Vincent Debaene

In Our Time

In Our Time: Lévi-Strauss

BBC Radio 4

23/05/2013

Lévi-Strauss

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Lévi-Strauss

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. One of twentieth-century France's most celebrated intellectuals, Lévi-Strauss attempted to show in his work that thought processes were a feature universal to humans, whether they lived in tribal rainforest societies or in the rich intellectual life of Paris. During the 1930s he studied native Brazilian tribes in the Amazonian jungle, but for most of his long career he preferred the study to the field. He was the leading exponent of structuralism, a school of thought which was influential for decades, and was involved in a famous debate with his friend Jean-Paul Sartre, who resisted many of his ideas. His books about the nature of myth, human thought and kinship are now seen as some of the most important anthropological texts written in the twentieth century.

With:

Adam Kuper 
Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Boston University 

Christina Howells 
Professor of French at Oxford University 

Vincent Debaene 
Associate Professor of French Literature at Columbia University


Producer: Thomas Morris.

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