PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Claude Levi-Strauss was born in Brussels in 1908. He held the chair of social anthropology at the College de France from 1959 to 1982 and was elected a member of the Academie Francaise in 1973. He died in Paris on October 30, 2009. Maurice Olender is maitre de conferences at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Jane Marie Todd has translated more than seventy books, including Catherine Clement and Julia Kristeva's The Feminine and the Sacred.
Claude L vi-Strauss invites us to think through the persistence of primitive thought in the rapid growth of rituals and forms of worship. By giving accounts of structure and history, he celebrates the architecture of mind, empowering facts not only for the pleasure of thinking but also for the diagnosis of unseen social transformations. The globalized celebration of Santa Claus -- that commercialization of the sacred -- has its origins in the Latin Saturnalia and Native American katchina; the political philosophy of the French Revolution owes its foundations to the cannibals of New Guinea; and the mythic thinking of societies without writing rivals the most audacious fables of modern astrophysics. Claude L vi-Strauss was the austere author of Elementary Structures of Kinship, but did he also become, with age, a novelist of ideas, like those French philosophes of the Enlightenment? I am not sure he would have appreciated this suggestion, but I can give him no higher praise: We Are All Cannibals reads like a novel. -- Julia Kristeva
