May 11th: On Claude Lévi-Strauss — Frédérick Keck, John Leavitt, and Anthony Allen

Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, John Leavitt will discuss his new translation of La Pensée Sauvage with Frédérick Keck in a conversation moderated by Anthony Allen.

The live event will stream directly on this page on Tuesday, May 11th at 6pm EST. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be archived and posted shortly afterwards.

Claude Lévi-Strauss — Wild Thought: A New Translation of “La Pensée Sauvage”, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman and John Leavitt (University of Chicago Press, 2021)

As the most influential anthropologist of his generation, Claude Lévi-Strauss left a profound mark on the development of twentieth-century thought. Through a mixture of insights gleaned from linguistics, sociology, and ethnology, Lévi-Strauss elaborated his theory of structural unity in culture and became the preeminent representative of structural anthropology. La Pensée sauvage, first published in French in 1962, was his crowning achievement. Ranging over philosophies, historical periods, and human societies, it challenged the prevailing assumption of the superiority of modern Western culture and sought to explain the unity of human intellection.

Controversially titled The Savage Mind when it was first published in English in 1966, the original translation nevertheless sparked a fascination with Lévi-Strauss’s work among Anglophone readers. Wild Thought rekindles that spark with a fresh and accessible new translation. Including critical annotations for the contemporary reader, it restores the accuracy and integrity of the book that changed the course of intellectual life in the twentieth century, making it an indispensable addition to any philosophical or anthropological library.

Frédéric Keck — Avian Reservoirs: Virus Hunters & Bird Watchers in Chinese and Sentinel Posts (Duke University Press, 2020)

After experiencing the SARS outbreak in 2003, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan all invested in various techniques to mitigate future pandemics involving myriad cross-species interactions between humans and birds. In some locations microbiologists allied with veterinarians and birdwatchers to follow the mutations of flu viruses in birds and humans and create preparedness strategies, while in others, public health officials worked toward preventing pandemics by killing thousands of birds. In Avian Reservoirs, Frédéric Keck offers a comparative analysis of these responses, tracing how the anticipation of bird flu pandemics has changed relations between birds and humans in China. Drawing on anthropological theory and ethnographic fieldwork, Keck demonstrates that varied strategies dealing with the threat of pandemics—stockpiling vaccines and samples in Taiwan, simulating pandemics in Singapore, and monitoring viruses and disease vectors in Hong Kong—reflect local geopolitical relations to mainland China. In outlining how interactions among pathogens, birds, and humans shape the way people imagine future pandemics, Keck illuminates how interspecies relations are crucial for protecting against such threats.

John Leavitt — Linguistic Relativities: Language Diversity and Modern Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2015)

There are more than six thousand human languages, each one unique. For the last five hundred years, people have argued about how important language differences are. This book traces that history and shows how language differences have generally been treated either as of no importance or as all-important, depending on broader approaches taken to human life and knowledge. It was only in the twentieth century, in the work of Franz Boas and his students, that an attempt was made to engage seriously with the reality of language specificities. Since the 1950s, this work has been largely presented as yet another claim that language differences are all-important by cognitive scientists and philosophers who believe that such differences are of no importance. This book seeks to correct this misrepresentation and point to the new directions taken by the Boasians, directions now being recovered in the most recent work in psychology and linguistics.

Anthony Allen is a Director of Paula Cooper Gallery in New York.

Frédéric Keck is Senior Researcher at CNRS, director of the Laboratory for Social Anthropology in Paris, coeditor of The Anthropology of Epidemics, and editor of La Pensée Sauvage for the Pléiade edition.

John Leavitt is a translator and professeur titulaire of anthropology at the Université de Montréal. He is the author of Linguistic Relativities and the editor of Poetry and Prophecy.