Food & Culture CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS. I auspiciously came across a paper last night by Edmund Leach all about Claude Levi-Strauss. I had been looking to find some work by Strauss himself available on the great wide web, but who better to read than a man who widely publicized Levi-Struass’s work to the British academic tradition. Levi-Strauss, in his famous analysis of the raw, the cooked and the rotten, saw this triangle, in native thought, as being formed by the elaboration and nature/culture distinctions. Food starts as Raw, and then is transformed by either natural or cultural processes. Cultural processes yield Cooked food. Natural processes yield Rotten food. In his book The Raw and the Cooked, Levi-Strauss goes further to discuss how binary pairs, particularly binary opposites, form the basic structure of all human cultures, all human ways of thought, and all human signifying systems. If there is a common 'human nature' or 'human condition,' from this perspective, it's that everyone everywhere. Cooking foods also extends their life, easing worries about where the next meal is coming from. During this same period people began hardening arrow tips in the fire, facilitating hunting. So Claude Levi-Strauss's metaphor 'The Raw & the Cooked' to express the opposition between nature and culture is extremely apposite. Other articles where The Raw and the Cooked is discussed: myth: Music: Cru et le cuit, 1964; The Raw and the Cooked) he explains that his procedure is “to treat the sequences of each myth, and the myths themselves in respect of their reciprocal interrelations, like the instrumental parts of a musical work and to study them as one studies a symphony.”.
— Claude Lévi-Strauss, book The Raw and the Cooked
The Raw and the Cooked : Introduction to a Science of Mythology (1975) Vol. I, [Le Cru et le Cuit, as translated by Doreen and John Weightman], p. 113
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Mosaic is a quarterly journal published by the University of Manitoba that brings insights from a wide variety of disciplines to bear on the theoretical, practical, and cultural dimensions of literary works. Some essays highlight the interrelationship between literature and other disciplines, cultural climates, topical issues, recent discoveries, or divergent art forms and modes of creative activity. Mosaic’s essays also explore emerging trends in theory and literary criticism and address the nature and scope of interdisciplinary study itself. Of the four issues the journal publishes each year, at leastone is a special issue that addresses a topic of contemporary concern.
Founded more than 137 years ago, and located in the heart of the country, the University of Manitoba is the region’s largest and only research intensive university offering over 100 degrees, diplomas, and certificates – more than 60 at the undergraduate level including professional disciplines such as medicine, law, and engineering.
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Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal © 1991 University of Manitoba
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