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Jonathan Taylor writes:
Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has died at 100.
Updating: John Updike praised The Origin of Table Manners in 1979, though he found missed any sense of "the arthropoid breath" in CLS's "science of mythology": "It is beautiful like a clock, and cool like a clock—a strangely elegant heirloom from the torture-prone, fear-ridden jungles and plains. Its orderly revolutions and transpositions have the inverted function of not marking but arresting time, and making a haven, for their passionate analyst, from the torsion and heat of the modern age."
Comments
I remember reading Updike’s review of Lévi-Strauss’s “The Origin of Table Manners†when it appeared in the magazine (“A Feast of Reason,†July 30, 1979) and enjoying its audacity immensely. I say “audacity,†because even though Updike was a layman when it came to things anthropological, he did not flinch from pointing out what appeared to him to be a nonsensical element in Lévi-Strauss’s vast system of thought. To illustrate his point, Updike picked out a vivid example, namely, Lévi-Strauss’s analogy between honey and menstrual blood. I’ll not go into detail here. Suffice it to say, Updike persuasively shows Lévi-Strauss’s analysis to be “less a pragmatic servicing of reality than the execution of a fiendishly difficult, self-imposed intelligence test.†The review – one of the best I’ve ever read - is included in Updike’s great 1983 collection, “Hugging The Shore.â€