Author: Claude Lévi-Strauss File Type: pdf On Christmas Eve 1951, Santa Claus was hanged and then publicly burned outside of the Cathedral of Dijon in France. That same decade, ethnologists began to study the indigenous cultures of central New Guinea, and found men and women affectionately consuming the flesh of the ones they loved. Everyone calls what is not their own custom barbarism, said Montaigne. In these essays, Claude Levi-Strauss shows us behavior that is bizarre, shocking, and even revolting to outsiders but consistent with a peoples culture and context. These essays relate meat eating to cannibalism, female circumcision to medically assisted reproduction, and mythic thought to scientific thought. They explore practices of incest and patriarchy, nature worship versus man-made material obsessions, the perceived threat of art in various cultures, and the innovations and limitations of secular thought. Levi-Strauss measures the short distance between complex and primitive societies and finds a shared madness in the ways we enact myth, ritual, and custom. Yet he also locates a pure and persistent ethics that connects the center of Western civilization to far-flung societies and forces a reckoning with outmoded ideas of morality and reason.**ReviewClaude Levi-Strauss invites us to think through the persistence of primitive thought in the rapid growth of rituals and forms of worship. By giving accounts of structure and history, he celebrates the architecture of mind, empowering facts not only for the pleasure of thinking but also for the diagnosis of unseen social transformations. The globalized celebration of Santa Clausthat commercialization of the sacredhas its origins in the Latin Saturnalia and Native American kachinas the political philosophy of the French Revolution owes its foundations to the cannibals of New Guinea and the mythic thinking of societies without writing rivals the most audacious fables of modern astrophysics. Levi-Strauss was the austere author of The Elementary Structures of Kinship, but did he also become, with age, a novelist of ideas, like those French philosophes of the Enlightenment? I am not sure he would have appreciated this suggestion, but I can give him no higher praise We Are All Cannibals reads like a novel.(Julia Kristeva) About the AuthorClaude Levi-Strauss was born in Brussels in 1908. He held the chair of social anthropology at the College de France from 1959 to 1982 and was elected a member of the Academie Francaise in 1973. He died in Paris on October 30, 2009.Maurice Olender is maitre de conferences at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Jane Marie Todd has translated more than seventy books, including Catherine Clement and Julia Kristevas The Feminine and the Sacred.

Author: Luisa Muraro File Type: pdf Este libro combina la filosofia, la autobiografia y la politica... y tiene en su base una estructura que es la relacion de la hija con su madre concreta y personal, una estructura elemental que falta en el patriarcado, falta de la que el orden patriarcal se nutre.**

Author: David Bates File Type: pdf Between 1910 and 1920, the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL) inaugurated a massive organizing drive in the citys meatpacking and steel industries. Although the CFL sought legitimately progressive goals, worked earnestly to organize an interracial union, and made major inroads among both black and white workers, their efforts resulted in a bitter defeat. David Bates provides a clear picture of how even the most progressive of intentions can be ground to a halt. By organizing workers into neighborhood locals, which connected workplace struggles to ethnic and religious identities, the CFL facilitated a surge in the organizations membership, particularly among African American workers, and afforded the federation the opportunity to aggressively confront employers. The CFLs innovative structure, however, was ultimately its demise. Linking union locals to neighborhoods proved to be a form of de facto segregation. Over time union structures, rank-and-file conflicts, and employer resistance combined to turn the unions hopeful calls for solidarity into animosity and estrangement. Tensions were exacerbated by violent shop floor confrontations and exploded in the bloody 1919 Chicago Race Riot. By the early 1920s, the CFL had collapsed. The Ordeal of the Jungle explores the choices of a variety of people while showing a complex, overarching interplay of black and white workers and their employers. In addition to analyzing union structures and on-the-ground relations between workers, Bates synthesizes and challenges previous scholarship on interracial organizing to explain the failure of progressive unionism in Chicago. **Review The Ordeal of the Jungle is a timely contribution to the ongoing conversation between the past and the present not only in the fields of labor and African American history but also in movements for the advancement of working people and people of color.Peter Rachleff,author of Black Labor in Richmond, 18651890 In this absorbing study, David Bates charts the spectacular rise and equally dramatic fall of the Chicago Federation of Labors World War I era campaign to organize the citys stockyards across lines of race, ethnicity, gender, and skill.Paul Michel Taillon, author of Good, Reliable, White Men Railroad Brotherhoods, 18771917 The Ordeal of the Jungle deftly blends perspectives of union leaders, rank-and-file workers, strikebreakers, and employers to show how aspects of class and race determined the fate of ambitious organizing drives in Chicagos stockyards and steel mills. Batess methodology and nuanced interpretation exemplify the promise of a new generation of labor historians.Michael K. Rosenow, author of Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865 1920 Bates offers a vivid account of the Chicago labor movements failed attempts to promote a progressive brand of interracial unionism early in the twentieth century. Through a masterful synthesis of the old and new labor histories, Bates illuminates how employer predation, union miscues, and rank-and-file conflict worked together to undercut solidarity and with it hopes of racial change and economic justice. A vital retelling with important lessons for both historians and labororganizers.Kerry Pimblott, author of Faith in Black Power Race, Religion, and Resistance in Cairo, Illinois About the Author David Bates is an assistant professor of history at Concordia University Chicago. He is a regular contributor to the Illinois Reading Council Journal and has also contributed to the Journal of Interdisciplinary History and The Encyclopedia of American Reform Movements.

Author: John V. Tolan File Type: pdf In September, 1219, as the armies of the Fifth Crusade besieged the Egyptian city of Damietta, Francis of Assisi went to Egypt to preach to Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil. Although we in fact know very little about this event, this has not prevented artists and writers from the thirteenth century to the twentieth, unencumbered by mere facts, from portraying Francis alternatively as a new apostle preaching to the infidels, a scholastic theologian proving the truth of Christianity, a champion of the crusading ideal, a naive and quixotic wanderer, a crazed religious fanatic, or a medieval Gandhi preaching peace, love, and understanding. Al-Kamil, on the other hand, is variously presented as an enlightened pagan monarch hungry for evangelical teaching, a cruel oriental despot, or a worldly libertine. Saint Francis and the Sultan takes a detailed look at these richly varied artistic responses to this brief but highly symbolic meeting. Throwing into relief the changing fears and hopes that Muslim-Christian encounters have inspired in European artists and writers in the centuries since, it gives a uniquely broad but precise vision of the evolution of Western attitudes towards Islam and the Arab world over the last eight hundred years.Review[A] richly documented and attractively illustrated study. --Catholic News ServiceA brilliant study on a timely topic... The entire book shows impeccable scholarship, precise writing, and keen cultural insights that speak with unparalleled authoirty and ecumenical diplomacy. ...Highly recommended for all academic libraries. --Catholic Library WorldA welcome and useful survey of the changing European perspectives on Francis and al-Kamil, and will be a welcome addition for scholars and readers interested in Francis, his changing image, and European perspective on Islam.--The Catholic Historical Review...Tolan provides fascinating insights into the historical context in which the trestises and images under discussion came into being.--Bret Roset, Radboud UniversityJohn Tolan has produced a richly detailed metahistory of an intriguing encounter between East and West, Islam and Christianity. The modest lesson we can draw from it, it seems, is that every encounter is pregnant with multiple meanings and interpretations. This, in turn, should move us to consider the best possible meaning and interpretation so as to better allow for mutual learning and understanding.--The American Journal of Islamic Social SciencesNo single individual would have the scholarly competence to cover this much material, and its authors list reads like a whos who of contemporary ecumenical critically orthodox theology...How well does the book accomplish its task? It is written and organized well, and the articles are uniformly of high quality. The writers are some of the best orthodox theologians today...It is an excellent starting point for further research and, to the best of my knowledge, there is nothing else like it. Some of the articles are gems, and all are worth reading.--The Living ChurchAbout the AuthorJohn V. Tolan was educated at Yale and Chicago. He has taught at universities in North America and Europe and is currently Professor of Medieval History at the University of Nantes. He has published widely in both French and English, including most recently Saracens Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (2002).