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Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture [Paperback]

Claude Levi-Strauss
3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
Price: £8.99 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
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Book Description

1 Mar 1995
Ever since the rise of science and the scientific method in the seventeenth century, we have rejected mythology as the product of superstitious and primitive minds. Only now are we coming to a fuller appreciation of the nature and role of myth in human history. In these five lectures originally prepared for Canadian radio, Claude Lévi-Strauss offers, in brief summations, the insights of a lifetime spent interpreting myths and trying to discover their significance for human understanding.
 
The lectures begin with a discussion of the historical split between mythology and science and the evidence that mythic levels of understanding are being reintegrated in our approach to knowledge. In an extension of this theme, Professor Lévi-Strauss analyzes what we have called “primitive thinking” and discusses some universal features of human mythology. The final two lectures outline the functional relationship between mythology and history and the structural relationship between mythology and music.

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Product details

  • Paperback: 80 pages
  • Publisher: Schocken Books; 1st Pbk. Ed edition (1 Mar 1995)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0805210385
  • ISBN-13: 978-0805210385
  • Product Dimensions: 13.3 x 0.6 x 20.3 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 98,615 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • See Complete Table of Contents

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Review

'Some thinkers are influential, a few create schools, a very few characterize a period... it is possible that just as we speak of the age of Aquinas or of Goethe, later ages will speak of our time as the age of Levi-Strauss... he is a maker of the modern mind.' - James Redfield --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From the Back Cover

'Some thinkers are influential, a few create schools, a very few characterize a period ... it is possible that just as we speak of the age of Aquinas or of Goethe, later ages will speak of our time as the age of Levi-Strauss ... he is a maker of the modern mind.' - Professor James Redfield, University of Chicago

In addresses written for a wide general audience, one of the twentieth century's most prominent thinkers, Claude Livi-Strauss, here offers the insights of a lifetime on the crucial questions of human existence. Responding to questions as varied as 'Can there be meaning in chaos?', 'What can science learn from myth?' and 'What is structuralism?', Livi-Strauss presents, in clear, precise language, essential guidance for those who want to learn more about the potential of the human mind.

Claude Livi-Strauss (1908- ). Anthropologist, who became the most prominent exponent of structuralism. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.


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Customer Reviews

3.4 out of 5 stars
3.4 out of 5 stars
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
24 of 26 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars Mythical Brief 16 Mar 2004
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This volume arrived with a postman’s knock and packaged in reinforced cardboard. Disappointment is therefore too weak a word to describe the discovery that the book is so thin that it could have been popped into an envelope and slid under the door. For a book entitled Myth and Meaning that promises insights into human existence, forty eight pages of well spaced text that can be read comfortably in an hour, certainly makes you think profoundly…about your lost tenner!

If you can stomach the price for such a miniscule intellectual snack then the Levi-Strauss lectures reproduced here will not spoil your digestion. Divided into five, lets say ‘bite sized chunks’, the author explicates a little of his notion of science and its relationship to anthropological and structural analysis of myth. Debunking the idea of the ‘primitive’ Levi Strauss endeavours to show certain correspondences between societies ‘without writing’ and methods of science in the modern western world. We can not think of ‘primitive’ societies as backward, rather through myths they develop often sophisticated and communally shared symbolic orders of meaning. Some of these such as the pan-American myths discussed in the second and third chapters, contain elements that describe manners of thought that we are dimly aware of in the west because our cultures and social circumstances have not demanded the development of this mental sector. As such the myth of the Skate and the South Wind of the American Indians is related to binary processes in computers and tribal narratives have parallels with the science of history.

The type of explanation Levi Strauss gives of these myths is at best tenuous but some of his suggestions are delightfully innovative and sincere and the fieldwork is of interest in itself. However, the lecture context is altogether too ephemeral to allow one to see the extent to which the various explanations arise out of systematic treatment rather than authorial whim. The case is not helped by at least three lazy editing mistakes that obscure the meaning of the argument, and dare it be said some needless repetition, which if omitted would make this poor emaciated script even thinner.

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars Short, but Sweet. 15 Dec 2009
Format:Paperback
This book is very short, and generally a bit expensive considering its length, but if you want a bite-size introduction into the world of structural anthropology, their are few better and more interesting places to start than here. What is the relationship between babies born feet first and harelips? Can their be meaning in chaos? Could people of some cultures literally see venus in the sky? If these things strike you as interesting, do get it and enjoy, you will read it over a good few times and short, as it is, it will retain it's freshness.
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4.0 out of 5 stars Brief essays into how myths permeate culture 20 May 2012
Format:Paperback
Anyone looking for a tome comparable to Joseph Campbell's output or an update on Bulfinch's encyclpaedia will be disappointed. For those, however, who are interested in reading Levi-Strauss' expository essays into some aspects of how myth and popular culture intersect, will be rewarded. This thin book contains 5 essays, entitled 1. the Meeting of Myth and Science 2. 'Primitive' Thinking and the 'Civilized' Mind 3. Harelips and Twins: The Splitting of a Myth 4. When Myth Becomes History 5. Myth and Music. Each was thought-provoking and got me contemplating how I conduct myself as a member of society, how I interpret the scientific evidence given to me, and how we collude in the perpetuation of historical reality. The final essay was more personal reflection than exposition, and thus was a bit disappointing. There are more revealing pieces written about how myth and music are related (or as Levi-Strauss argues, two branches of the same tree).
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