Claude Lévi-Strauss was one of France’s most famous anthropologists. Indeed, he was one of France’s greatest intellectuals of the twentieth century. He also viewed Israel as a settler state. As is well known, Lévi-Strauss was Jewish. And, unlike some famous intellectuals, he “knew himself to be Jewish” (p. 467 – this and other citations are to the English translation of Loyer’s biography Lévi-Strauss). How could he not? Born in 1908, he spent his youth in exile, fleeing from the Nazi takeover of France. He did not have a permanent academic appointment in his home country until he was in his ea ..read more

Arjun Appadurai Ruth Benedict Allison Davis Natascha Döw-Schull Katherine Dunham Marvin Harris Epeli Hau‘ofa Zora Neale Hurston Edmund Leach Claude Lévi-Strauss Robert Lowie Bronislaw Malinowski Marcel Mauss Lewis Henry Morgan Laura Nader Esthew Newton A.R. Radliffe-Brown Renato Rosaldo Marshall Sahlins Edward Sapir Anna Tsing Michel-Rolph Trouillot Wilton Willis Eric Wolf ..read more

I recently read Wild Thought, the new translation of Pensée Sauvage from U Chicago Press. In fact, it was the first time I had read the book from beginning to end. I can now confirm that much of the middle can be skipped if you are not interested in 19th century debates about totemism, caste, sacrifice, and so forth. However, reading the book is incredibly strengthening and I highly recommend the new translation. There is a modest amount of useful footnotes, but really the translation is the star, not the new scholarly apparatus. It doesn’t reveal a new or previously-understood Lévi-Strauss, b ..read more

Tambiah’s biography of Edmund Leach is large, and the table of contents is not very detailed. But in fact the book is broken up into titled subsections, which I’ve collated here into a perhaps-useful analytics table of contents. I typed it up quickly so there may be some errors, including auto-correct-induced ones. 1 Edmund Leach (1910-1989): achievements 2 Childhood and Youth Web of Kinship From Public School to COming of Age in Cambridge Gloomy Forebodings at Cambridge The Gathering of Stormclouds The Chinese Interlude 3 Apprenticeship and the Second World War Malinowski’s Seminar Leach’s ..read more

I’m happy to announce that I have a new interview out at the New Books Network! This one is with Jack Glazier on his new book Anthropology and Radical Humanism: Native and African American Narratives and the Myth of Race. You can listen to it here or over there. There is also a page with a complete list of all my NBN interviews available if you’d like to see some of my other work. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the interview. Enjoy! Alex Golub: Hello everybody and welcome back to the new books in anthropology podcast, which is a channel of the new books network. I’m Alex Golub, a prof ..read more

While surfing the Internet for stamps with pictures of anthropologists on them, I discovered the existence of Bratislava Sušnik, of whom there is a stamp. I am obviously late to the game — Sušnik is celebrated for being the greatest Slovenian expert on Paraguayan anthropology ever, a founder of Paraguayan ethnography . There is a very detailed discussion of her life and career on YouTube which looks excellent but which I, alas, cannot really understand. There are many high quality pictures of her on the Internet, including this one which serves as a model for the stamp: In all of these pictu ..read more

Mary Catherine Bateson has passed. There is an obituary at the New York Times, Amherst, and other locations. She is famous for viewing human lives as works of art and urged that we live and analyze them as such. Krista Tippet’s On Being has a valuable interview with Bateson about this work. For anthropologists such as myself, she is famous for being the daughter and biographer of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Her passing moves their era of anthropology further and further away from us. This picture of Mary Catherine and Margaret is from the Smithsonian Archives. The image’s composition h ..read more

The latest number of the open access (yeah open access!) issue of Religion and Society contains an autobiographical reminiscence by Talal Asad and a series of short appreciations of him by his friends and colleagues. I found Asad’s life story very informative — I’m hardly an expert though, so ymmv. At any rate, the piece features a fine, highly-accurate portrait of him. Talal Asad, from the open access article “Portrait: Talal Asad” I am hardly an expert on Talal Asad, but at one point in my history of anthropology class I did do a lecture examining the intertwining lives of Siegfried Nadel an ..read more

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