This volume of Lévi-Strauss's writings from 1941 to 1947 bears witness
to a period of his work which is often overlooked but which was the
crucible for the structural anthropology that he would go on to develop
in the years that followed.
Like many European Jewish intellectuals, Lévi-Strauss had sought refuge
in New York while the Nazis overran and occupied much of Europe. He had
already been introduced to Jakobson and structural linguistics but he
had not yet laid out an agenda for structuralism, which he would do in
the 1950s and 60s. At the same time, these American years were the time
when Lévi-Strauss would learn of some of the world's most devastating
historical catastrophes - the genocide of the indigenous American
peoples and of European Jews. From the beginning of the 1950s,
Lévi-Strauss's anthropology tacitly bears the heavy weight of the memory
and possibility of the Shoah. To speak of 'structural anthropology zero'
is therefore to refer to the source of a way of thinking which turned
our conception of the human on its head. But this prequel to Structural
Anthropology also underlines the sense of a tabula rasa which animated
its author at the end of the war as well as the project - shared with
others - of a civilizational rebirth on novel grounds.
Published here in English for the first time, this volume of
Lévi-Strauss's texts from the 1940s will be of great interest to
students and scholars in anthropology, sociology and the social sciences
generally.
