The Raw and the Cooked

For the Fine Young Cannibals album, see The Raw & the Cooked (album).
The Raw and the Cooked

Cover of the first edition
Author Claude Lévi-Strauss
Original title Le Cru et le cuit
Translator John and Doreen Weightman
Series Mythologiques
Publisher Plon
Publication date
 1964
Media type Print
Pages 402 pp.
ISBN 978-2-259-00413-8
OCLC 4955922

The Raw and the Cooked (1964) is the first volume from Mythologiques, a structural study of Amerindian mythology written by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. It was originally published in French as Le Cru et le Cuit.[1] Although the book is part of a larger volume Lévi-Strauss writes that it may be appreciated on its own merits, he does not consider this first volume a beginning: "since it would have developed along similar lines if it had had a different starting point".[2]

In the introduction, Lévi-Strauss writes of his confidence that "certain categorical opposites drawn from everyday experience with the most basic sorts of things — e.g. 'raw' and 'cooked,' 'fresh' and 'rotten,' 'moist' and 'parched,' and others — can serve a people as conceptual tools for the formation of abstract notions and for combining these into propositions." Beginning with a Bororo myth, Lévi-Strauss analyses 187 myths, reconstructing sociocultural formations using binary oppositions based on sensory qualities.[3] The work thus presents an adaption of Ferdinand de Saussure's theories of structural linguistics applied to a different field.[4]

See also

References

  1. ↑ The English translation of the title Le Cru et le Cuit is not incorrect, but it is perhaps incomplete. "Cuit" in French does not necessarily mean "cooked", but is also used to denote "done" or "prepared", which is not necessarily obtained by cooking. In this case, Strauss' use of cuit implies what culture and society do to the raw and make it 'done' or 'cooked'.
  2. ↑ Maquet, Jacques. Rev. of The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology. Vol. 1, by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Technology and Culture 11.4 (1970): 613-15.
  3. ↑ Makaryk, Irena R. (1993). Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. pp. 200, 404. ISBN 978-0-8020-6860-6.
  4. ↑ Brenner, Art. "The Structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss and the Visual Arts." Leonardo 10.4 (1977): 303-06.


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