The book The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologiques, Volume 1, Claude Levi-Strauss is published by University of Chicago Press.

Claude Levi-Strauss, a French anthropologist, was the founder of structural anthropology. This theoretical position assumes that there are structural propensities in the human mind that lead unconsciously toward categorization of physical and social objects, hence such book titles as The Raw and the Cooked (1964) and such expositions of his work by others as The Unconscious in Culture and Elementary Structures Reconsidered. According to Levi-Strauss, the models of society that scholars create are often dual in nature:status-contract (Maine): Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft (Tonnies); mechanical-organic solidarity (Durkheim); folk-urban (Redfield); universalism-particularism (Parsons); and local-cosmopolitan (Merton).

Levi-Strauss's writings---some of which have been described by Clifford Geertz as 'theoretical treatises set out as travelogues'---have been enormously influential throughout the scholarly world. Serijnij nomer i kod aktivacii dlya avtokad 2009 hd. George Steiner has described him, along with Freud (see also Vol. 5) and Marx (see also Vol. 4), as one of the major architects of the thought of our times.

Levi-Strauss died October 30, 2009.

Why are the stars placed just this way? The stories of how humans are connected to animals - all peoples have stories and myths to explain the incomprehensible 'why' of existence.

Levi-Strauss was bucking traditional anthropological thought by contending that there isn't much distance between the primitive mind and the supposedly evolved mind. It won't surprise anyone to know that many collected myths from oral tradition cultures were mutated by the missionaries who then brought the altered stori Why are the stars placed just this way? The stories of how humans are connected to animals - all peoples have stories and myths to explain the incomprehensible 'why' of existence. Levi-Strauss was bucking traditional anthropological thought by contending that there isn't much distance between the primitive mind and the supposedly evolved mind. It won't surprise anyone to know that many collected myths from oral tradition cultures were mutated by the missionaries who then brought the altered stories to our awareness. Levi-Strauss's dedication to truth using his philosophical humanitarian mind is a gift we all need to unwrap more thoroughly.

I read this book in the late 80s with the ambition of getting through all four volumes of mythologiques. That didn't happen. However, I did learn a lot about ethnographic paradigmatic structuralism from this book. The book starts out making an analogy between music and myth. A piece of music is only music when it has one or more motifs which repeat and vary in structured ways.

So avant-garde atonal serial music is not music. Myth works exactly the same way; recurring motifs hold a story together I read this book in the late 80s with the ambition of getting through all four volumes of mythologiques. That didn't happen. However, I did learn a lot about ethnographic paradigmatic structuralism from this book.

The book starts out making an analogy between music and myth. A piece of music is only music when it has one or more motifs which repeat and vary in structured ways. So avant-garde atonal serial music is not music. Myth works exactly the same way; recurring motifs hold a story together.

To L-S the motif itself is not meaningful, as only the patterning and arrangement of motifs in the composition of the music/myth gives the work significance. The notes of a song played on an instrument do not have meaning the same way that spoken words strung together in a sentence have meaning. But these instrumental or mythic performances do have meanings and comprise ideas. However, there is much to dislike about this book. I feel I did not learn much about Native South Americans. Also, L-S ignores obvious psychoanalytical or ideological interpretations of mythic symbolism.

They just are not what he is after. And the endless barrage of myths and their mutations, flayed out in purely structural terms, can be overwhelming not to mention tedious and boring at times. But I am glad I had the discipline to read it.

Better books by L-S are Totemism, Savage Mind, and Tristes Tropiques.