Levi-Strauss, Anthropology, and Aesthetics: 85 (Ideas in Context, Series Number 85)
Cambridge University Press, 11/22/2007
EAN 9780521875295, ISBN10: 0521875293
Hardcover, 264 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
In a wide-ranging 2007 study of Claude Lévi-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 Lévi-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 Lévi-Strauss's aesthetic theory forms an integral part of his approach to Amerindian masks, body decoration and mythology. He reveals the significance of Lévi-Strauss's anthropological analysis of an 'untamed' mode of thinking (pensée 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. Lévi-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.
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. Lévi-Strauss' mytho-poem
Conclusion
between concept and metaphor.
Review of the hardback: 'It is evident that there is great expertise in these pages, and even for the non-anthropologist, much material whose interest it would be hard to deny.' Modern Language Review