The Global Sociology Blog

Liberation is starting an interesting weekly series in partnership with the National Institute of Audiovisual (INA - the television archives). They will publish segments of old television programs with important intellectual figures. The first installment can be seen here, an interview with Claude Levi-Strauss. Claude Levi-Strauss was the initiator of a major (and I mean MAJOR) epistemological shift in France (VERY simplistically, from existentialism to structuralism) thanks to his structural anthropology (excerpts here). The French intellectual scene was never the same… there is a “before Levi-Strauss” and “after Levi-Strauss”. Of course, I am still an enthusiastic reader of his work and he is still considered the most important French intellectual in France. And he’s still alive!

Unfortunately, it’s all in French, so, if you don’t speak the language (you mean the whole world is not francophone? Well I never!), you’re missing out on all the good stuff on the structural study of myths as language and the raw and the cooked as symbolic representations of the duality between nature and culture. I still think there is very little that is more powerful than structural analysis (and post-structural as well… damn, I have to blog more on theories, especially the French ones).

The good news is that there is a YouTube clip for everything, so, without further ado, let’s hear it from Pierre Bourdieu (gosh, I miss him!) - with sub-titles - on Levi-Strauss.