Re: Klein and Levi-Strauss sources/Urbano/McCreery

Sheldon Klein (sklein@CS.WISC.EDU)
Sat, 9 Dec 1995 09:58:59 -0600

>
>Well I have some references in french. I sent to you a very good one:
>Edouard Delruelle, Claude Levi-Strauss et la philosophie, Editions
>universitaires, Bruxelles, 1989. If you want more...Urbano

Thank you. Before I ask for more, you must tell me the length of your list.
(There is a vast literature on L-S which is almost the result of an
L-S Industry.)

If it is not too long, please send me all.

You might find the following to be of interest,

Klein S. et al. 1976. Simulation d'hypotheses emises par Propp et Levi-Strauss
en utilisant un systeme de simulation meta-symbolique.
INFORMATIQUE ET SCIENCES HUMAINES, No. 28, pp. 63-133, Mars.

Klein S. 1990. Human Cognitive Changes at the Middle-to-Upper Transition:
The Evidence of Boker Tachtit. In The Emergence of Modern Humans:
An Archaeological Perspective, edited by Paul A. Mellars, pp. 499-516.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univesity Press.

Klein S. 1991. The Invention of Computationally Plausible Knowledge Systems
in the Upper Paleolithic. In The Origins of Human Behavior, edited
by Robert A. Foley, pp. 67-81. London: Unwin Hyman
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To John McCreery-- the breadth of a good French education can account
for the acceptance and popularity of L-S's work in France,
but it is insufficient to account for the genesis of Mythologiques.

I think a case can be made that many of the sources you cite
have aspects of secular transformation of earlier paradigms
in a non-secular domain.

There has been so very much written about Levi-Strauss and his
work that the literature, itself, takes on the character of a
globally distributed myth system that encodes local categories
and frameworks that may also be nationalistic. It may be fruitful
to approach that literature using the same analytic techniques
L-S uses in Mythologiques.

Sheldon Klein sklein@cs.wisc.edu