Claude Lévi-Strauss, the 'father of modern anthropology' and author
of the classic Tristes tropiques, was one of the most influential
intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century. Dislodging
Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir from the pinnacle of French intellectual
life in the 1950s, he brought about a sea change in Western thought and
inspired a generation of thinkers and writers, including Michel
Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan with his structuralist
theories.
Lévi-Strauss's bohemian childhood and later studies of the emerging
discipline of anthropology in the field and the university led him to
mix with intellectuals, artists and poets from all over Europe. Tracing
the evolution of his ideas through interviews with the man himself,
research into his archives and conversations with contemporary
anthropologists, Wilcken explores and explains Lévi-Strauss's theories,
revealing an artiste manqué who infused his academic writing with an
artistic and poetic sensibility.
