Description: Gathering all of Claude Lévi-Strauss's writings on Japan, this sustained meditation follows his dictum that to understand one's own culture, one must see it from another's point of view. For Lévi-Strauss, Japan occupied a unique place among world cultures. This English translation presents one of France's most public figures at his most personal.
Brief description: Claude Lévi-Strauss was chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France (1959-1982).
Review Quotes: Lévi-Strauss was certainly not the only French intellectual to develop a fascination for Japan. Indeed, Japan's sculptured landscapes, highly stylized rituals and philosophies of self-denial struck a particular chord with his structuralist contemporaries, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. But the impressions gathered here are distinctively his, and indeed sometimes read as if they were lifted straight from the Mythologiques... There is much to admire [here]... Still fizzing with ideas as he approached eighty, Claude Lévi-Strauss never relented on his increasingly lonely structuralist quest. His fascination for Japanese traditions, similar to his lifelong obsession with ethnography in general, stemmed in part from his feeling of alienation from modernity.
--Patrick Wilcken "Times Literary Supplement" (7/5/2013 12:00:00 AM)