生趣,唱的一段歌曲:
Mais ce soir-là, autour de notre feu de campement, la conversation portrait sur les incidents quotidiens auxquels étaient exposés nos visiteurs. J’apprenais ainsi la langue pittoresque du sertão, qui, pour render notre pornom on, fait usage d’une collection extraordinairement variée de termes: o homem, l’homme; o camarada, le collègue; o negro, le nègre, o tal, un tel, o fulano, le type, etc. On avait donc eu la malchance de recueillir de l’or dans les bates: fâcheux presage pour un chercheur de diamants; la seule resource est de le rejecter aussitôt dans le courant; celui qui garderait l’or se ménagerait des semaines infructueuses; tel autre, ramassant le gravier à gravier à pleines mains, avait reçu un coup de la queue à crochets d’une raie venimeuse. Ces blessures sont difficiles à guérir. Il faut trouver une femme qui consente à se denuder et à uriner dans la plaie. Comme il n’y a guère autre chose dans le garimpo que des prostituées paysannes, ce traitement naïf entraîne le plus souvent une syphilis particulièrement virulente.
Ces femmes sont attires par les récits de coups de chance legendaries. Riche du jour au lendemain, le chercheur, prisonnier de son casier judiciaire, est oblige de tout dépenser sur place. Ainsi s’explique le traffic des camions charges de biens superflus. Pour peu qu’ils parviennent au garimpo avec leur cargaison, celle-ci se vendra à l’importe quell prix, et moins par besoin que par ostentation. Au petit jour, avant de repartir, je suis allé jusqu’à la hutte d’un camarada, au bord de la rivière infestée de moustiques et d’autres insects. Son casque de scaphandre démodé sur la tête, il était déjà en train de grater le fond. L’intérieur de la hutte était aussi miserable et déprimant que le site; mais, dans un coin, la compagne me fit voir avec orgueil les douze complets de son home, et ses robes de soie que dévoraient les termites.
La niut s’était passée à chanter et à deviser. Chaque convive est invité à “faire un numéro”, emprunté à quelque soirée de café-concert, souvenir d’un temps révolu. J’ai retrouvé ce décalage sur les marches frontiers de l’Inde, à l’occasion de banquets entre petits fonctionnaires. Ici comme là, on présentait des monologues, ou encore ce que l’on appelle dans l’Inde des “caricatures”, c’est-à-dire des imitations: cliquetis d’une machine à écrire, pétarade d’une motocyclette en difficulté, suivie – extraordinaire contraste – du bruit évocateur d’uneDe ma soirée avec les garimpeiros, j’ai conserve dans mes carnets de notes un fragment de complainte sur un modèle traditionnel. Il s’agit d’un soldat mécontent de l’ordinaire, qui écrit une reclamation à son caporal; celui-ci transmit au sergent et l’opération se répète à chaque echelon: lieutenant, capitaine, major, colonel, general, empereur. Ce dernier n’a plus comme resource que de s’adresser à Jésus-Christ, lequel, au lieu de faire suivre la doléance au Père éternel, “met la main à la plume et envoie tout le monde en enfer”. Voici ce petit échantillon de poésie du sertão:
O soldado…
O oferece…
O Sargento que era um homem pertinente
Pegô na penna, escreveu pro seu Tenente
O Tenente que era homem muito bão
Pegâ na penna, escreveu pro Capitão
O Capitão que era homem dos melhor’
Pegô na penna, escreveu pro Major
O Major que era Homem como é
Pegô na penna, escreveu pro Coroné
O Coroné que era homem sem igual
Pegô na penna, escreveu pro General
O General que era homem superior
Pegô na penna, escreveu pro Imperador
O Imperador…
Pegô na penna, escreveu pro Jesu’ Christo
Jesu’ Christo que é filho do Padre Eterno
Pegô na penna e mandô tudos pelo inferno.
敲打这一些不太明白的法语&葡萄牙语(赛尔陶语?哀歌),也是作一段
Meditation......
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