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| omnipoetics:levi-strauss [2025/02/05 20:55] – [Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908 - 2009)] joshua | omnipoetics:levi-strauss [2025/04/24 00:46] (current) – admin |
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| ====== Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908 - 2009) ====== | ====== Triste Tropoiques (excerpt)_ by Claude Lévi-Strauss ====== |
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| Lévi-Strauss's thinking about human relationships with the self, other selves, and nature blends philosophical explorations about the inward facing work of studying identity with prescriptive scientific thinking rooted in sociology and structuralism. Critical concepts like //bricolge// and //the new wilderness// show an overlap between thinkers like [[omnipoetics:durkheim-on_ritual_and_theater|Durkheim]] and Rothenberg's project that promote universalizing poetics. | <WRAP center round info 60%> |
| | //Tristes Tropiques//."//Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward and Ethnopoetics//. edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Diane Rothenberg, University of California Press, 1983, pp. 57-59. |
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| Rothenberg presents an excerpt from //Tristes Tropiques// (1955) literally "Sad Tropics", published in French and translated by John Russell, pp. 126-27. "Structural anthropology" according to Lévi-Strauss attempts to work outside of the [primitive / civilized] binary. This way of thinking critically considers the fundamental relationships of social and aesthetic reality and requires us to know the structure from both the standpoint of an objective social scientist and a human being and a creative mind with immense sense perception. | |
| | Rothenberg presents an excerpt from //Tristes Tropiques// (1955) literally "Sad Tropics", published in French and translated by John Russell, ((Rothenberg Symposium pp. 126-27)). Lévi-Strauss's thinking about human relationships with the self, other selves, and nature blends philosophical explorations about the inward facing work of studying identity with prescriptive scientific thinking rooted in sociology and structuralism. Critical concepts like //bricolge// and //the new wilderness// show an overlap between thinkers like [[omnipoetics:durkheim-on_ritual_and_theater|Durkheim]] and Rothenberg's project that promote universalizing poetics. |
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| | "Structural anthropology" according to Lévi-Strauss attempts to work outside of the [primitive / civilized] binary. This way of thinking critically considers the fundamental relationships of social and aesthetic reality and requires us to know the structure from both the standpoint of an objective social scientist and a human being and a creative mind with immense sense perception. |
| Our ancestors, who were also preoccupied with the creation of meaningful aesthetic experiences, existed in a state of being before the break down of modernity, the breakdown of "the social bond" as Rothenberg summarizes. A restoration of this bond—a kind of joint enterprise between mind and nature—transcends the normative limits of human experience by means of passing through space and time. If humans have become disconnected from the psychic unity that underlies all bonds, connections, and transcendent experiences (like the creation and transmission of art), then the solution must find cure through "poetic wisdom". In other words, modern humans need fundamental realignment of their minds with nature. This is the ancestral wisdom brought down by Lévi-Strauss. | Our ancestors, who were also preoccupied with the creation of meaningful aesthetic experiences, existed in a state of being before the break down of modernity, the breakdown of "the social bond" as Rothenberg summarizes. A restoration of this bond—a kind of joint enterprise between mind and nature—transcends the normative limits of human experience by means of passing through space and time. If humans have become disconnected from the psychic unity that underlies all bonds, connections, and transcendent experiences (like the creation and transmission of art), then the solution must find cure through "poetic wisdom". In other words, modern humans need fundamental realignment of their minds with nature. This is the ancestral wisdom brought down by Lévi-Strauss. |
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| Instead of smashing our inheritance, Lévi-Strauss suggests, "[w]e should do better to accept the true conditions of our human experience and realize that it is not within our power to emancipate ourselves completely from either its structure or natural rhythms. Space has values peculiar to itself, jut as sounds and scents have their colours and feelings their weights" (58). Zooming into the micro structures and pulsating out to examine the macro-structure is a creative act in itself. This experiential approach to access our ancestor's wisdom through creative culture literally brings readers into an imaginative space where they can consider the orders of magnitude that structure humanity's "insect like" activity between the cosmic distances and inter-generational time. | Instead of smashing our inheritance, Lévi-Strauss suggests, "[w]e should do better to accept the true conditions of our human experience and realize that it is not within our power to emancipate ourselves completely from either its structure or natural rhythms. Space has values peculiar to itself, just as sounds and scents have their colours and feelings their weights" (58). Zooming into the micro structures and pulsating out to examine the macro-structure is a creative act in itself. This experiential approach to access our ancestor's wisdom through creative culture literally brings readers into an imaginative space where they can consider the orders of magnitude that structure humanity's "insect like" activity between the cosmic distances and inter-generational time. |
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| The synesthetic qualities of binding to the worlds of space, sound, scent, and feeling offer a twentieth-century literary respite in Symbolist poetry. The unity between nature with the human, and the somatic with the cerebral, reveal an intimate connection between the internal and the external world. These fundamental structural relationships can be studied, perhaps with more intensity, in the world of the imagination. The possibility of new distinctions, previously unknown connections and associations, they carry the potential to exist because the conditions to create them were carried from the past to the present, and experienced | The synesthetic qualities of binding to the worlds of space, sound, scent, and feeling offer a twentieth-century literary respite in Symbolist poetry. The unity between nature with the human, and the somatic with the cerebral, reveal an intimate connection between the internal and the external world. These fundamental structural relationships can be studied, perhaps with more intensity, in the world of the imagination. The possibility of new distinctions, previously unknown connections and associations, they carry the potential to exist because the conditions to create them were carried from the past to the present, and experienced |
| No wonder Lévi-Strauss cites the visionary poet Rimbaud's [[https://doctorhugo.org/synaesthesia/rimbaud.html |"Sonnet des voyelles"]] | No wonder Lévi-Strauss cites the visionary poet Rimbaud's [[https://chromaticcabinet.swarthmore.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Voyelles2.pdf|"Sonnet des voyelles"]] There are many aspects to Poetry, of course, some poets inscribe symbols of national unity in verse and narrate history through epic, but the asthetic turn inward in twentieth-century symbolist poetry invites the reader to withdraw from society. For a further discussion, see how Edmond Wilson traces the Symbolist desire for experience, which they inherited from the Romantics, and later traded "the experience of the outside world for the experience of the imagination alone" (Wilson 206). |
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| ====== Reading Responses ====== | ====== Reading Response ====== |
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| **Essential Question:** | **Essential Question:** |
| Lévi-Strauss, Claude. "from //Tristes Tropiques//."//Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward and Ethnopoetics//. edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Diane Rothenberg, University of California Press, 1983, pp. 57-59. | Lévi-Strauss, Claude. "from //Tristes Tropiques//."//Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward and Ethnopoetics//. edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Diane Rothenberg, University of California Press, 1983, pp. 57-59. |
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| Wilson, Edmund. "Axel and Rimbaud". //Axel's Castle//, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004 pp. 205-236. | Wilson, Edmund. "Axel and Rimbaud". //Axel's Castle//, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004, pp. 205-236. |
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| | {{tag>Structuralism essay anthropology French}} |
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