In 1974, when I was a graduate student in anthropology at Columbia University, I wanted to organize a discussion of universals. At the time, I was working for Margaret Mead as one of her assistants.
'But that music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated, that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by few, and that it alone of all the languages unites the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable - these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods and make music itself the supreme mystery of human knowledge' (Claude...
Although I haven’t been able to catch this latest offering from TAC, this video and the previous two, first aired a few weeks back should definitely be worth setting aside some time for over this (or any other) weekend – here’s a description of the first, Archaeology in Taguatinga Valley, from TAC’s website: This video describes [...]
THE FAME of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who has died aged 100, extended well beyond his own subject of anthropology. He was without doubt the anthropologist best known to non-specialists. This is mainly because he is usually considered to be the founder of the intellectual movement known as structuralism, which was to have such influence, especially in the 1970s.
Claude Levi-Strauss , the father of modern anthropology because of his revolutionary conclusion that so-called primitive societies did not differ from modern ones. He banished the whole idea of primitive man as separate from civilized man, and that the “savage mind” is a necessary to the creative process and is something we all have access. According to Strauss, the "savage mind"...
Today's schedule is A-B-Lunch-C-D Hau'oli lā hānau to my son Noah who turns 14 today! A - Social Studies 11 - Today with Mr. Jones you will be looking at the rise of dictators in Europe from the 1920's through the late 30's. You'll focus on Joseph Stalin in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Adolph Hitler in Nazi Germany, and Benito Mussolini in Fascist Italy. You'll need to look at...
Current Anthropology, December 2009, Volume 50 number 6 is now out, which as will be apparent from the headline, marks no less than 50 years in the field, and there are a number of essays contained therein which reflect on the past, present and future of this publication. Here’s part of editor Mark Alfenferfer’s introduction [...]
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news: What should count as an illness in the DSM-V? Asks Psychiatric Times with a brief discussion on the concepts of mental disorder . Addiction Inbox is a fantastic blog about drug abuse and addiction. There's an excellent article on the anthropology of office gossip over at The New York Times . New Scientist reports on a convicted murderer who got...
At a hundred, Claude Levi-Strauss observed the binary structure that death follows life. I was never really a 'believer' in the Levi-Strauss scheme. And yet... There is plenty of evidence that there is some sort of mental brain structure, in that we do learn languages and their grammar far faster than copying from those around us. There seems to be a meta-language structure in the brain that allows...
What a life. The LA Times has an obit by Thomas Maugh II: Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French philosopher widely considered the father of modern anthropology because of his then-revolutionary conclusion that so-called primitive societies did not differ greatly intellectually from modern ones, died Friday at his home in Paris from natural causes. He was 100. Part philosopher, [...]
Claude Lévi-Strauss, known as the father of modern anthropology, has died . He was 100 years old. Cultural anthropology was my field of study at university, and Strauss always loomed large as a revolutionary figure to be both admired and challenged. I was deeply affected by his work, including and perhaps especially the parts of his work with which I disagreed. Every time I stumbled across one...
Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation . Here's today's news: g Abodes - On its final flyby of Mercury, NASA's Messenger spacecraft has captured images of never before seen regions of the planet. Messenger is providing new scientific findings about the closest planet to the sun, and teaching astrobiologists about...
Take a moment to remember Claude Lévi-Strauss, a social scientist who took music seriously, indeed as a model for the discernment of structure in cultural artifacts that do not speak for themselves. In turn, the work of Lévi-Strauss was important to many composers, for example Luciano Berio, who used texts from the anthropologist's The Raw and the Cooked in his Sinfonia . I'm not well...
A collaboration between Ozgur Uckan and me, in honour of Claude Lévi-Strauss who passed away recently aged 101. Features music from Brasil, Angola, Hawaii, Egypt & Cuba, more or less around the tropics, and almost exclusively sad.
Amidst all the excitement yesterday, I failed to mark the passing of Claude Lévi-Strauss , without whom linguists, anthropologists, literary critics and many others would simply be wandering around describing everything as 'nice' or 'interesting'. Astonishingly, having died at the age of 100, the inventor of structuralism (alongside the structural linguists) outlived not only his own theory,...
Born in 1945, Helen Fisher teaches at Rutgers, in the department of Anthropology. She is a specialist in romantic relationships and the reasons people are attracted to one another. Before assuming her position at Rutgers, she worked in New York as a researcher for the American Museum of Natural History. She was at the museum from 1984 to 1994. Dr. Fisher received her Ph.D. from the University of Colorado