Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The eighteen essays collected in this volume have been selected and ordered to give what Levi-Strauss terms "a bird's-eye view of the problems of modern ethnology." As representative examples, these essays introduce readers to the methods of structural anthropology while affording a glimpse into the mind of one of the foremost anthropologists of our time.
""Structural Anthropology, Volume II" is a diverse collection. It is] a useful 'sampler' that gives a reader the full range of Levi-Strauss's interests."--Daniel Bell, "New York Times Book Review
"

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Author's Prefaceto the French Edition (p. vii)
• Translator's Preface (p. ix)
• Acknowledgments (p. xvi)
• Chapter I Introduction History and Anthropology (p. 28)
• Part 1 Language and Kinship (p. 29)
• Chapter II Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology (p. 51)
• Chapter III Language and the Analysis of Social Laws (p. 65)
• Chapter IV Linguistics and Anthropology (p. 80)
• Chapter V Postscript to Chapters III and IV (p. 96)
• Part 2 Social Organization (p. 99)
• Chapter VI The Concept of Archaism in Anthropology (p. 117)
• Chapter VII Social Structures of Central and Eastern Brazil (p. 131)
• Chapter VIII Do Dual Organizations Exist? (p. 162)
• Part 3 Magic and Religion (p. 165)
• Chapter IX The Sorcerer and His Magic (p. 185)
• Chapter X The Effectiveness of Symbols (p. 204)
• Chapter XI The Structural Study of Myth (p. 230)
• Chapter XII Structure and Dialectics (p. 241)
• Part 4 Art (p. 243)
• Chapter XIII Split Representation in the Art of Asia and America (p. 266)
• Chapter XIV The Serpent with Fish inside His Body (p. 273)
• Part 5 Problems of Method and Teaching (p. 275)
• Chapter XV Social Structure (p. 316)
• Chapter XVI Postscript to Chapter XV (p. 341)
• Chapter XVII The Place of Anthropology in the Social Sciences and Prob­- lems Raised in Teaching It (p. 379)
• Acknowledgments (p. 382)
• Bibliography (p. 385)
• Index (p. 399)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

By now, Claude Levi-Strauss' reputation and influence as not only the founder of structural anthropology--and perhaps the greatest living anthropologist--but also as a major contemporary thinker have become so established that any book he publishes is de facto an event. This second volume of his Structural Anthropology (the first was published in France in 1958) picks up where the other left off collecting the papers which have appeared in scholarly journals over the last fifteen years to offer, in the author's words, ""a bird's-eye view of the problems of modern ethnology."" They are organized into several groupings although each essay is also a startlingly coherent statement of Levi-Strauss' world view, since the structuralist approach is based on an immanent unity behind all languages, codes and systems devised by man. The initial essays in this volume pay tribute to his mentors--ethnographers, philosophers, sociologists, semiologists--and point to a direction for the future of social anthropology, later, there are several pieces augmenting his revolutionary rethinking of the kinship ""atom"" and the basis of social organization; the most developed section is devoted to ""that domain which I have been most concerned with for the past twenty years,"" the study of mythology and ritual as a means of communication. Levi-Strauss essential humanism--his facility for understanding people as people, even within his atemporal, scientific context--make him one of our most important arbiters of the meaning of ""progress. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

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. 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. (Bowker Author Biography)