The Jealous Potter
The Jealous Potter

Author: Claude Lévi-Strauss

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1988-04-15

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780226474809

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As Lévi-Strauss freely explores the mythologies of the Americas, with occasional incursions into European and Japanese folklore, tales of sloths and squirrels interweave with discussions of Freud, Saussure, "signification," and plays by Sophocles and Labiche. Lévi-Strauss critiques psychoanalytic interpretation and defends the interpretive powers of structuralism. "Electrifying. . . . A brilliant demonstration of structural analysis in action. . . . Can be read with pleasure and profit by anyone interested in that aspect of self-discovery that comes through knowledge of the universal and timeless myths that live on in all of us."—Jonathan Sharp, San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle "A characteristic tour de force. . . . One remains awed by him."—Colin Thubron, Sunday Times "With all its epistemological depth, the book reads at times like a Simenon or a Lewis Carroll, fusing concise methodology with mastery of style."—Bernadette Bucher, American Ethnologist "[An] engagingly provocative exploration of mythology in the Americas. . . . Always a good read."—Choice "A playful, highly entertaining book, fluently and elegantly translated by Bénédicte Chorier."—Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, New York Times Book Review

Perspectives in Sociology
Perspectives in Sociology

Author: E.C. Cuff

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2005-08-31

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 1134722222

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Perspectives in Sociology provides students with a lively and critical introduction to sociology and to the ways in which sociologists are trained to think and work. The subject is presented as a sequence of different perspectives on the social world, all of them interrelated, sometimes in conflict with one another, and all contributing important and necessary insights. The discussion is backed up by extensive reference to empirical studies. This edition has been completely revised. A chapter on critical theory has been added in order to reflect the extensive work and thinking that Marx's basic work continues to stimulate. The chapter on research strategies now takes account of new developments in the philosophy of science that are relevant for sociological approaches. Throughout, the authors have rewritten extensively in their continuing desire to produce clarity, and to respond to the comments of students and teachers.

Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss

Author: Maurice Godelier

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2018-08-07

Total Pages: 561

ISBN-13: 1784787094

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One of the world’s leading anthropologists assesses the work of the founder of structural anthropology As a young man, Maurice Godelier was Claude Lévi-Strauss’s assistant. Since then, Godelier has drawn on this experience to develop a profound and intimate grasp on the writings of his former teacher, one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Meticulously researched, Lévi-Strauss: A Critical Study of His Thought will prove indispensable to students of Lévi-Strauss and to structural anthropologists more generally. It is a compelling and comprehensive study destined to become the definitive work on the evolution of Lévi-Strauss’s ideas, at the heart of which lies his analysis of kinship and myth.

Potters without a Wheel
Potters without a Wheel

Author: Saswati Bhattacharya

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-06-24

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 1000598632

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This book is an ethnographic study of clay idol-makers of Kumartuli in Kolkata, India. Much of the visibility and identity of Kolkata’s creative culture has been dependent upon the clay artists of Kumartuli for the last 100 years or so. This book explores the nature of the carefully constructed identity of these idol-makers as mritshilpis , or clay artists, who, as opposed to ordinary potters, work with their hands instead of a wheel. It looks at how the mritshilpis consciously embrace and expand their market based on this variation and elevated status as artists instead of artisans and studies the embeddedness of this identity within the commodity markets. It also shows that commodity markets, in this case the market of clay idols, are an outcome of trends of urbanisation, popular demand, corporatisation and commodification of culture, all of which have shaped the contours of clay idol-making as not only an occupation but a brand identity. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and in-depth interviews, the book highlights the larger structural relationship between urbanisation, indigenous occupational categories and identity politics. It will be indispensable to scholars and researchers of sociology, social anthropology, political studies, cultural history, urban economy, art history, urbanisation, cultural studies and urban sociology.

Lévi-Strauss
Lévi-Strauss

Author: Emmanuelle Loyer

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2019-01-18

Total Pages: 908

ISBN-13: 1509512012

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Academic, writer, figure of melancholy, aesthete – Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) not only transformed his academic discipline, he also profoundly changed the way that we view ourselves and the world around us. In this award-winning biography, historian Emmanuelle Loyer recounts Lévi-Strauss’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, Lévi-Strauss left Paris in 1935 for São 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 – to avoid confusion with the jeans manufacturer. Lévi-Strauss’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, Tristes Tropiques offered indisputable proof of this the world over. During those years, Lévi-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 ‘view from afar’, enabling him to deliver incisive and subversive diagnoses of our waning modernity. Loyer’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 Lévi-Strauss less as a modern than as our own great and disquieted contemporary.

Asian Nationalism in an Age of Globalization
Asian Nationalism in an Age of Globalization

Author: Roy Starrs

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-23

Total Pages: 499

ISBN-13: 1134278691

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Topics include: Government Intervention and Economic Growth in East Asia, Agricultural Nationalism in the Age of Globalization, Japan's Dominance and Multi- Racial Coalitions in Malaysia.

Chiasmus and Culture
Chiasmus and Culture

Author: Boris Wiseman

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2014-03-01

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0857459619

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Anyone who has heard of chiasmus is likely to think of it as no more than a piece of rhetorical playfulness, at times challenging, though useful for supplying a memorable sententious note or for performing a pirouette of syntax and thought. Going beyond traditional rhetoric, this volume is concerned with the possibility of using the figure of chiasmus to model a broad array of phenomena, from human relations to artistic creation. In the process, it provides the first book-length study not of chiasmus, the rhetorical figure, but of chiastic thought. The contributors are concerned with chiastic inversion and its place in social interactions, cultural creation, and more generally human thought and experience.They explore from a variety of angles what the unsettling logic of chiasmus (from the Greek meaning “cross-wise”), has to tell us about the world, human relations, cultural patterns, psychology, and artistic and poetic creation.