THE RAW AND THE COOKED

by Claude Levi-Strauss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 15, 1968

Methodology is the mistress of the Western world. Freud, Einstein, modern art, music, literature, computerized economics, the space age--wherever you turn you are confronted with a particular way of looking at phenomena, social or otherwise. Change is omnipresent, but order is paramount, re a technique, a system, an idea. For Levi-Strauss, the Rosetta Stone is analyse structurale. ""Structuralism is the search for unsuspected harmonies. It is the discovery of a system of relations latent in a series of objects."" Objects, or words, or myths, or just about anything. . . The Raw and the Cooked, the first of Levi-Strauss' projected three volume Mythologiques, concerns itself with the ""empirical categories"" of cooking (or eating)--""the raw and the cooked, the fresh and the decayed, the moistened and the burned, etc.""--as they have evolved in 187 varying myths collected from 20 South American tribes. Stated thus, Levi-Strauss' ethnographic exhumations may sound bizarre. (perhaps that's why everyone from Sartre to Myra Breckinridge has had something to say about them). But there's a method in the madness, especially so since Levi-Strauss' spiraling investigations (a chain of polarities, contrasts, oppositions), draw out, like the progress of the bee from the flower to the hive to the honeycomb, fundamental parallels between primitive and modern cultures, or between ""cold/static"" and ""hot/mobile"" societies. These parallels demonstrate that the mentality (or mores or artifacts) of the savage is as ""sophisticated"" as that of the technocrat, and that there is, consequently, no evolutionary splendor or purpose in human history (goodbye to both the Left and the Right). There are only ""different"" values, needs, codes of behavior, privileges and constraints. In the end, one sees in Levi-Strauss poet and mandarin. Rousseau and Cassirer. His structural anthropology is really a brilliant philosophical debate.

Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1968

ISBN: 0226474879

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1968

Categories: NONFICTION