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All Played Out?
Christopher Johnson detects the patterns of a hidden philosophy of history, threaded through Claude Lévi-Strauss’s most famous works. Might its seeming pessimism—a sequence of downward turns from the Neolithic to the present—hold out the possibility of alternative outcomes, virtual destinies?
An Anthropological Turn?
Alongside the familiar pathways of French post-structuralist thought, Jacob Collins detects an alternative trajectory in the work of four thinkers whose allegiances span the political spectrum. The return to ethnographical concepts of social belonging—fraternity, family, faith—amid the multiple crises of the 1970s.
Labour in the Levant
Against celebrations of the messianic potential of migrant labour, John Chalcraft presents the case of Syrian workers in Lebanon, where porous borders and hybrid identities serve to reproduce exploitative conditions. What motivations and aspirations underpin migration—and what routes might lead out of commodification’s web?
The Labyrinth of Kinship
Jack Goody on Maurice Godelier, Métamorphoses de la parenté. Kinship as the central concern of anthropology, and its place in French and British traditions of the discipline. The universality—or otherwise—of incest taboos; their interpretation by Lévi-Strauss; and the role of beliefs versus interests in generating them.
More Conjectures
Replying to critics of his ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ (NLR 1), Franco Moretti considers the objections to a world-systems theory of the relations between centre and periphery in the sphere of the novel or poetry, and proposes some new hypotheses about the morphology of forms and the politics of comparative literary studies.
Conjectures on World Literature
Nearly two hundred years ago, Goethe announced the imminence of a world literature. Here Franco Moretti offers a set of hypotheses for tracking the birth and fate of the novel in the peripheries of Europe, in Latin America, Arab lands, Turkey, China, Japan, West Africa. For the first time, the prospect of a morphology of global letters?
The Idea of the Primitive: British Art and Anthropology 1918-1930
“The idea of the primitive has long been a potent and highly influential current in British thought and history. In particular, the period 1918–30 saw primitivism established as an important theme in writing on art and anthropology. Analysis of the concept may therefore usefully begin there—with a span . . .” read more
Soviet Theories of Ethnicity: The Case of a Missing Term
“All through the twentieth century the significance of ‘ethnicity’ in the structuring of social life and in setting patterns of political action has been extensive and usually unpredicted. Neither its treatment by 19th-century ‘rationalists’ as a retrograde piece of barbarism nor its biological-racial explanations by their ‘romantic’ foes . . .” read more
The Origins of Male Domination
“The social inequalities between men and women are increasingly questioned by women from quite diverse milieux and waging their fight in various ways. Theoretical positions and forms of struggle which a short time ago still had some credibility, and indeed some importance, have began to be transformed by . . .” read more
Infrastructures, Societies and History
“This essay—which summarizes the basic theses of my forthcoming book of the same title—seeks to provide a clear and concise formulation of my provisional conclusions on two key issues in the social sciences: the notions of ideology and class. In it, I shall deal successively with four problems: . . .” read more
Introduction to Mannoni
“The observation of wild children, re-captured after years in the forest or jungle, provides the most elementary disproof of the myth of ‘human nature’. These mirrors, in which man strives to recognize his own essence, exhibit none of those ‘human’ characteristics which he flatters himself are his by . . .” read more
Itard and his Savage
“The remarkable story of the re-education of the ‘savage’ of Aveyron, and the pedagogic methods devised by his teacher, Dr Itard, still influence many of the techniques used in the training of backward children today, more than a century and a half later. The situation is paradoxical in . . .” read more
The Crisis of British Anthropology
“Two events have transformed the background of post-war anthropology: the colonial revolution leading to the rise of struggles against imperialism, now on the defensive, and, at a different level, the growth of structural anthropology. The one reflects the other, for the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss is an extended . . .” read more
A Confrontation
“Paul Ricoeur: The methodological questions I should like to ask you are of three kinds; all three concern the possibility of co-ordinating your scientific method—structuralism as a science—with other modes of comprehension which are not built on a generalized linguistic model, but consist of a recovery of meaning . . .” read more
Limits of British Anthropology
“Anthropological studies in Britain grew up in the context of European, and especially British colonialism as a part of the colonial situation. Anthropologists for the most part did not question the colonial situation and the fact that they participated in it by investigating subjugated peoples. As they took . . .” read more
Introduction to Oscar Lewis
“Over the last two years New Left Review has published a number of accounts—fictional and documentary—aiming to give the quality of life in an under-developed country: for instance Antonio Ferres’s story ‘Land of Olives’ (nlr 29) and Jan Myrdal’s description of life in a Chinese village (” read more
Claude Levi-Strauss--Anthropologist and Philosopher
“As with Darwin and Freud and many other famous men Claude Lévi-Strauss, Professor of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France, needs to be judged on two quite different levels. First we may ask: ‘What has he contributed to the particular scientific discipline in which he is a . . .” read more