Ever since the rise of science and the scientific method in the seventeenth century, we have rejected mythology as the product of superstitious and primitive minds. Only now are we coming to a fuller appreciation of the nature and role of myth in human history. In these five lectures originally prepared for Canadian radio, Claude Lévi-Strauss offers, in brief summations, the insights of a lifetime spent interpreting myths and trying to discover their significance for human understanding. The lectures begin with a discussion of the historical split between mythology and science and the evidence that mythic levels of understanding are being reintegrated in our approach to knowledge. In an extension of this theme, Professor Lévi-Strauss analyzes what we have called “primitive thinking” and discusses some universal features of human mythology. The final two lectures outline the functional relationship between mythology and history and the structural relationship between mythology and music.

Over the course of a monumental career, Claude Lévi-Strauss has interwoven artistic materials and themes into his seminal analyses of the “savage mind.” Now the world's most famous anthropologist turns his attention entirely to the domain of aesthetics. In a series of brilliant but meticulous studies, he ranges widely across the domains of painting, music, literature and the plastic arts, his fertile mind opening more general, philosophical perspectives. Look, Listen, Read begins with an analysis of Nicolas Poussin's method of visual composition, and after drawing a surprising parallel with Marcel Proust, moves into a fascinating discussion, joined by Ingres and Delacroix among others, on the art of painting. Next the author turns to music, taking his inspiration from an inquiry into certain chord modulations in Rameau's opera Castor et Pollux, which at the time of its composition were considered a musical breakthrough. The book then considers the nature of the “beautiful.” The reference point here remains the French Enlightenment, and in particular Diderot's reflections on painting. Focusing on the aesthetic controversies of this same period, but with regard to music, a fascinating series of chapters revives the work of the largely forgotten eighteenth-century musicologist Michel-Paul-Guy de Chabanon and his surprisingly contemporary discussion of music's partial resemblance to language. This leads to a consideration of the relations of words to music in opera, where Lévi-Strauss reveals something of his own tastes in music while engaging in a critical review of a work by his recently deceased friend and colleague, Michel Leires. The relation between sounds and colors is considered next, largely through a breathtaking examination of a famous but difficult poem by Arthur Rimbaud. There follows an exchange of notes with André Breton, written some fifty years ago, on the nature of the work of art. In the book's concluding chapters the author dons the more familiar mantle of the anthropologist, and by looking at the myths of the American Indians, offering an analysis of their understanding of the place of art and of the artist in their own societies. Look, Listen, Read is a truly original work, far removed from the intellectual fads that mark contemporary discussions on aesthetics, as Lévi-Strauss advances into new territory even as he remains faithful to his structuralist inspiration. The book weaves a dense tissue of connections, correspondences, and principles, while at the same time remaining sensitive to the specificities of each of the beaux-arts. In a valedictory statement capping a lifetime's work, Lévi-Strauss has made a major new contribution to our understanding of the place of art in human life, the nature of its appeal, the source of its creativity, and its universality.

The published work of Claude Levi-Strauss over the last three and a half decades has established him as one of the world′s most innovative anthropologists. Yet throughout this period he was maintaining a full taching commitment in Paris. The pieces in Anthropology and Myth illustrate (in his own words) ′the efforts, the tentative advances and retreats and now and again the achievements of a thought process during some thirty-two years that amount to a large propotion of an individual life and the span of a generation′. Levi-Strauss used to the lecture theatre as a workshop in which to try out and develop new ideas, and many of the familiar themes of his books will be found here: analysis of myth and ritual, totemism, kinship, marriage and social structure. Offering a unique glimpse of the genesis of such subjects throughout his teaching career, this book provides a sketchbook of the themes painted elsewhere in larger, more finished form, and thus forms a document of vital importance for the history of anthropological thought.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Claude Levi-Strauss's fascination with Northwest Coast Indian art dates back to the late 1930s. "Sometime before the outbreak of the Second World War," he writes, "I had already bought in Paris a Haida slate panel pipe." In New York in the early forties, he shared his enthusiasm with a group of Surrealist refugee artists with whom he was associated. "Surely it will not be long," he wrote in an article published in 1943, "before we see the collections from this part of the world moved from ethnographic to fine arts museums to take their just place amidst the antiquities of Egypt of Persia and the works of medieval Europe. For this art is not unequal to the greatest, and, in the course of the century and a half of its history that is known to us, it has shown evidence of a superior diversity and has demonstrated apparently inexhaustible talents for renewal." In The Way of the Masks , first published more than thirty years later, he returned to this material, seeking to unravel a persistent problem that he associated with a particular mask, the Swaihwe, which is found among certain tribes of coastal British Columbia. This book, now available for the first time in an English translation, is a vivid, audacious illustration of Levi-Strauss's provocative structural approach to tribal art and culture. Bringing to bear on the Swaihwe masks his theory that mythical representations cannot be understood as isolated objects, Levi-Strausss began to look for links among them, as well as relationships between these and other types of masks and myths, treating them all as parts of a dialogue that has been going on for generations among neighboring tribes. The wider system that emerges form his investigation uncovers the association of the masks with Northwest coppers and with hereditary status and wealth, and takes the reader as far north as the Dene of Alaska, as far south as the Yurok of northern California, and as far away in time and space as medieval Europe. As one reader said of this book, "It will be controversial, as his work always is, and it will stimulate more scholarship on the Northwest Coast than any other single book that I can think of."

"In olden days, in a village peopled by animal creatures, lived Wild Cat (another name for Lynx). He was old and mangy, and he was constantly scratching himself with his cane. From time to time, a young girl who lived in the same cabin would grab the cane, also to scratch herself. In vain Wild Cat kept trying to talk her out of it. One day the young lady found herself pregnant; she gave birth to a boy. Coyote, another inhabitant of the village, became indignant. He talked all of the population into going to live elsewhere and abandoning the old Wild Cat, his wife, and their child to their fate . . . " So begins the Nez Percé myth that lies at the heart of The Story of Lynx , Claude Lévi-Strauss's most accessible examination of the rich mythology of American Indians. In this wide-ranging work, the master of structural anthropology considers the many variations in a story that occurs in both North and South America, but especially among the Salish-speaking peoples of the Northwest Coast. He also shows how centuries of contact with Europeans have altered the tales. Lévi-Strauss focuses on the opposition between Wild Cat and Coyote to explore the meaning and uses of gemellarity , or twinness, in Native American culture. The concept of dual organization that these tales exemplify is one of non-equivalence: everything has an opposite or other, with which it coexists in unstable tension. In contrast, Lévi-Strauss argues, European notions of twinness—as in the myth of Castor and Pollux—stress the essential sameness of the twins. This fundamental cultural difference lay behind the fatal clash of European and Native American peoples. The Story of Lynx addresses and clarifies all the major issues that have occupied Lévi-Strauss for decades, and is the only one of his books in which he explicitly connects history and structuralism. The result is a work that will appeal to those interested in American Indian mythology.