We Are All Cannibals: And Other Essays by Claude Lévi-Strauss

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On Christmas Eve 1951, Santa Claus was hanged and then publicly burned outside of the Cathedral of Dijon in France. That same decade, ethnologists began to study the indigenous cultures of central New Guinea, and found men and women affectionately consuming the flesh of the ones they loved. "Everyone calls what is not their own custom barbarism," said Montaigne. In these essays, Claude Lévi-Strauss shows us behavior that is bizarre, shocking, and even revolting to outsiders but consistent with a people's culture and context.

These essays relate meat eating to cannibalism, female circumcision to medically assisted reproduction, and mythic thought to scientific thought. They explore practices of incest and patriarchy, nature worship versus man-made material obsessions, the perceived threat of art in various cultures, and the innovations and limitations of secular thought. Lévi-Strauss measures the short distance between "complex" and "primitive" societies and finds a shared madness in the ways we enact myth, ritual, and custom. Yet he also locates a pure and persistent ethics that connects the center of Western civilization to far-flung societies and forces a reckoning with outmoded ideas of morality and reason.

Claude Lévi-Strauss and his first session of Lacan's seminar. He would not get over it..

Claude Lévi-Strauss, self-portrait (with monkey) in Brazil, 1938.

"What was striking was the kind of radiant influence emanating from both Lacan's physical person and from his diction, his gestures. I have seen quite a few shamans functioning in exotic societies, and I rediscovered there a kind of equivalent of the shaman's power. I confess that, as far as what I heard went I didn’t understand. And I found myself in the middle of an audience that seemed to understand ..."

Claude Lévi-Strauss as quoted in Jacques Lacan & Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in France

Lacan’s Confrontation with a Young Rebel: “The Single Most ‘French’ Moment in all of 1972: Jacques Lacan Accosted, But No One Stops Smoking.”

Lacan: Seminar recording - watch online this extremely rare recording of Lacan giving a lecture at Louvain University on 13th Octover 1972.

Introducing Levi-Strauss: A Graphic Guide

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Introducing Lévi-Strauss is a guide to the work of the great French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009). The book brilliantly traces the development and influence of Lévi-Strauss’ thought, from his early work on the function of the incest taboo to initiate an exchange of women between groups, to his identification of a timeless “wild” or “primitive” mode of thinking – a pensée sauvage – behind the processes of human culture.

Accessibly written by Boris Wiseman and beautifully illustrated by Judy Groves, Introducing Lévi-Strauss also explores the major contribution that Lévi-Strauss made to contemporary aesthetic history – his work on American-Indian mythology provides a key insight into the way in which art itself comes into being.

Lacan and Levi-Strauss or The Return to Freud (1951-1957)

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Lacan and Levi-Strauss are often mentioned together in reviews of French structuralist thought, but what really links their distinct projects? In this important study, Markos Zafiropoulos shows how Lacan's famous 'return to Freud' was only made possible through Lacan's reading of Levi-Strauss. Via a careful and illuminating comparison of the work of the psychoanalyst and that of the anthropologist, Zafiropoulos shows how Lacan's theories of the symbolic function, of the power of language, of the role of the father and even of the unconscious itself owe a major debt to Levi-Strauss.

Lacan and Levi-Strauss is much more than an academic study of the relations between these two thinkers: it is also a superb introduction to the work of Lacan, setting out with detail and lucidity the major concepts of his work in the 1950s.