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Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2009 12:40 am
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Claude Lévi-Strauss died last Friday. For those of you who don't know who he is, he is father of modern anthropology and one of the most pervasive names that haunted be throughout my university career. If you've even done anything with anthropology, comparative mythology, sociology, cultural history, linguistics, and a few other fields, you've probably run into him.
Whether you agree with him or not, and recently it's often not as newer theories come to light, people who's areas of study have been close to mine have a lot to thank this guy for, and we, the Rehab guild owe him a big debt because this is one of the guys who pioneered delving into the nitty gritty bits of society, letting go of the temples and the shrines for a moment and focusing on the everyday life of people living in these times, which has led to some of the most telling discoveries which affect Reconstructionalist Pagans today. Comparative myth owes him for his introductions of structuralism. He also because to focus psychology on the past, especially in his research of the incest taboo (which is a fat lot more than Freud can ever claim to have done).
It's probably fair to say that without at least his methods if not his research, a lot of us would be a lot poorer for knowledge, and possibly Gnosis, today.
I mostly wanted to know if any of you have been effected by his research like I have.
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Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2009 4:03 am
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Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2009 8:05 am
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Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2009 12:36 pm
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Posted: Fri Nov 06, 2009 1:07 pm
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demisara When I was learning theory, Levi-Strauss had already been delegated to Old White Guys 301. I remember my prof saying something like, "This guy was incredibly important to the development of our field, but I don't think anyone really gets this stuff." Since Claude was writing we've figured out that society is really too complicated to describe using his incredibly complicated models most of the time, and the social sciences have veered away from overly psychological analysis. That said, I thought structuralism was ******** beautiful theory, and I was pissed that no one in class wanted to talk about it. They were all "Woo, Margret Mead uses accessible language and discusses taboo subjects." I never did like the over all approach structuralism originally took, but for individual topics, as you said, it was a really beautiful theory.
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