La Alfarera Celosa

by Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude LéviStrauss revolucionó el campo de la antropología con esta obra, en la que afirma que los mitos de los indios son un fruto de su conocimiento sobre plantas y animales, sobre la sociedad humana y sus emociones, sobre el cuerpo humano y los astros. Así, parecería que los descubrimientos de Freud y sus discípulos van por el mismo camino que la ambiciosa ciencia de los indios americanos

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

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

[Gary Bruff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't derive much pleasure or knowledge from The Jealous Potter. I appreciate the effort, though. By 'effort' I mean the attempt by L-S to create a kind of digest of his monumental and, from the non-professional anthropologist's point of view unreadable, Mythologiques. In this comparatively short book, we are introduced to the meat and bones of L-S's later methodology. Although there are parts of the technique that come off as opaque (what IS an inverted function when you are talking about birds and sloths?), you come away as the reader with a strange and possibly 'emic' notion of how Native American Indians conceptualize their universe through myths. In other words, he does bring to light an oddly charming interplay between concrete ideas (like how a sloth takes a dump) and the more abstract formants of mythic systems. Compared to Raw and the Cooked, there are more 'semantically' derived concepts (as opposed to strictly 'grammatical' ones). Right off the bat, this makes the exemplar myths more intelligible.

The work ultimately disappoints, however, since we are left, even amidst bodily functions of all kinds, with a fairly disembodied brain. I can't say I learned much about Native Americans in terms of their lived experiences. I also think that it is odd how, after years of arguing that ethnology needs to be grounded in cultural context, he would name a book after an isolated motif in much the same way as Frazer did (Golden Bough, apropos to nothing, but presented by Frazer as central to the world's myths).

In brief, this is not a book I would recommend to someone interested in an introduction to L-S. A novice would be better off with Savage Mind (philosophical tour de force), Totemism (best concise elaboration of the structuralist method) , or Tristes Tropiques (a strangely modern if not post-modern ethnography).

[Mateusz Kasprowicz]

When he starts talking about Klein bottles it gets super heady. The last essay is brilliant and one of my favorite things CLS has written

[Roberto Yoed · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mythologies VI

[Mar Xinmas · Rating 2 out of 5]

No es una novela. Pero es el primer libro de antropología que me deja registrar después de intentar introducir anteriormente tres obras de esta materia.
Recomendarla, no sé, para estudiantes obvio, pero para meros interesados no, puedes acabar teniendo pesadillas con chotacabras y perezosos.

[Yann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Troublant mais intéressant.

[Laura Wiltshire · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very convoluted theory. He perfectly represents the intricacies of anthropological structuralism.