In a now much-read critique, Derrida claimed to show the weakness and the supposed
contradictions of Lévi-Strauss's interpretation of writing and
his characterization of modern industrial society by the pathology of written
communication. Lévi-Strauss is tweaked however for everything at odds
with what is normally understood as Lévi-Straussian analysis. It is my
contention in this article to argue that, by misconstruing
Lévi-Strauss's actual theoretical and epistemological
contribution to general knowledge, Derrida's reading of Tristes
Tropiques is exemplary and influential in that it joins together all the
essential didactic elements of ‘deconstructionist’ criticism,
and seems to be what exactly ‘lit-crit’ deconstructionism is all
about, which in the last analysis turns into an arrogant scholastics that only
ignorance or deliberate misinformation could allow.
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Campion, Pierre (1996) ‘De l'anthropologie à la
littérature: Tristes Tropiques de Claude
Lévi-Strauss’, in La Littérature à la
recherche de la vérité, pp. 325–35. Paris: Seuil.
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Bruxelles: DeBoeck.
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Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.)
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Derrida, Jacques (1967b) L’Écriture et la
différence. Paris: Seuil. (English trans., University of Chicago Press, 1978.)
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introduction au problème du signe dans la
phénoménologie de Husserl. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France. (English trans., Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973.)
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(2006a)
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his Legacy in Current Anthropology’
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79–107
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Doja, Albert
(2006b)
‘The Predicament of Heroic Anthropology’
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Paris: Gallimard. (English trans., New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.)
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Geertz, Clifford
(1988) ‘The World in a Text: How to Read Tristes
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14.
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Johnson, Christopher
(2003) Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Formative
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aujourd'hui. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. (English trans.
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22.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1962b) La Pensée sauvage. Paris:
Plon. (English trans., The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.)
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Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1964) Le Cru et le cuit (Mythologiques, vol.
I). Paris: Plon. (English trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman,The Raw and the
Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.)
24.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1966) Du Miel aux cendres (Mythologiques,
vol. II). Paris: Plon. (English trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman,From
Honey to Ashes, Introduction to a Science of Mythology, vol. 2. New York: Harper and
Row, 1973.)
25.
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élémentaires de la parenté, 2nd edn. Paris/Hague:
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and Rodney Needham, The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969.)
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Man. New York: Harper and Row, 1981.)
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(1990)
‘Our Master, Our Brother: Lévi-Strauss's Debt
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396–413
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Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.)
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(1978)
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