
Lévi-Strauss, philosopher among the Indians - Thevet
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/philosopher-among-the-indians/
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gbog
"although Emmanuelle Loyer makes a case for Lévi-Strauss as a contemporary –
and he has been canonized by the Greens – he has come to rest, rather, as a
giant figure in the French cultural tradition: a monument to another time."

And you're surprised that we French have sometime a tooth against the Britons.
This sentence is really poisonous. French anthropology is not of the "past
glorious days and gone forever", it's still on top, for example with Philippe
Descola.

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jessaustin
One might suggest that your reading of that sentence is a bit prickly. The
subject is not "French anthropology" in general, but rather Lévi-Strauss
himself. Surely structuralism's heyday has passed, even within the context of
French anthropology? (...and _definitely_ in other contexts)

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gbog
It's in the colon, which implies a causation, an explication or something
similar. Here it means, CLS is a great figure of French philosophy,
_therefore_ a figure of the past.

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jessaustin
Perhaps that would be a fair reading in French? In English one can't be so
sure of such an interpretation. The sentence would still make sense if its
subject were Voltaire rather than Lévi-Strauss. Being a monument to another
time is simply one way for someone to be a giant figure in a cultural
tradition. (Certainly, it's a clumsy sentence, but there's no indication of
poisonous motivation.)

This determination to take offense via idiosyncratic hermeneutics seems so
"stereotypical", one almost suspects trolling.

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gbog
Why, no. It's right there, in plain text. No need for hermeneutics.

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cafard
I find it hard to conclusively read the sentence as you do. Yes, there could
be snark meant, but I cannot say positively that the author intends one to
understand a French tradition of canonized fossils.

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ajeet_dhaliwal
I need to read up on why the "Indians" tag remained and persisted for
centuries considering it must have not taken very long for Christopher
Columbus to realize he was not in India after all. Certainly subsequent
arrivals from Europe would have known it wasn't India so why did they all keep
calling them that.

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infodroid
Building on this point, I think it feels wrong to use the unqualified
_Indians_ as opposed to _American Indians_ to refer to Native Americans.
Clearly the people of India are the default referent. So it is surprising to
see the more confusing usage in a TLS headline.

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benbreen
In the past 10 years or so academic historians have switched back to using
'Indian' again.[1] For the most part, I'm told, simply because it's useful
(from the perspective of prose style) to have a shorter synonym for 'Native
Americans' to pull out once in awhile. But also because some indigenous groups
have argued for re-appropriating the term 'Indian.' I agree that it's
confusing.

[1] One example from an academic whose background is Shoshone: Ned Blackhawk,
_Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West_
(2006)

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milesf
I thought the article would be about THIS Levi Strauss :)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levi_Strauss](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levi_Strauss)

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erroneousboat
thanks for sharing this

