Lévi-Strauss, anthropology and aesthetics
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Lévi-Strauss, anthropology and aesthetics
（Ideas in context / edited by Quentin Skinner (general editor) ... [et al.], 85）
Cambridge University Press, 2007
Available at 14 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references ( p. 230-239) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In a wide-ranging 2007 study of Claude Levi-Strauss's aesthetic thought, Boris Wiseman demonstrates not only its centrality within his oeuvre but also the importance of Levi-Strauss for contemporary aesthetic enquiry. Reconstructing the internal logic of Levi-Strauss's thinking on aesthetics, and showing how anthropological and aesthetic ideas intertwine at the most elemental levels in the elaboration of his system of thought, Wiseman demonstrates that Levi-Strauss's aesthetic theory forms an integral part of his approach to Amerindian masks, body decoration and mythology. He reveals the significance of Levi-Strauss's anthropological analysis of an 'untamed' mode of thinking (pensee sauvage) at work in totemism, classification and myth-making for his conception of art and aesthetic experience. In this way, structural anthropology is shown to lead to ethnoaesthetics. Levi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics adopts a broad-ranging approach that combines the different perspectives of anthropology, philosophy, aesthetic theory and literary criticism into an unusual and imaginative whole.
Table of Contents
- Introduction: Ethnoaesthetics
- 1. The reconciliation
- 2. Art and the logic of sensible qualities
- 3. The work of art as a system of signs
- 4. Structuralism, symbolist poetics and abstract art
- 5. The anthropologist as art critic
- 6. Nature, culture, chance
- 7. From myth to music
- 8. Levi-Strauss' mytho-poem
- Conclusion: between concept and metaphor.
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