Christopher Lehrich said:
>> If we're going to get out of this somehow, we have to
master pretty much the whole Levi-Strauss corpus and at least the first
third or so of the Derrida corpus. <<
I have to say that this has left me curious. While Levi-Strauss is still well-known among anthropologists, and while some of his work is still cited, for the most part he has had little or no influence on the field as it stands today. I read some Levi-Strauss as an undergrad and in my graduate program, but on the whole it was mostly from a historical perspective, and even then a great deal of attention was paid to the gaps in his reasoning.
Before people get too far into the work a scholar who was prominent half a century ago and whose theories fell by the wayside in his own discipline decades before our time, I'd like to know what exactly a detailed study of Levi-Strauss can offer the field of ritual studies that we cannot find in the work of subsequent theorists.
Dan Harms
Coordinator of Instruction Librarian
State University of New York - Cortland
Memorial Library B-110
(607) - 753-4042
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