Recommendations
Books Like Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss
Works that use the encounter with the other to question the self
Lévi-Strauss goes to Brazil to study the Nambikwara and returns having questioned the foundations of Western civilization itself. These works share that same defamiliarizing encounter — the other is not just interesting, it is a mirror that reflects Western assumptions back at themselves.
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Buy on AmazonLa Pensée sauvage
by Claude Lévi-Strauss
The central statement of structural anthropology — mythical thought as the science of the concrete; the theoretical companion to Tristes Tropiques; read after the memoir
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Buy on AmazonMythologies
by Roland Barthes
The semiological counterpart — Barthes applying the same structural analysis to French bourgeois culture that Lévi-Strauss applies to Amazonian myth systems; the shared structuralist project
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Buy on AmazonRace et histoire
by Claude Lévi-Strauss
The UNESCO essay — Lévi-Strauss's most direct statement of his political and cultural position on cultural diversity and Western ethnocentrism; the most accessible single Lévi-Strauss text
- 4Buy on Amazon
L'Afrique fantôme
by Michel Leiris
Ghost of Africa — Leiris's journal of the Dakar-Djibouti ethnographic mission; the self-conscious ethnographer observing himself observing; the companion in French intellectual encounters with Africa
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Buy on AmazonLes Structures élémentaires de la parenté
by Claude Lévi-Strauss
The Elementary Structures of Kinship — the founding technical text of structural anthropology; the analysis of kinship rules and the incest taboo as a cultural universal
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Buy on AmazonThe Interpretation of Cultures
by Clifford Geertz
Geertz's interpretive anthropology — the American counterpart to Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology; thick description vs. structural analysis; the great theoretical alternative
- 7Buy on Amazon
Orientalism
by Edward Said
Said's analysis of how Western scholarship constructs 'the Orient' — the postcolonial development of the structuralist critique of Western knowledge that Lévi-Strauss initiated
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Buy on AmazonThe Raw and the Cooked
by Claude Lévi-Strauss
The first volume of Mythologiques — Lévi-Strauss's structuralist analysis of 187 South American myths; the most systematic application of structural analysis to mythology; read after Tristes Tropiques
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