From Honey to Ashes

Mythologiques #2

by Claude Lévi-Strauss

English, French (translation)

Genres: Anthropology, Mythology, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Sociology, Social Science, Ethnography

512 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist, well-known for his development of structural anthropology. He was born in Belgium to French parents who were living in Brussels at the time, but he grew up in Paris. His father was an artist, and a member of an intellectual French Jewish family. Lévi-Strauss studied at the University of Paris. From 1935-9 he was Professor at the University of Sao Paulo making several expeditions to central Brazil. Between 1942-1945 he was Professor at the New School for Social Research. In 1950 he became Director of Studies at the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes. In 1959 Lévi-Strauss assumed the Chair of Social Anthroplogy at the College de France. His books include The Raw and the Cooked, The Savage Mind, Structural Anthropology and Totemism (Encyclopedia of World Biography).

Some of the reasons for his popularity are in his rejection of history and humanism, in his refusal to see Western civilization as privileged and unique, in his emphasis on form over content and in his insistence that the savage mind is equal to the civilized mind.

Lévi-Strauss did many things in his life including studying Law and Philosophy. He also did considerable reading among literary masterpieces, and was deeply immersed in classical and contemporary music.

Lévi-Strauss was awarded the Wenner-Gren Foundation's Viking Fund Medal for 1966 and the Erasmus Prize in 1975. He was also awarded four honorary degrees from Oxford, Yale, Havard and Columbia. Strauss held several memberships in institutions including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society (Encyclopedia of World Biography).

Reviews

[James F · Rating 3 out of 5]

The second volume of Lévi-Strauss' series Mythologiques, this follows the same method as in the first volume (Le cru et le cuit/The raw and the cooked) which it continues (and which I read last month). As I could not find a free or inexpensive copy of this volume in French, and I already have physical copies of the last two in English, I had to switch to reading the translation.

The first volume began with myths about the origins of cooking, or culture as opposed to nature, and expanded to other myths which Lévi-Strauss considered as "transformations" where traits were transformed along various axes according to discoverable laws. In this volume, the subject is myths about honey and tobacco, which are investigated in the same way. In fact, it is almost all about honey and other foods associated with the dry season. Lévi-Strauss considers that these myths are connected with initiation, and have the double function of teaching the boys about providing food and choosing wives. As with the first book, it is much too complex to attempt to summarize.

When I am reading a fairly long e-book, I generally alternate with physical books, so I have something to read while my Kindle is recharging. I was reading this along with Leonard Susskind and André Cabannes, General Relativity: The Theoretical Minimum, which is also concerned with transformations (of coordinate systems) according to specific rules, and there seemed to be a similarity between the two discussions. I don't know which was more difficult, the relativity book which introduced advanced mathematics which I had to learn as I went along or this book which refers to almost three hundred myths by numbers, many from the first volume (my memory couldn't cope with that.) Both books had my brain giving me "buffer overflow" errors. Perhaps this represents a "structure" of early twentieth-century scientists?

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Expands the exploration began in The Raw and the Cooked by examining myths regarding the matter and means of cooking, nature and culture, which relate to the origin of tobacco and honey, the infra- and ultra-culinary, respectively. Relevant here is how these myths function as ideologemes legitimizing a sexual division of labor, providing honey or supplying meat, and forbidding the act of "seduction", enforcing the rules of exogamy. The derivation of the "equivalence" between the sexes on the basis of their reversibility within the context of M303 in the case of the Tacana is fascinating.

[A YOGAM · Rating 4 out of 5]

In diesem Band seziert der „Macher“ des Strukturalismus die süßen und bitteren Mythen Amerikas mit einer Präzision, bei der man beinahe den Rauch indigener Lagerfeuer riechen kann. Lévi-Strauss schafft eine eindrucksvolle Lichtung im aromatischen Dickicht und zeigt, dass selbst der Honig einer logischen Struktur folgt, die weit über bloßen Gaumenkitzel hinausreicht.

[Alienne Laval · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vol. 2 of the four volume "Mythologica". Structural anthropology and myth research.