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Lévi-Strauss is a many-sided genius, so that it is still partly an open question what part of his work will survive after he crosses the Acheron. His heritage may overstep the limits of ethnology. Any description of his work focused on existing academic disciplines could miss whatever may prove to be the essence of his work. I have chosen the theme of local versus universal knowledge, because from one perspective a group's bodily and external universe is the sum of all it can know, but each group's universe differs from all others. Yet, humanity also has a common universe: some similarities are more potent than differences. This is one great question structuralism was set up to consider. It involves analysis of exacting factual data, as well as much methodological discovery, philosophical awareness and literary descriptive power. The peoples I studied, such as Mâori and Orokaiva, still perceived themselves, in 1960, as wholly enveloped in their own local system of thought. Today, their civilisations are not lost but their myths have been ordered by a new calculus, aimed at relating the core of their historical universe to another one, global in its range, contemporary in its forms, inspired by abundant objective knowledge and a metaphysical source of moral rules. As such transformations were not a field of anthropological study fifty years ago, it was only with the help of structural methods that I could hope to model the transformed relations of these plural universes, to discover by what hidden logic they took shape and how new frames were created to cope with new experiences. The reading list of structuralism begins in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, as early as Hobbes, Montaigne, Rabelais, Cervantes, Spinoza, who were all immersed in their transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovative thinking always operates on the uncertain border between light and darkness. On the side of light, it formulates new, explicit, clearly defined concepts, putting them forward for debate, hoping to convince while taking the risk of being contradicted or even rejected. On the side of darkness, it draws from a reserve of notions which lies within of the realm of the commonly shared views of an epoch or an established discipline and its traditions. Lévi-Strauss's thinking about the concept of symbolism illustrates this in exemplary fashion. This concept derives from a long philosophical and hermeneutic history. At the turn of the twentieth century, the most prominent figures of British religious anthropology - Frazer, Robertson-Smith - and those of the French school of sociology - Durkheim, Mauss - made it one of the major concepts of their theoretical work. From his earliest works, Lévi- Strauss has proposed to use it in a specific way and has elaborated, in this connection, original positions. He writes in 1945: 'No social phenomenon may be explained, and the existence of culture itself is unintelligible, if symbolism is not set up as an a priori requirement of sociological thought' (1945a: 517-18). He also adds: 'Sociology cannot explain the genesis of symbolic thought, but has just to take it for granted in man' (1945a: 518). A few years later in the Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, he specifies: 'Any culture can be considered as a combination of symbolic systems headed by language, the matrimonial rules, the economic relations, art, science and religion' (1950a; 1987a: 16). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It was in the fifties that Lévi-Strauss explicitly focused on anthropological knowledge, at a decisive moment indeed. A deep, to many readers troubling, difference opposes The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949a; 1969a) to a series of later, connected books beginning with The Savage Mind (1962b; 1966b). It testified to a completely new approach to ethnographic understanding. Lévi-Strauss himself confirmed the break. In between, ten years had passed, devoted to an epistemological reflection, echoed in homages paid to Mauss, Durkheim and Rousseau. Lévi-Strauss had definitely turned to a question first raised by Mauss, who left it unanswered, standing as a sealed legacy. When Lévi-Strauss came back from New York, he might have decided either to start new fieldwork in the Pacific or to pursue his theoretical research, turning to some non-elementary structures of kinship. These would have supplied a link of sorts to confront contemporary social constructions of family relations in post-war Western societies. Although he never forgot his concern for civil life, he finally chose a third option, precisely to reconsider anthropological knowledge as such. Three enigmas surfaced out of his preceding experiences. One is closely bound to structuralism, another to his Brazilian fieldwork and the third to Mauss's limited success in The Gift. All have to do with the very possibility of anthropology as a science. The uncontested achievement of The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949a; 1969a) had come at an excessively high price. To confirm his argument and give it a decisive perspicuity, Lévi-Strauss resorted to a mathematical representation, a specific application of group theory supplied by the mathematician André Weil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is common knowledge that the contrastive opposition between nature and culture plays a crucial role in the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss: he has used it in such a variety of contexts and for so many purposes, that for many it has come to embody one of the main characteristics of his way of thinking. It is also well known that Lévi-Strauss attributes to Rousseau the merit of having, in practice, founded the field of ethnology by inaugurating, in Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality, a strand of thinking on the possible links between nature and culture (Lévi-Strauss 1978b: 35). In other words, the problem of the tension between these two domains lies not only at the heart of structural anthropology, but is also what defines, according to its founder, the domain to which ethnology is dedicated and thanks to which it can claim a certain autonomy within the human sciences. However, the role attributed to this conceptual pair is not easily circumscribed in Lévi-Strauss's thought: it is at once an analytical tool, the philosophical stage upon which the story of our origins is played out and an antinomy that must be overcome. This conceptual pair is given a plurality of sometimes contradictory meanings, which account for its great productivity and the ensuing difficulties of interpretation. The aim of this chapter is to contribute to the clarification of this question by means of what is at once a critique and a tribute, because progress can only be made on the path one has chosen thanks to the advances made by previous generations and, from this point of view, the twentieth century, in anthropology, will undoubtedly remain the century of Lévi-Strauss, since his thought, even if one rejects it, has stamped its mark on our conception of this science, its aim and its methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the publication of The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949a; 1969a), Lévi-Strauss's work on kinship has acquired a somewhat ambiguous status: foundational, of course - a classic - but a classic whose specific thesis and concepts are frequently thought of as having little relevance to today's anthropology. After forming one of the two grand paradigms that polarised the field of kinship studies in mid-twentieth-century anthropology (the 'alliance theory' that became opposed to the 'descent theory' of British extraction) Lévi-Straussian theses (along with descent theory) fell under the fire of critics from culturalist, practice theory and feminist perspectives, among other tendencies that entered the anthropological scene from the seventies onwards - the decade that saw the demise of kinship itself as an anthropological concept, if not as a legitimate subject of anthropological enquiry. The news of its passing having been perhaps exaggerated, kinship remains a cherished topic of anthropological research. The field has, nevertheless, re-emerged from the fin-de-siècle doubts deeply transformed. Among the multiple aspects involved, the most conspicuous is the status of a conceptual and ideological opposition - that between nature and culture - that is central to Lévi-Straussian kinship theory, to anthropology in general and, more generally still, to modern(ist) thought. A keystone of all of those ideational structures, and of the more material ones we build from them, the dichotomy is today the focus of many of our uncertainties, and the efforts to deconstruct it are perhaps surpassed only by the efforts to reconstitute it - inside and outside anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Precursors Jazz has proved to be one of the most significant forms of music to arise in the twentieth century. Aesthetic considerations aside, it has been the source for the two most important forms of popular music in the West, and to a considerable extent elsewhere: the big dance band, which dominated popular music from about 1925 to 1945, and what is loosely called rock, in its various manifestations. Without jazz neither of these forms could have existed. As for ‘classic’ jazz, this term arose in the last twenty years or so of the twentieth century as a catch-all to subsume a variety of forms of music that existed before the arrival of ‘modern’ jazz in about 1945. The word ‘classic’ is a loaded one, chosen for its overtones of prestigious classical music, and reflecting the pressure during this period to assimilate jazz within the academic canon of great music; in this chapter, however, it is employed simply as a convenient term to cover pre-modern jazz, including Dixieland, swing and their variants, all of which share harmonic and rhythmic systems that are significantly different from those of modern jazz. Jazz arose in the United States at the opening of the twentieth century out of a unique set of circumstances: the presence of a concentrated population of blacks and racially mixed ‘Creoles’ in the New Orleans area; rapidly developing systems of mechanical entertainment, including the player piano, sound recording, and radio; a craze for social dancing; and a dramatic shift in American attitudes occurring in about 1910–25. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fascination American women held for the eyes and minds of the French, indeed all Europeans, was of long standing. It can already be seen among the first observers of the society of the New World, from François-Jean de Chastellux to the great Tocqueville himself. They marveled at the high spirits of young girls, at their poise in every situation, at “the extreme liberty that prevails in this country between persons of different sex before they are married,” and at the resolute bearing that matrons kept up even in the lonely Western pioneer life of those days. This fascination did not fade over the years, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century one regularly finds positive comments on the freedom enjoyed by American women, the near-absence of constraint and discrimination they encountered, and on the role they played in politics. The continuity of this admiration, which did not preclude certain criticisms, is all the more astonishing because throughout these periods a very different tune was heard in the United States: Women protested against the inequality to which they were subjected, and some of them struggled vigorously to end it, albeit with only partial success. This gap between reality and the image constructed by the French can be explained, however, by the real discrepancy that existed in this domain between Europe and the New World. Between 1870 and 1914, these views could have changed. American women were able to establish a certain equality in many areas of public life – except the right to vote in national elections – and to make it stick, but French women were not idle either, succeeding over the years in breaking some of the locks of their society’s ironclad traditionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If diamonds had begun the transformation of southern Africa, the industrialisation which followed the discovery of vast seams of underground gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886, followed by the renewed assertion of British supremacy in the interior of southern Africa, greatly accelerated the forces making for change over the entire region, and set the pace for much of the twentieth century. In the 1880s the sub-continent was still composed of a cluster of independent African kingdoms and Afrikaner republics, British colonies and protectorates; the huge new German acquisition of South West Africa was still largely unconquered. By 1910, with the political unification of the South African colonies, British ambitions of creating a southern African confederation seemed well on the way to fulfilment, while, to the north, British imperial frontiers stopped short only at Katanga and Tanganyika. All over southern African the annexation of African polities meant the establishment of colonial states, with government departments and courts, alien soldiers and policemen. By 1910 railroad arteries, often built at enormous human cost, connected the coast with mining centres as far afield as Bwana Mkubwa and Elisabethville (Lubumbashi), opening up new markets and releasing new sources of labour. Boundaries had been drawn which were to last beyond the colonial period, and it was accepted by the colonial rulers that the Zambezi was to be the boundary between the ‘white south’ and the ‘tropical dependencies’ of east and central Africa, although British Central Africa uneasily straddled the divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]