Word: vi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...more than any of his previous movies, Avatar is wholly Cameron's world. The 2½-hr. sci-fi epic follows an ex-Marine named Jake Sully as he struggles for survival on an alien moon called Pandora, home to a tall, blue, humanoid species called the Na'vi and to a mysterious resource called unobtainium, which draws humans in a future century to colonize the planet. Jake (Sam Worthington) must inhabit the body of a human-alien hybrid, or avatar, to breathe the noxious air on Pandora. There he falls in love with a Na'vi woman and finds...
Building on the linguistic science developed by the pioneering semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure, Lévi-Strauss became a pivotal figure in the development of structuralism, which holds that universal mental structures underlie the behaviors, social relations and beliefs of virtually all societies in all eras. It was an idea with many critics, but in the 1960s, '70s and '80s, structuralism became a hugely influential school of thought, with offshoots--some of them just barely related to Lévi-Strauss's original thinking--in many other disciplines, including sociology and literature...
...vi-Strauss, who was 100 when he died on Oct. 30 in Paris, also transformed notions about tribal societies. When he entered the field of anthropology in the 1930s, "primitive peoples" were regarded pretty much as just that--mindless and crude. Lévi-Strauss penetrated the intricacy of their myths and cultural practices and found tribal peoples to be sophisticated and intellectually curious, a picture of them he laid out in his 1962 book The Savage Mind. And in his four-volume Mythologies, he showed the immense complexity behind the stories tribal people use to explain the world...
...sense of wonder never abated. Describing his first brush with Anglo-American anthropology after a cloistered education at the Sorbonne, Lévi-Strauss wrote that: “My mind escaped from the closed circuit, which was what the practice of academic philosophy amounted to: made free of the open air, it breathed deeply and took on new strength. Like a townsman let loose in the mountains, I made myself drunk with the open spaces, and my astonished eye could hardly take in the wealth and variety of the scene.” Until the very...
...vi-Strauss is best immortalized by the title of one of his greatest books, “La Pensée Sauvage.” “Pensée” translates literally as “thought,” but in its secondary meaning it can also signify a kind of flower. Lévi-Strauss combined both of these ideas in his own person—the unruly directions in which his thought bloomed speaking to a consuming intellect at once exquisitely savage and fiercely beautiful...