From Montaigne to Montaigne, Paperback

Two previously unpublished lectures charting the renowned anthropologist's intellectual engagement with the sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne

In January 1937, between the two ethnographic trips he would describe in Tristes Tropiques, Claude L vi-Strauss gave a talk to the Conf d ration g n rale du travail in Paris. Only recently discovered in the archives of the Biblioth que national de France, this lecture, "Ethnography: The Revolutionary Science," discussed the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, to whom L vi-Strauss would return in remarks delivered more than a half-century later, in the spring of 1992. Bracketing the career of one of the most celebrated anthropologists of the twentieth century, these two talks reveal how L vi-Strauss's ethnography begins and ends with Montaigne--and how his reading of his intellectual forebear and his understanding of anthropology evolve along the way.

Published here for the first time, these lectures offer new insight into the development of ethnography and the thinking of one of its most important practitioners. Essays by Emmanuel D sveaux, who edited the original French volume De Montaigne Montaigne, and Peter Skafish expand the context of L vi-Strauss's talks with contemporary perspectives and commentary.

Claude L vi-Strauss (1908-2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist who was foundational in the development of structuralism and structural anthropology. The best known of his many books are Tristes Tropiques, The Savage Mind, and Myth and Meaning.

Emmanuel D sveaux is a director of studies at the cole des hautes tudes en sciences sociales.

Robert Bononno has translated fiction and nonfiction, including Ren Crevel's My Body and I (a finalist for the French-American Foundation Prize) and works by Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Albert Memmi, and Isabelle Stengers published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Peter Skafish is visiting assistant professor of anthropology at University of California, Berkeley. He is editor and translator of Cannibal Metaphysics by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (Univocal/Minnesota, 2014).