Lévi-Strauss, philosopher among the Indians

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/philosopher-among-the-indians/

by Thevet • 10 years ago

36 14 10 years ago

the-tls.co.uk

gbog3• 10 years ago

"although Emmanuelle Loyer makes a case for Lévi-Strauss as a contemporary – and he has been canonized by the Greens – he has come to rest, rather, as a giant figure in the French cultural tradition: a monument to another time."

And you're surprised that we French have sometime a tooth against the Britons. This sentence is really poisonous. French anthropology is not of the "past glorious days and gone forever", it's still on top, for example with Philippe Descola.

jessaustin2• 10 years ago

One might suggest that your reading of that sentence is a bit prickly. The subject is not "French anthropology" in general, but rather Lévi-Strauss himself. Surely structuralism's heyday has passed, even within the context of French anthropology? (...and definitely in other contexts)

gbog3• 10 years ago

It's in the colon, which implies a causation, an explication or something similar. Here it means, CLS is a great figure of French philosophy, therefore a figure of the past.

ajeet_dhaliwal2• 10 years ago

I need to read up on why the "Indians" tag remained and persisted for centuries considering it must have not taken very long for Christopher Columbus to realize he was not in India after all. Certainly subsequent arrivals from Europe would have known it wasn't India so why did they all keep calling them that.

infodroid• 10 years ago

Building on this point, I think it feels wrong to use the unqualified Indians as opposed to American Indians to refer to Native Americans. Clearly the people of India are the default referent. So it is surprising to see the more confusing usage in a TLS headline.

benbreen• 10 years ago

In the past 10 years or so academic historians have switched back to using 'Indian' again.[1] For the most part, I'm told, simply because it's useful (from the perspective of prose style) to have a shorter synonym for 'Native Americans' to pull out once in awhile. But also because some indigenous groups have argued for re-appropriating the term 'Indian.' I agree that it's confusing.

[1] One example from an academic whose background is Shoshone: Ned Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (2006)

gnipgnip• 10 years ago

https://youtu.be/5YBwDNfOaxU?t=16s

ajeet_dhaliwal2• 10 years ago

Humorous explanation of the original reason but the persistence of it over such a long time period still baffles me.

GFK_of_xmaspast• 10 years ago

Certainly subsequent arrivals from Europe would have known it wasn't India

I'm not sure that all that many of the Europeans would have cared about the Native Americans for anything beyond slave labor or as an obstacle.

milesf• 10 years ago

I thought the article would be about THIS Levi Strauss :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levi_Strauss

erroneousboat• 10 years ago

thanks for sharing this

Lévi-Strauss, philosopher among the Indians

Related Stories