My scarily erudite beloved is currently doing an Advanced Theory tutorial with one of her students, an art historian interested in architecture. Now they are doing structuralism and asking for suggestions. They have two sessions alotted to it, and want suggestions about ‘which Levi-Strauss to read.’ I suggested that for the first session they read “Animals are good to think and good to prohibit” by Stanley Tambiah and “The Kabyle house, or the world reversed” by Pierre Bourdieu. After that they can move to the first two chapters of our namesake, Savage Minds.
Does anyone have any other ideas? Classic structuralist writing useful to art historians with a focus on architecture? Please do not reccomend “Myth and Meaning” or anything by Roland Barthes.
I tend to come at it from its linguistic origins. Saussure and Jakobson. A course in General Linguistics and Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning. I also think that Foucault’s The Order of Discourse (The afterwards to The ORder of Things) is very useful.
I happen to like Barthes… but I’ll keep my mouth shut as requested.
My favorite reader of Levi-Strauss is Jim Boon (natch).
Boon, James A. “The Reticulated Corpus of Claude Levi-Strauss.” The Philosophy
of Discourse. Ed. Chip Sills and George H. Jensen (1992)
Or:
Boon, James A. “From Symbolism to Structuralism: Levi-Strauss in a Literary Tradition.” Harper & Row, 1972
About, architecture/social life, what about:
Carsten, J. and S.-H. Jones, eds (1995) About the House: Levi-Strauss and Beyond
In keeping with Boonian emphases (non-programmatic, triangulated, humanistic), I’d obviously recommend Tristes Tropiques together with Saudades do Brasil, both of which give a strong sense of L-S’s quite brilliant aesthetic sensabilities — which may be of interest to an art history/architecture types.
You know I didn’t think of About The House at all — despite the fact that is right up that alley. I think they are looking for something that is more focused on remedial theory, so that at cocktail parties the student can say “I’ve read Levi-Strauss.” I have a weakness for Boon as well — although I’m not sure I’d inflict it on anyone else. I’ll check out the reticulated corpus paper, though, in my Copious Free Time.
I would suggest the classical structuralist analysis of ‘The Order in the Atoni house’, by Cunningham. From 1964, pulished in Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde.
Architecture and Order edited by Mike Parker Pearson and Colin Richards has some pretty good introductory stuff. Many of the chapters within are of a structuralist bent, written by archaeologists, architects, and ethnographers. The case studies range from the European Neolithic, to Ancient Rome, to modern Pyschiatric wards, to the Dogon of Mali.
Not so “classic” but by L-S and relevant is _The Way of the Masks_ which is about art and (in the chapter on Kwakiutl Social Organization, where the whole “house societies” thing is first proposed by him. For a version of a more classic structuralist argument that both works and points to the limits of structuralist analyses, what about Sahlins’ discussion of clothing in “La Pensee Bourgeois” (in _Culture and practical Reason_–the argument does illuminate the way contrastive features of the clothing mark the distinctions between the ceremoinal and the workaday but says not so much about why rap singers might wear Tommy Hilfiger–I’d read the Sahlins over the Tambiah (haven’t read the Bourdieu you mention, is it like the bit on the house in Outline?)
I am very taken by the idea of a person interested in art history–which certainly implies she has a feeling for the beauty of art–and also hoping to connect the criticism of a work of art to structuralism as presented by Claude Levi-Strauss.
I have written about this from the point of view of Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy founded by Eli Siegel, a scientific approach to value. Like structuralism it also places primary importance in opposites. It is unlike structuralism, which analyses through opposites but doesn’t say, This painting is beautiful or not beautiful.
I hope you’ll see why this matters if you look at my blog page http://perey-anthropology.blogspot.com/2005/10/aesthetic-realism-so-different-from.html
Since the main thing structuralism leaves out is value, and this is the main thing an artist is interested in: “How valuable, how beautiful, can this red be, next to this brown?” for example–the use of structuralism doesn’t transfer very well from anthropology (See Levi-Strauss’ TOTEMISM essay) to the analysis of art.
Rex wrote about Aesthetic Realism a while ago on his blog. Personally, I found this site devoted to Aesthetic Realism to be very informative.
In my experience (which may be atypical) most art historians are pretty over the whole idea of The Beautiful, actually. Or least are unable to use the term without irony given what’s happened to ‘Art’ and ‘The Sublime’ in the past century or so.
Speaking of crossing disciplines, I am reminded of the first time I came across the Tambiah and Bourdieu articles, in Mary Douglas’ little book Rules and Meanings. It struck me that it might be interesting to do an imaginary update of this book, given the conversation between disciplines that Douglas urged was never taken up. Does anyone know any cognitive scientists who could put readings next to anthropology?
As the art historian in question, I’d have to agree with Rex on the question of the Beautiful, Art, and the Sublime. I teach both art history students and studio artists, which has given me the opportunity to observe artists as they struggle with the process of creation. It is an enormous oversimplification to claim, as Mr. Perey does, that an artist is primarily interested in beauty, or indeed that beauty and value are somehow equivalent. Art history is not a particularly cohesive discipline, theoretically speaking, but I think few art historians would doubt the value of Picasso’s “Guernica,” an immensely powerful work that is at the same time ugly and even disturbing.
Many thanks to the more anthropological commentators on this thread for recommendations on reading. My student has found “Architecture and Order” particularly helpful (thanks Tim!).
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