The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss was one of the greatest intellectuals of the twentieth century. His work has had a profound impact not only within anthropology but also linguistics, sociology and philosophy. In this short book he examines the nature and role of myth in human history, distilling a lifetime of writing into a few sharp insights. It is a crystalline overview of many of the basic ideas underlying his work, including the theory of structuralism and the difference between 'primitive' and 'scientific' thought and shows why Levi-Strauss remains a hugely important...

"Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World" is the first English translation of a series of lectures Claude Levi-Strauss delivered in Tokyo in 1986. Written with an eye toward the future as his own distinguished career was drawing to a close, this volume presents a synthesis of the author s major ideas about structural anthropology, a field he helped establish. Critiquing insights of his earlier writings on the relationship between race, history, and civilization, Levi-Strauss revisits the social issues that never ceased to fascinate him.

He begins with the observation...

Gathering for the first time all of Claude Levi-Strauss s writings on Japanese civilization, "The Other Face of the Moon" forms a sustained meditation into the French anthropologist s dictum that to understand one s own culture, one must regard it from the point of view of another.

Exposure to Japanese art was influential in Levi-Strauss s early intellectual growth, and between 1977 and 1988 he visited the country five times. The essays, lectures, and interviews of this volume, written between 1979 and 2001, are the product of these journeys. They investigate an astonishing range of...