"Je suis allé une fois en Israël. J'ai dit à mes interlocuteurs que je les considérais comme les acteurs de la neuvième croisade. Ils m'ont répondu que c'était vrai, mais eux avaient amené leurs femmes. Pendant ce voyage en Israël, le seul endroit où je me sois vraiment senti chez moi est une église Franciscaine. A peine une chapelle, je crois."
Translation:
"I visited Israel once. I told people whom I talked to that I consider them as the actors/players in the ninth crusade. They said yes but unlike them we brought our women with us. During this visit the only place I felt at home was a Franciscan church. Hardly a chapel, I believe."
Claude Levi-Strauss passed away last week. A giant intellect, author of the groundbreaking 'Tristes Tropiques' ( Sad Tropics), an essay in Anthropology which researches the devastating impact of colonisation on the indigenous people of Brazil and the Caribeans. He's also considered as central figure of the Structuralist school of thought..
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
THIS is HizbullaH.
ReplyDelete<span>On its Web site, Al-Manar reported the book as "focus[ing] on the persecution of Jews during the war, but even more dangerous is the theatrical and dramatic method employed to narrate the diary [entries] in an emotional way." </span>
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1257770024277&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
<span><span>Nice comment on Claude-Levi Strauss vza.</span></span>
ReplyDeleteOh dear. Am I the first and only one to post off topic?
ReplyDeleteQu'un choc!
No not at all. No rules about that....I just thought you'd like to comment on Claude Levi, that's all.
ReplyDeleteThe data collected from the Amerindians and its complexity delighted him, and made him react permanently against reductionist explanations of culture, which implicitly denied the intellectual achievement that indigenous mythology and social thought represented.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/nov/03/claude-levi-strauss-obituary
"The individual subject, the self-obsessed innovator or artist so dear to much western philosophy, had, therefore, no place for Lévi-Strauss, and indeed repelled him. He saw the glorification of individual creativity as an illusion. As he wrote in Tristes Tropiques: "the I is hateful". This perspective is particularly evident in his study of Amerindian art. This art did not involve the great individualistic self-displays of western art that he abhorred. The Amerindian artist, by contrast, tried to reproduce what others had done and, if he was innovating, he was unaware of the fact. Throughout Lévi-Strauss's work there is a clear aesthetic preference for a creativity that is distributed throughout a population and that does not wear its emotions on its sleeve."
ReplyDeleteHad to go through this in Uni..
"He was charming and very considerate and respectful towards whoever he was dealing with, irrespective of status. I remember him at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, on the occasion of his being given an honorary degree, listening to students telling him about what they got from his work and not allowing them to be interrupted by the French ambassador, who failed in the attempt to barge in and drag him away in the direction of more important guests."
ReplyDeleteA wonderful fellow.
If Levi-Strauss proved anything it was that fact that when nations are formed through colonial assault, they treat the minorities with the same or worse than they experienced. Also, that individuals who treat entire groups as a whole, as totally worthless ot threatening, are really the dumb brutes that have nothing but ulterior motives or questionable designs.
ReplyDelete