http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/nov/03/claude-levi-strauss-obituary


Which includes the following text:




"There is also another, even more fundamental, way in which his thought seeks
to
rejoin that of the mythology of the Amerindians as he understands it to be.
Myths have no
authors. Their creation occurs imperceptibly in the process of transmission
or
transformation over hundreds of years and across hundreds of miles. The
individual
subject, the self-obsessed innovator or artist so dear to much western
philosophy, had,
therefore, no place for LC)vi-Strauss, and indeed repelled him. He saw the
glorification
of individual creativity as an illusion. As he wrote in Tristes Tropiques:
"the I is
hateful". This perspective is particularly evident in his study of Amerindian
art.
This art did not involve the great individualistic self-displays of western
art that he
abhorred. The Amerindian artist, by contrast, tried to reproduce what others
had done
and, if he was innovating, he was unaware of the fact. Throughout
LC)vi-Strauss's work
there is a clear aesthetic preference for a creativity that is distributed
throughout a
population and that does not wear its emotions on its sleeve."
(Maurice Bloch)



Maurice Bloch is the  anthropologist whose attack on the current norms of
academic cultural anthropology leads off Chapter 4 in Denis Dutton's "The Art
Instinct" entitled "But They  Don't Have Our Concept of Art"

(although the idea presented in the above text would seem to contradict some
of the characteristics of art that Dutton proposed as cross-cultural in
Chapter 3.

____________________________________________________________
Weight Loss Program
Best Weight Loss Program - Click Here!
http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2231/c?cp=KoJ92HyLkB7Gsw-KgePLogAAJz6c
l_zTaptgNR5c8Mer1v9kAAYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEUgAAAAA=

Reply via email to