Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World

“Lévi-Strauss was certainly not the only French intellectual to develop a fascination for Japan. Indeed, Japan’s sculptured landscapes, highly stylized rituals and philosophies of self-denial struck a particular chord with his structuralist contemporaries, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. But the impressions gathered here are distinctively his, and indeed sometimes read as if they were lifted straight from the Mythologiques… There is much to admire [here]… Still fizzing with ideas as he approached eighty, Claude Lévi-Strauss never relented on his increasingly lonely structuralist quest. His fascination for Japanese traditions, similar to his lifelong obsession with ethnography in general, stemmed in part from his feeling of alienation from modernity.”—Patrick Wilcken, The Times Literary Supplement

“This new translation provides an accessible gloss on the unique special contributions of a dynamic thinker who forever altered the course of anthropology.”—Publishers Weekly