The Raw and the Cooked

This is the first of a series of volumes in which the famous French anthropologist attempts to reduce some of the basic myths of the South American Indians to a comprehensible psychological pattern. The primitive mind reacted to the mystery of the world by inventing myths of origin to explain, for instance, how man discovered fire and first used it for cooking, how the edible and inedible animals came into being, how the stars came to be placed as they are in the sky, how the celestial and terrestrial realms or the human and animal kingdoms are interconnected, and so on. It is Levi-Strauss's contention that there is no fundamental break between the primitive mind and the more highly evolved and that the primitive tale-tellers, in establishing their patterns of explanation, which vary considerably from tribe to tribe, were following an implicit logic that we can understand once we grasp the terms according to which it operates. To support this argument, Levi-Strauss undertakes the analysis of some 200 myths and shows their basic structures and interrelations. His study is technical, but at the same time the author is addressing the general public. He is, furthermore, writing as a philosopher as well as an anthropologist. He makes frequent cross-references to European customs, and he sets the study of mythology in a general cultural context by linking it up with music and painting. This is one of the most original and stimulating books to appear for some time, and it displays in a particularly impressive manner that ability to move from minute inspection of detail to bold general speculation for which French thinkers are renowned.