We are all cannibals and other essays
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
We are all cannibals and other essays
(European perspectives)
Columbia University Press, c2016
- : cloth
- : [pbk.]
- Other Title
-
Nous sommes tous des cannibales
Available at 8 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Originally published: [Paris] : Seuil, c2013
Includes bibliographical references (p. 132) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
On Christmas Eve 1951, Santa Claus was hanged and then publicly burned outside of the Cathedral of Dijon in France. That same decade, ethnologists began to study the indigenous cultures of central New Guinea, and found men and women affectionately consuming the flesh of the ones they loved. "Everyone calls what is not their own custom barbarism," said Montaigne. In these essays, Claude Levi-Strauss shows us behavior that is bizarre, shocking, and even revolting to outsiders but consistent with a people's culture and context. These essays relate meat eating to cannibalism, female circumcision to medically assisted reproduction, and mythic thought to scientific thought. They explore practices of incest and patriarchy, nature worship versus man-made material obsessions, the perceived threat of art in various cultures, and the innovations and limitations of secular thought. Levi-Strauss measures the short distance between "complex" and "primitive" societies and finds a shared madness in the ways we enact myth, ritual, and custom.
Yet he also locates a pure and persistent ethics that connects the center of Western civilization to far-flung societies and forces a reckoning with outmoded ideas of morality and reason.
Table of Contents
Foreword, by Maurice Olender Part 1: Santa Claus Burned as a Heretic, 1952 Part 2: We Are All Cannibals, 1989-2000 1. "Topsy-Turvydom" 2. Is There Only One Type of Development? 3. Social Problems: Ritual Female Excision and Medically Assisted Reproduction 4. Presentation of a Book by Its Author 5. The Ethnologist's Jewels 6. Portraits of Artists 7. Montaigne and America 8. Mythic Thought and Scientific Thought 9. We Are All Cannibals 10. Auguste Comte and Italy 11. Variations on the Theme of a Painting by Poussin 12. Female Sexuality and the Origin of Society 13. A Lesson in Wisdom from Mad Cows 14. The Return of the Maternal Uncle 15. Proof by New Myth 16. Corsi e ricorsi: In Vico's Wake Notes Index About the Author
by "Nielsen BookData"