| The raw, the cooked and Claude Lévi-Strauss If it weren't for the great anthropologist, who has died aged 100, I would never have learned a radical new way of looking at art historyThe news that Claude Lévi-Strauss has died at the grand age of 100 brings back memories of my student days, which coincided with the intellectual dominance of this great French anthropologist.For young would-be intellectuals in the 1980s, his books The Savage Mind and The Raw and the Cooked had a biblical status. Lévi-Strauss was the high priest of structuralism. Building on the linguistic ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure, he argued that all myth, and hence all pre-scientific thought, can be understood in terms of binary oppositions – such as, er, raw and cooked. The strange and troubling grandeur of Lévi-Strauss lay in his insistence on the "synchronic" and contempt for the "diachronic": that is, he was interested in structures of thinking that endure over the very long term. He was apparently not interested in history, in change. Paradoxically, his ideas were of great interest to historians. I first encountered his work through a history book by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie that applied his methods to an 18th-century French folk tale. Other French thinkers, notably Michel Foucault in The Order of Things, sought to switch attention to the violent breaks and transformations of one intellectual order into another. But Lévi-Strauss reflected a deep, and great, tendency in French historiography to draw attention to the "longue durée".History and art history really demand to be thought of in this way. When you read a story about, say, the marriages of Henry VIII or the life of Caravaggio, it's easy to fool yourself into believing you are glimpsing a world much like our own. To grasp the real, radical differences between one moment and another, you need to comprehend the vast web of everyday phenomena (food, illness, buildings ...) that shaped everyone's existence. These things tend to change very slowly (at any time before 1900) and Claude Lévi-Strauss directed our attention to them. His influence is subtle and will endure.AnthropologyAnthropologyJonathan Jonesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Martin Amis says new novel will get him 'in trouble with the feminists' Author expects criticism of The Pregnant Widow, but insists it's "actually a very feminist book" that shows how his sister fell victim to the sexual revolutionMartin Amis's new novel The Pregnant Widow will explore his belief that the apparent freedom of the sexual revolution actually placed huge pressure on women, with his late sister Sally one of its victims. The author has written his sister – who died in 2000 after periods of depression and alcoholism – into the forthcoming book's storyline, and has attributed many of her problems to the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s."She was pathologically promiscuous. She really had the mental age of someone who was 12 or 13 and I think she was terrified. I think what she was doing was seeking protection from men, but it went the other way, she was often beaten up, abused and she simply used herself up," Amis is reported by the Evening Standard to have told a London festival audience earlier this week."She died at the age of 46, not of anything sudden; she was one of the most spectacular victims of the revolution. It would have needed the Taliban to protect her."The Pregnant Widow will also include "a minor Islamic theme", he told the Epsom Guardian, which "has to do with how Muslims and Christians seemed to be getting on reasonably well and we had no idea that this millennium old hatred would burst forward on [September 11]."Amis has previously come under fire over Islam, with Terry Eagleton accusing him of views appropriate to a "British National Party thug" following Amis's comment to a newspaper that "there's a definite urge – don't you have it? – to say the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order".He has been accused of misogyny in the past, but told the Richmond Book Now festival audience he was a feminist himself. "Women can't rise far enough to suit me," he said. "I'm a gynocrat – I'd like rule by women."The Pregnant Widow, described by its publisher as a tragicomedy, follows the lives of six young people spending a long, hot summer holiday in an Italian castle during the sexual revolution and the "sea change" of 1970.Amis said he had been told it would get him "in trouble with the feminists", but he insisted that it was actually "a very feminist book" and that "they haven't got a case".The title of the novel, which will be published in February 2010, is taken from the Russian intellectual Alexander Herzen, who said that after a revolution we are left with "not an heir but a pregnant widow"."In other words, revolution isn't a flip," said Amis. "It's a churning process that goes on for a long time before the baby is born. It's not the instant replacement of one order by another."Martin AmisFictionAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Children’s Books: Animal Spirits An animal alphabet in photographs and a book of life-size portraits of 20 animals. feeds.nytimes.com |
Books of The Times: The Man Behind Boy, Dog and Their Adventures A biography of Georges Remi, a k a Hergé, the Belgian artist behind the character Tintin. feeds.nytimes.com |
Quiz: 'Alice in Wonderland' How well do you know the tale of Alice in Wonderland? rssfeeds.usatoday.com |