Claude Lévi-Strauss's Social Media
Shmoop eavesdrops on your favorite critic's online convos.
Dear Claude—don't want to be a big baby about things, but I feel like you kinda diss psychoanalysis. Don't you have room in your circle of compassion for the important contributions I made to understanding human thought, human pleasure, human misery…?
Well, I guess. But you sort of compared psychoanalysis to shamanism, which made me feel like a bit of a swindling New Age medicine man.
You're missing the point, then. My theories reject the whole "better than" thing. Just because you're a Western doctor sitting in your Viennese office doing talk therapy doesn't make your work more legitimate than the efforts of the shaman singing songs and healing by reciting ancient myths.
Hey, Claude, it's me, Mark Bittman, food writer for The New York Times. I'm writing a book on dirty food and was hoping to bounce a few ideas off you. I know rotten food is a big thing for you.
I'm putting together a conference panel on "Kinship and Popular Culture," and I was wondering if you would grace us as a panelist?
Well, I thought we'd look at the kinship structures of, say, the Kardashians and see what the patterns of marriage, the exchange of women, and alliance theory can tell us about television's most important tribe.
It's true that I am very interested in the institution of marriage, and I believe that the bonds across families create necessary social networks, but that family is beyond theorization. That's not a kinship system—it's a hot mess.
Wow. Not fair, Sig. I talk about many of your findings—for example, the conscious and unconscious. Remember my study of the Cuna Indians of Panama? I talked about childbirth and how conscious resistance to the pain of it is brought about by ritual.