Word: vi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Claude Lévi-Strauss passed away at last a little over a week ago, eleven months after his 100th birthday. In France, his death has been marked by all the mourning one would expect for a national legend, with the president and foreign minister offering up grief-filled tributes to a “visionary” and “humanist.” Here in the U.S., media reactions have been more muted: a faithful reflection of our general domestic indifference toward the intricacies of Gallic theory. (That the anthropologist shares his name with the most American...
It’s true that in many ways, Lévi-Strauss was the artifact of a much different world. His great legacy is structuralism, the idea that universal patterns of thought—most notably, the desire to create myths—underlie all human activities. Though that take may not be in vogue today (even in the ‘70s, one Cambridge University professor wrote that “despite his immense prestige, the critics among his professional colleagues greatly outnumber the disciples”), there’s something to admire in the impulse...
Despite numerous expeditions to study peoples as foreign as the Nambikwara tribe of São Paulo or the policy apparatchik of Washington D.C., though, Lévi-Strauss himself remained consummately European. “Every man carries within himself a world made up of all that he has seen and loved; and it is to this world that he returns incessantly, though he may pass through and seem to inhabit a world quite foreign to it,” wrote Chateaubriand a century earlier, an author whose "Voyage en Italie" Lévi-Strauss had read and quoted...
Such self-consciousness is on clearest display in Lévi-Strauss’ lovely travelogue-cum-memoir Tristes Tropiques. Indeed, Lévi-Strauss’ own work can be divided into two categories: Tristes Tropiques, and everything else. Cherished as a formative influence by many established anthropologists, the slim volume sets down in pearlescent prose all the bittersweet joys of the profession, absent in Lévi-Strauss’ more detached volumes of scholarship. This elegiac tone evolved into outright pessimism as he grew older; in one of his last interviews he flatly states that...
...course, it’s too easy to simply complain that the franchise has run out of ideas: this happened millions of dollars (and gallons of fake blood) before “Saw VI,” and cinematic originality has never been “Saw’s” strong point. The appeal, of course, is the blood and gore, and “Saw VI” delivers exactly what audiences have come to expect. Writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, also responsible for “Saw IV?...