BOOKS
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a new historiography that does not consider human beings as only
the playthings of economic circumstance.
LEWIS COSER
"
LEVI·STRAUSSIANA
THE VIEW FROM AFAR By Claude Levl·Strauss. Translated by
Joachim Neucroschel and Phoebe Hoss.
Basic Books Inc. $24.95.
Whatever they may declare in public places, devotees of
Levi-Straussian structuralism are not going to feel happy about this
book. The form is similar to that of
Structural Anthropology
(1963) and
Structural Anthropology,
Volume II (1976), but whereas these earlier
symposia contained many of the foundation texts of the author's very
personal style of anthropological analysis, the essays in the present
collection have no obvious merit other than that they are "a gather–
ing of scattered and hard to find writings." The claim that the book
"has the pace of a short treatise on anthropology or of an introduc–
tion to this discipline, whose main aspects are largely represented" is
in no way born out by what follows, but the diversity of materials
makes reviewing difficult. My comments will be selective and ar–
bitrary.
There are twenty-three items in all; one first appeared in 1956;
one was previously unpublished; all the rest are post-1970.
It
is a very bad-tempered and egocentric book. There is scarcely
any reference to the post-1962 proliferation of "structuralist" think–
ing in such fields as literary criticism, art history, classical studies,
and general semiotics . But although Levi-Strauss ignores most of his
admirers, he finds time to abuse his supposed enemies . For example,
he denounces the work of "our English-language colleagues as they
repudiate all the achievements of our discipline, revile its founders
and the scholars who succeeded them, and insist that it is necessary
to 'rethink' anthropology from top to bottom, that nothing from its
past remains valid. This rancor has been vented by turns on Frazer,
Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown and several other anthropologists ..."
This particular passage is a jibe against myself (it refers to lec–
tures I delivered in 1958 and 1976 and to an essay published in
1965), but the author's main purpose is to assert that, notwithstand-
