Book Description
Philippe Bourgois's ethnographic study of social marginalization in inner-city America, won critical acclaim when it was first published in 1995. For the first time, an anthropologist had managed to gain the trust and long-term friendship of street-level drug dealers in one of the roughest ghetto neighborhoods--East Harlem. This new edition adds a prologue describing the major dynamics that have altered life on the streets of East Harlem in the seven years since the first edition. In a new epilogue Bourgois brings up to date the stories of the people--Primo, Caesat, Luis, Tony, Candy--who readers come to know in this remarkable window onto the world of the inner city drug trade. Philippe Bourgois is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He has conducted fieldwork in Central America on ethnicity and social unrest and is the author of Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). He is writing a book on homeless heroin addicts in San Francisco. 1/e hb ISBN (1996) 0-521-43518-8 1/e pb ISBN (1996) 0-521-57460-9
Customer Reviews:
Good and Enlightening Read.......2007-09-19
This is a great book. Definitely disturbing but well worth the read. Bourgois does an excellent job of honestly portraying the lives of these people while still letting the reader know that he is human and sometimes has a difficult time being unbiased. Highly recommend this book.
Well Written Account of Urban Life........2007-07-24
I read this book as a junior Sociology major at Berkeley. This book makes me want to quit my day job and go back to school to explore academia again. Highly inspirational anthropological account of growing up impoverished in NY and selling crack to make ends meet. Like many people, I do not support drugs in any way as it contributes to the decline of families and communities, but I love how this book guides you through the intricacies of street (drug) life with a nice layer of dignity and integrity.
The ugly truth.......2006-11-08
This book is well written, throughly researched and extremely enlightening. It is the best ethnography i have read. Unlike some "liberals" who write about the poor (e.g. Kozol), Bourgois lived among the people he writes about, and he is not afraid to show the less flattering aspects of their personalities. Thus, there are passages that will make some people cringe, others that are frankly disturbing, but it is all part of the ugly reality of life in the ghetto. Bourgois lets the residents speak in their own voices and provides useful commentary rather than "cultural marxist" analysis as some reviewer suggested. In Search of Respect shows that simplistic explanations for the persistance of poverty ("bad choices") are unsatisfactory, but does not ignore the fact that some poor people commit stupid and also brutal acts. This is a great book for use in upper level undergraduate courses in social problems, deviance, criminology, ethnography, qualitative methods, juvenile delinquency.
"hard core" book.......2006-08-22
This book is a 5 for awakening of what was Harlem NY and for a sociological book, but a 4 because it is not something you will enjoy reading 2x. It is deep, complex, and if you are a young person reading it or someone unfamiliar with the mentallity of the oppressed being an oppressor in a unfeeling world...you may have to stop for a second and take a breath. The book is well written from a sociological and anthropological perspective and it will go from your heart and mind to the pit of your stomach, but it certainly is a wake up call to the social changes and conditions of poverty, drug use & abuse and the people sucked into that world.
example: the author goes from talking about being "white" and seen as an outsider and recieving only bits of information to being 'accepted' and listening to "primo" explain when "they" gang raped a junkie and had to pistol whip his cousins wife because she wanted to have sexual relations with him while his cousin "the don" was in jail.
It is an extrodinary book and not surprisingly has become more expensive to purchase as the years go forward.
An Amazing Ethnography.......2006-05-12
Concidering Bourgois's choice for an ethnographic site I am suprised this book is as non jugmental as it is. While some times limited in scope due to his almost complete forcus on the crack community of East Harlem, instead of venturing out and looking at this cultural groups inpact on the greater community around it, it gives a quite amazing portrayl and discusssion of drug culture in the neighborhood. The insights he makes on the effect of streat culture and challenges many from poor innercity communities can have in negotiating the licit economy is worth note. In particular the chapters School Days and Going Ligit are wonderful peices of ethnographic annalysis and study. That he chose not to glorify or shugar coat the lives of those he spent five years living with adds much to the power and incite of this work.
Book Description
In this path breaking book, Eiko Ikegami uncovers a complex history of social life in which aesthetic images became central to Japan's cultural identities. The people of premodern Japan built on earlier aesthetic traditions in part for their own sake, but also to find space for self-expression in the increasingly rigid and tightly controlled Tokugawa political system. In so doing, they incorporated the world of the beautiful within their social life which led to new modes of civility. They explored horizontal and voluntary ways of associating while immersing themselves in aesthetic group activities. Combining sociological insights in organizations with prodigious scholarship on cultural history, this book explores such wide-ranging topics as networks of performing arts, tea ceremony and haiku, the politics of kimono aesthetics, the rise of commercial publishing, the popularization of etiquette and manners, the vogue for androgyny in kabuki performance, and the rise of tacit modes of communication.
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Adapted City: Institutional Dynamics and Structural Change (Cities and Contemporary Society)
H. George Frederickson ,
George H. Frederickson ,
Gary A., M.D. Johnson , and
Curtis H. Wood
Manufacturer: M.E. Sharpe
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"Lévi-Strauss is a French savant par excellence, a man of extraordinary sensitivity and human wisdom . . . a deliberate stylist with profound convictions and convincing arguments. . . . [The Raw and the Cooked] adds yet another chapter to the tireless quest for a scientifically accurate, esthetically viable, and philosophically relevant cultural anthropology. . . . [It is] indispensable reading."—Natural History
Customer Reviews:
Genius, but no model.......2003-10-31
Claude Lévi-Strauss's Mythologiques, of which this is volume 1, are brutally difficult to work through, endlessly fascinating once you get the hang of them, and ultimately not something one ought to imitate or emulate. But until you have read The Raw and the Cooked, at the least, you are not really entitled to speak about the study of myth, and certainly not about structural anthropology (or its weaknesses).
The whole book-the whole four volumes, actually-is structured according to a complex musical metaphor, and the Overture to The Raw and the Cooked explicates this metaphor in detail. You'll need to know something about serialism (i.e. Schoenberg) to understand it, but once you do you'll really begin to see what Lévi-Strauss is up to. He thinks that myth is not like poetry, and is more like music than ordinary language. I think his comparison is misguided, based on a misunderstanding of serialism, but it's essential to understand why he correlates myth and music to understand the project.
In the main part of the book, he goes on to select a "key myth," a somewhat arbitrarily-chosen tale from the Bororo, a people he has studied fairly intensively (and did some fieldwork among). He then begins a massive project of connecting this myth to other myths from South America, breaking down and analyzing all the little bits and pieces as he goes. The logic can be hard to follow at times; his little diagrams don't help much, and in fact he seems to see this and ditches them in later volumes. But if you lose the thread, you can lose track of the whole book.
Ultimately, he's going to link up a thousand-odd myths from both Americas, demonstrating how each transforms and adds to other themes, until we get a vast complex of American mythical thought laid out in a mesmerizing sort of crystalline web of relations.
In short, Lévi-Strauss thinks that myths are a way of thinking, using concrete objects, about such problems as self and other, social relations, kinship, cooking, culture and nature, and so forth. He argues that each myth demonstrates a particular thinking-through of such problems by what amounts to cultures as intellectual entities. This may seem hard to believe, but if you've read The Savage Mind, this is the bricoleur at work.
The big problem, as various people have noted, is that his readings are necessarily somewhat subjective; he could be breaking the myths down incorrectly, splitting up whole units or lumping discrete pieces. What we really see is Lévi-Strauss giving it a shot, not a conclusion. Indeed, he calls this a "prolegomenon to a science of mythology," which hits the nail on the head.
I doubt very much whether anyone ought to continue the work, correcting the readings on the basis of further fieldwork or computerized analysis, as he seems to want. Once you've read through this series, you really have to wonder whether it's worth going further, or whether there aren't more interesting questions to ask about mythology. But his point really does stand: myth cannot be taken as a bunch of moral tales and ritual foundations; it must be recognized as thought enacted, or action thought-through.
The big question he doesn't address is history; as in The Savage Mind, he wants to exclude the historical from analysis. Thus the next big step would be someone like Sahlins, who tries to build an appreciation of the historical into structural analysis. Nevertheless, these books really do deserve serious study. If you want to see what mythology really is about "in the raw," as it were, you need to read this. As far as I'm concerned, those who haven't read The Raw and the Cooked have no business saying that structuralism is dead, or that it's unhelpful; they don't know what they're talking about.
Lévi-Strauss is a genius, and if he goes in directions that maybe now seem a bit dated, let's remember when he wrote all this stuff (i.e. the 60s). But only the intellectually lazy can afford to pass over this essential moment in the study of myth and religion; we have to work through, not skip over.
Book Description
"The main thrust of this book is to deliver a major critique of materialist and rationalist explanations of social and cultural forms, but the in the process Sahlins has given us a much stronger statement of the centrality of symbols in human affairs than have many of our 'practicing' symbolic anthropologists. He demonstrates that symbols enter all phases of social life: those which we tend to regard as strictly pragmatic, or based on concerns with material need or advantage, as well as those which we tend to view as purely symbolic, such as ideology, ritual, myth, moral codes, and the like. . . ."—Robert McKinley, Reviews in Anthropology
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- An introduction to anthropology and Levi-Strauss
- A very readable introduction to Claude Lévi-Strauss
- Good Introduction to Levi-Strauss but falters at the end
- Great Infro to Levi-Strauss
- A good short intro to Levi-Strauss
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Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture
Claude Levi-Strauss
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Structural Anthropology
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Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books Classics)
ASIN: 0805210385
Release Date: 1995-03-14 |
Customer Reviews:
An introduction to anthropology and Levi-Strauss.......2006-07-16
The book is a recommended introduction to anthropology and the theories of Levi-Strauss. Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture describes, among other things, how some myths have certain attributes common in between them and how they would evolve. The author describes how in certain cultures twins are viewed as evil and theories how that might have evolved. At the end, the book discusses how myths should be interpreted.
A very readable introduction to Claude Lévi-Strauss .......2004-11-25
MYTH AND MEANING is a short and easily-digestible work based on a series of interviews and discussions delivered by the venerable French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and broadcast by Canadian radio in 1977. Its informal and conversational style (based on his responses to a series of questions posed by the CBC producer who is interviewing him) allows us broad-stroke insight into Lévi-Strauss's development of structuralism and his theories about science.
A self-professed "non-scientist" with a strong interest in science, Lévi-Strauss begins by outlining the divergence between science and "mythical and mystical thought" which began to occur around the 17th century in European intellectual traditions. The result is, we are lead to believe, that we have somehow lost something: something we may yet strive to regain or at least try to understand better.
Lévi-Strauss makes the argument that `primitive' thought is as rich and complex as so-called `civilized' thought, debunking various functionalist and traditional viewpoints that deny the savage mind has the ability to think both disinterestedly and intellectually. "In order for a culture to be really itself... its members must be convinced of their originality and even... of their superiority over the others." Mythical thinking may be the originality that we have lost in modern life.
One gets the sense that Lévi-Strauss develops his theories as he speaks-extemporaneously. He almost admits as much in his introduction: "I forget what I have written practically as soon as it is finished... I have the feeling that my books get written through me and that once [finished], I feel empty and nothing is left." Some of his explanations of particular myths, though entertaining, are a bit "out there" and border implausibility. One may reproach him for his methods or dispute his theories, but no one can deny that MYTH AND MEANING provides a fascinating glimpse into the mind of this original and controversial thinker.
Jeremy W. Forstadt
Good Introduction to Levi-Strauss but falters at the end.......2003-02-01
This book, based on interviews Levi-Strauss conducted with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the late '70s, is extremely clear and easy to understand for non-anthropologists like myself. He explains his views about how rational science and mythology branched off from each other in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, leading us to a situation where today we experience life differently that do 'primitive' tribes who use myths to explain the world around them. Levi-Strauss notes, however, that, while these peoples may not be as accurate in describing the world as we are with our modern science, they do possess a great deal of knowledge which we have lost on an individual level, i.e., knowledge about plants and stars. Mythology, he claims, functions like history and science for these people; for an example Levi-Strauss focuses his attention on the meaning of American myths about twins, hare(lips) and babies born feet first.
All this is quite well laid out and easy to read. However, the last chapter deals with music and mythology, and here Levi-Strauss badly missteps. He postulates that the decline in mythology that accompanied the rise of modern science coincided with the creation of great music by the likes of Bach, Haydn and Mozart that drew upon the same sources of inspiration as mythology. He spends several pages in a structural critique of Wagner's Ring which, albeit fascinating, is highly questionable. Furthermore, at the end of the book he suggests, quite wildly, that serial music is now poised to overtake the modern novel, which arose at the same time as modern science, in importance.
This weak section at the end notwithstanding, however, this is a good book for anyone interested in Levi-Strauss's groundbreaking work.
Great Infro to Levi-Strauss.......2002-04-14
If you trying to understand what drives Levi-Srauss to write, then this is the book you've been looking for...
A good short intro to Levi-Strauss.......2001-01-09
This is an excellent and very short intro to the work the of famed anthropologist Levi-Strauss. It breaks down to a large extent his basic ideas about the structural analysis of myth and provides an opportunity into the thoughts and opinions of the father of structural anthropology. It's mostly taken as a transcript from a series of lectures he gave outlining major themes he's covered in his work.
If you like this book and wish to read more by him I'd recommend The Raw and the Cooked and his classic work, Structural Anthropology.
Book Description
This modern classic provides an introduction to Levi-Strauss' distinctive approach to anthropology.
Customer Reviews:
Inspiring.......2003-06-08
Levi-Strauss ranks with Darwin for being hugely misunderstood. Like Darwin, what people say about Levi-Strauss is so often completely wrong that I strongly doubt he's ever really read.
Levi-Strauss believed that all cultures share the same basic characteristics. "Struturalism is the search for hidden harmonies," he said. One of my favorite quips from him is how interesting it is to see how the same personality type will be cast in different cultural roles--how the same basic humanity signifies radically different things to different cultures.
Levi-Strauss believed it is not important to try and figure out when a culture branched off from another, or what preceeded what: culture should be considered on its own terms. If a pot is interesting, it's interesting, no matter what its context.
The reason this physicist is curious about a dead anthropologist is that many of the misunderstandings of regular old evolution can be cleared up, as Saussure recommended, by considering both evolutionary history--how dinosaurs turned into birds--and evolutionary structure--why, at any given step in evolution, the dino-bird was best adapted to its enviornment. Gould has made a career out of clearing up this confusion; too bad our schools leave students in the dark.
And it's also interesting from the point of view of physics. Clouds, for instance, have a structure which is determined by wiggling water vapor. By looking at the shape of the clouds, we can determine just how the vapor is wiggling.
All cloud shapes can be predicted--not by solving deterministic physical laws (i.e. time evolution) but by making strucutral predictions based on guesses. It is a sort of physical law which corresponds to the structuralist view of evolution: at any given time, a cloud looks the way it does because it solves a kind of 'best fit' problem. It does *not* look that way because we can solve the time evolution; those equations are in principle unsolvable because the degrees of freedom is so high. The cause of cloud shape is not force or energy (which in physics are used to solve the time evolution of single or few bodies--vertical evolution), but information and order (which are used when the number of interacting elements is so high that only statistical arguments can be made--horizontal evolution).
A perfect example of structuralism was made by Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace. In it, he argued that the course of Russia's history was not written by Napoleon, and that following Napoleon's motivations (vertical evolution) gave one the illusion that he was in control of his own decisions. In fact, Russia's history was written by the sum total of its people, each influenced into their decisions by their immediate surroundings (horizontal evolution). History then emerges in the same manner as an ant society: one person puts down a pebble, only to have it picked up and put down again somewhere else, seemingly at random. Yet the colony has certain well-defined traits. In physics the colony would be said to be a self-organizing structure, what Stuart Kauffman calls 'order for free'. So too is human history, and attempting to ground it around Churchills and Napoleons is hen-picking.
Prigogine (a chemist) pointed Levi-Strauss out in his Nobel lecture. There's only a handful of people in the world who really understand why. I encourage you to find out!
PS: I remind the writer below of the Elements of Style rule: never enclose words in quotations, as though you were admitted to a secret world that knows better. Quotation marks are the authors' indication either that he knows the word he uses is poorly chosen, or that he doesn't actually know what it means.
Foundational Text.......2002-03-21
Structural Anthropology is a translation of Claude Levi-Strauss's well-known collection of essays, Anthropologie Structurale. I am hopeful that I can do him and this translation justice through this short review but I could well be accused of doing to Levi-Strauss what Levi-Strauss is accused of doing himself - reductionism. Despite it all looking like a kind of psychological reductionism, and since I am particular about reduction, I would really like to know what everything is being reduced to.
The essays contained in this collection deal with a variety of topics covering the whole range of Levi-Strauss's interests. They include the classical "Social Structure" which is now canon reading along with "The Structural Study of Myth". What is this thing called "structure"? Levi-Strauss refers fairly often to structural linguistics (see Course in General Linguistics by Ferdinand De Saussure) to give form to his concepts; for sociologists, maybe, reference to what has come to be known as the "cybernetic model" might be more communicative. Systematic interaction has two "hierarchies," an energic one and an informational one, conceived as counter "flows." Information controls energy and energy is the condition of actualization of information. This is the sense of Levi-Strauss's "structure": it is information, ultimately, a "code." Levi-Strauss is not interested in what is but rather in what gives form to and controls what is. Levi-Strauss searches for the formative codes of interaction. These he calls "structure." What he seems to be looking for are "unconscious processes" which somehow underlie the manifestations we call institutions. That they are located in the "mind" seems clear. It seems that certain mental operations (association, contradiction, dichotomization, resolution of dissonance, etc.) are at the back of the "structure" of societies, language, kinship systems, myths, art forms and all other aspects of culture. Thus analysis consists of taking varying manifestations and reducing them to a structural base such as the resolution of opposites or something like that. The model, method is that of De Saussure, et al.
What is really astonishing is that despite the profound nature of his infusing Anthropology with the findings of Structural Linguistics and making a fetish of inexactness and possibility, Levi-Strauss may have stumbled into a method that has proven useful in its critique and the doors with which it has opened. He has stumbled on a method, which pays dividends without actually knowing why it is paying dividends. We can all benefit from the works of Levi-Strauss, De Saussure and Foucault, as we need to know more about this unconscious. Structural Anthropology has become canon reading and is a classic for all times.
Miguel Llora
Great work by a forerunner of Anthropology!.......2000-03-18
I personally consider this book to be one of the greatest works in the field of Anthropology. It is an exhaustive treatment on a particular way of looking at how Anthropology is performed. Through various examples from different cultures the author attempts to show how this *structural* approach to Anthropology is viewed. This book changed how many social Anthropologists did their work. Written by one of the most pre-eminent Anthropologists of our time it will most undoubtly stand the test of time for many decades to come.
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The Naked Man: Mythologiques, Volume 4 (Mythologiques, Vol 4)
Claude Levi-Strauss
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
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ASIN: 0226474968 |
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"The Naked Man is the fourth and final volume [of Mythologiques], written by the most influential and probably the most controversial anthropologist of our time. . . . Myths from North and South America are set side by side to show their transformations: in passing from person to person and place to place, a myth can change its content and yet retain its structural principles. . . . Apart from the complicated transformations discovered and the fascinating constructions placed on these, the stories themselves provide a feast."—Betty Abel, Contemporary Review
"Lévi-Strauss uses the structural method he developed to analyze and 'decode' the mythology of native North Americans, focusing on the area west of the Rockies. . . . [The author] takes the opportunity to refute arguments against his method; his chapter 'Finale' is a defense of structural analysis as well as the closing statement of this four-volume opus which started with an 'Ouverture' in The Raw and the Cooked."—Library Journal
"The culmination of one of the major intellectual feats of our time."—Paul Stuewe, Quill and Quire
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- Mimetic Shmimetic
- Insightful essays
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To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis and Anthropology
René Girard
Manufacturer: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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ASIN: 0801836557 |
Book Description
An individual desires an object, not for itself, but because another individual also desires it. This mimetic desire, Rene Girard contends, lies at the source of all human disorder and order. In brilliant readings of Dante, Camus, Nietzsche, Dostoevski, Levi-Strauss, Freud, and others, Girard draws out the thesis of mimetic desire -- and ponders its suppression in the West since Plato: "The historical mutilation of mimesis ... was no mere oversight, no fortuitous 'error.' Real awareness of mimetic desire threatens the flattering delusion we entertain not only about ourselves as individuals but also about the nature and origin of that collective self we call our society."
Customer Reviews:
Mimetic Shmimetic.......2003-05-13
OK, I admit that I think that everything Girard has ever written is lights out brilliant, and my unceasing mantra is "all desire is mimetic" and I'm always on the lookout for my double (I'm not in the business of being bound you see). All desire is mimetic. All desire is mimetic.
This is a superior book for someone who might care to dabble, a series of essays, all of them proverbial juggernauts, all desire is mimetic. Freud and his Oedipus complex get the bunk debunked out of them, and then there's poor Nietzsche. The poor guy went insane and killed himself, but that isn't enough for Girard. Turns out Nietzsche couldn't even figure out if he was Dionysius or the Crucified. And you think you have problems! All desire is mimetic!
The Levi-Strauss essays are VITAL, and then you even get an interview at the end. All in a couple hundred pages! All desire is mimetic! May all your triangles have happy mediators, don't forget intra-literary criticism, and most of all, don't get your subjects and objects mixed up.
Girard is the only literary critic you'll ever need, the only anthropologist you'll ever need, and also the only Frenchman you'll ever need. He is not my Richard Wagner, I prefer portly walrus-types with spectacles and tweed suits who play super-chess. All desire is mimetic. You should probably read everything by Dostoevsky and Cervantes and Proust before tackling these essays. And Camus, don't foget Camus, never forget Camus.
Insightful essays.......2003-03-03
In his introduction to this fine collection of essays, addresses, and lectures, Rene Girard asserts that the social sciences are "impotent" and that they need "the great literary masterpieces to evolve." He argues the point with great clarity and persuasiveness in pieces that deal with, among other topics, the rivalry among great intellectual figures such as Nietzsche and Wagner, the ability of Dostoevsky's novels to surpass Freud in understanding mimetic desire, and the ability of the mimetic hypothesis to elucidate myth. Girard's analysis of a late work by Albert Camus, La chute, involves a revealing look at its more famous predecessor, The Stranger. This volume concludes with a wide-ranging interview that enables Girard to define his relationship to such thinkers as Jacques Derrida and Kenneth Burke. A powerful and insightful book.
Book Description
Guanxi, loosely translated as "social connections," or "social networks," is among the most important, talked about, and studied phenomena in China today. Guanxi lies at the heart of China's social order, its economic structure, and its changing institutional landscape. It is considered important in most every realm of life, from politics to business, and from officialdom to street life. This volume offers the latest scholarly thinking on the subject by top China sociologists whose work on guanxi has been influential and by new scholars offering cutting-edge insights on the topic.
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Recommended Books
- Quantitative Analysis for Management with CD
- Guide to Fly Fishing Knots: A Basic Streamside Guide for Fly Fishing Knots, Tippets, and Leader Form
- CET Study Guide
- Chloride Channels And Carriers In Nerve, Muscle, And Glial Cells
- Family Violence: Legal, Medical, and Social Perspectives
- Hood
- Fish Inspection, Quality Control, and HACCP: A Global Focus
- From Vines to Wines: The Complete Guide to Growing Grapes and Making Your Own Wine
- Business Valuation Body of Knowledge Workbook
- Making IT Count: Strategy, Delivery, Infrastructure
The Forest People
Mirror for Humanity: A Concise Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, with PowerWeb
Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village
Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation (Perennial Classics)
Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society,
