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Article: Recent highlights from the Ideas blog ; Levi-Strauss, the total anthropologist; Brainiac
- Article from:
- The Boston Globe (Boston, MA)
- Article date:
- November 8, 2009
CopyrightCopyright 2009 The Boston Globe. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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CLAUDE LeVI-STRAUSS, who died on Oct. 30, age 100, was an
extraordinarily influential figure in France by the early 1960s, but
"hardly known in this country," according to a young Susan Sontag.
Sontag, therefore, took it upon herself to hail him in a 1963 essay,
published in the New York Review of Books, that helped to broaden
his reputation. It later appeared, in expanded form, as "The
Anthropologist as Hero," in her collection "Against Interpretation."
Levi-Strauss, Sontag wrote, was prototypically modern in that he
had responded to the alienating aspects of contemporary life - its
accelerating speed, its homogeneity - by immersing himself in its
opposite: the exotic, the hyperlocal, ...