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The Malayali: The Double Life Of Bobby, Baby, Blossom, Biju And Shaji
The Malayali: The Double Life Of Bobby, Baby, Blossom, Biju And Shaji: "Lost causes, alcoholism, eve-teasing, world politics, parochialism. Is there no end to the contradictions in the Malayali male, asks NISHA SUSAN"
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Claude Lévi-Strauss Dies at 100 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com
Claude Lévi-Strauss Dies at 100 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com: "Claude Lévi-Strauss Dies at 100
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By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: November 3, 2009
Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called “primitive man” and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and ’70s, has died at 100.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist and father of structuralism, has died at the age of 100.
His death was announced Tuesday, the same day he was buried in the village of Lignerolles, in the Côte-d’Or region southeast of Paris, where he had a country home.
“He had expressed the wish to have a discreet and sober funeral, with his family, in his country house,” his son said. “He was attached to this place; he liked to take walks in the forest, and the cemetery where he is now buried is just on the edge of this forest.”
A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of “structuralism,” a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France. And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.
A descendant of a distinguished French-Jewish artistic family, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was a quintessential French intellectual, as comfortable in the public sphere as in the academy. He taught at universities in Paris, New York and São Paulo and also worked for the United Nations and the French government.
His legacy is imposing. “Mythologiques,” his four-volume work about the structure of native mythology in the Americas, attempts nothing less than an interpretation of the world of culture and custom, shaped by analysis of several hundred myths of little-known tribes and traditions. The volumes — “The Raw and the Cooked,” “From Honey to Ashes,” “The Origin of Table Manners” and “The Naked Man,” published from 1964 to 1971 — challenge the reader with their complex interweaving of theme and detail.
In his analysis of myth and culture, Mr. Lévi-Strauss might contrast imagery of monkeys and jaguars; consider the differences in meaning of roasted and boiled food (cannibals, he suggested, tended to boil their friends and roast their enemies); and establish connections between weird mythological tales and ornate laws of marriage and kinship.
Many of his books include diagrams that look like maps of interstellar geometry, formulas that evoke mathematical techniques, and black-and-white photographs of scarified faces and exotic ritual that he made during his field work.
His interpretations of North and South American myths were pivotal in changing Western thinking about so-called primitive societies. He began challenging the conventional wisdom about them shortly after beginning his anthropological research in the 1930s — an experience that became the basis of an acclaimed 1955 book, “Tristes Tropiques,” a sort of anthropological meditation based on his travels in Brazil and elsewhere.
The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, basing their approaches to life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food, clothing and shelter.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss rescued his subjects from this limited perspective. Beginning with the Caduveo and Bororo tribes in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, where he did his first and primary fieldwork, he found among them a dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins, a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths, and an implicit sense of order and design, even among tribes who practiced ruthless warfare.
His work elevated the status of “the savage mind, ” a phrase that became the English title of one of his most forceful surveys, “La Pensée Sauvage” (1962).
“The thirst for objective knowledge,” he wrote, “is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive.’ ”
The world of primitive tribes was fast disappearing, he wrote. From 1900 to 1950, more than 90 tribes and 15 languages had disappeared in Brazil alone. This was another of his recurring themes. He worried about the growth of a “mass civilization,” of a modern “monoculture.” He sometimes expressed exasperated self-disgust with the West and its “own filth, thrown in the face of mankind.”
In this seeming elevation of the savage mind and denigration of Western modernity, he was writing within the tradition of French Romanticism, inspired by the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom Mr. Lévi-Strauss revered. It was a view that helped build Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s public reputation in the era of countercultural romanticism in the 1960s and ’70s.
But such simplified romanticism was also a distortion of his ideas. For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, the savage was not intrinsically noble or in any way “closer to nature.” Mr. Lévi-Strauss was withering, for example, when describing the Caduveo, whom he portrayed as a tribe so in rebellion against nature — and thus doomed — that it even shunned procreation, choosing to “reproduce” by abducting children from enemy tribes.
His descriptions of American Indian tribes bear little relation to the sentimental and pastoral clichés that have become commonplace. Mr. Lévi-Strauss also made sharp distinctions between the primitive and the modern, focusing on the development of writing and historical awareness. It was an awareness of history, in his view, that allowed the development of science and the evolution and expansion of the West. But he worried about the fate of the West. It was, he wrote in The New York Review of Books, “allowing itself to forget or destroy its own heritage.”
With the fading of myth’s power in the modern West, he also suggested that music had taken on myth’s function. Music, he argued, had the ability to suggest, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society.
But Mr. Lévi-Strauss rejected Rousseau’s idea that humankind’s problems derive from society’s distortions of nature. In Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s view, there is no alternative to such distortions. Each society must shape itself out of nature’s raw material, he believed, with law and reason as the essential tools.
This application of reason, he argued, created universals that could be found across all cultures and times. He became known as a structuralist because of his conviction that a structural unity underlies all of humanity’s mythmaking, and he showed how those universal motifs played out in societies, even in the ways a village was laid out.
For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, for example, every culture’s mythology was built around oppositions: hot and cold, raw and cooked, animal and human. And it is through these opposing “binary” concepts, he said, that humanity makes sense of the world.
This was quite different from what most anthropologists had been concerned with. Anthropology had traditionally sought to disclose differences among cultures rather than discovering universals. It had been preoccupied not with abstract ideas but with the particularities of rituals and customs, collecting and cataloguing them.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s “structural” approach, seeking universals about the human mind, cut against that notion of anthropology. He did not try to determine the various purposes served by a society’s practices and rituals. He was never interested in the kind of fieldwork that anthropologists of a later generation, like Clifford Geertz, took on, closely observing and analyzing a society as if from the inside. (He began “Tristes Tropiques” with the statement “I hate traveling and explorers.”)
To his mind, as he wrote in “The Raw and the Cooked,” translated from “Le Cru et le Cuit” (1964), he had taken “ethnographic research in the direction of psychology, logic, and philosophy.”
In radio talks for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1977 (published as “Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture”), Mr. Lévi-Strauss demonstrated how a structural examination of myth might proceed. He cited a report that in 17th-century Peru, when the weather became exceedingly cold, a priest would summon all those who had been born feet first, or who had a harelip, or who were twins. They were accused of being responsible for the weather and were ordered to repent, to correct the aberrations. But why these groups? Why harelips and twins?
Mr. Lévi-Strauss cited a series of North American myths that associate twins with opposing natural forces: threat and promise, danger and expectation. One myth, for example, includes a magical hare, a rabbit, whose nose is split in a fight, resulting, literally, in a harelip, suggesting an incipient twinness. With his injunctions, the Peruvian priest seemed aware of associations between cosmic disorder and the latent powers of twins.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s ideas shook his field. But his critics were plentiful. They attacked him for ignoring history and geography, using myths from one place and time to help illuminate myths from another, without demonstrating any direct connection or influence.
In an influential critical survey of his work in 1970, the Cambridge University anthropologist Edmund Leach wrote of Mr. Lévi-Strauss: “Even now, despite his immense prestige, the critics among his professional colleagues greatly outnumber the disciples.”
Mr. Leach himself doubted whether Mr. Lévi-Strauss, during his fieldwork in Brazil, could have conversed with “any of his native informants in their native language” or stayed long enough to confirm his first impressions. Some of Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s theoretical arguments, including his explanation of cannibals and their tastes, have been challenged by empirical research.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss conceded that his strength was in his interpretations of what he discovered and thought that his critics did not sufficiently credit the cumulative impact of those speculations. “Why not admit it?” he once said to an interviewer, Didier Eribon, in “Conversations with Lévi-Strauss” (1988). “I was fairly quick to discover that I was more a man for the study than for the field.”
Claude Lévi-Strauss was born on Nov. 28, 1908, in Belgium to Raymond Lévi-Strauss and the former Emma Levy. He grew up in France, near Versailles, where his grandfather was a rabbi and his father a portrait painter. His great-grandfather Isaac Strauss was a Strasbourg violinist mentioned by Berlioz in his memoirs. As a child, he loved to collect disparate objects and juxtapose them. “I had a passion for exotic curios,” he says in “Conversations.” “My small savings all went to the secondhand shops.” A large collection of Jewish antiquities from his family’s collection, he said, was displayed in the Musée de Cluny; others were looted after France fell to the Nazis in 1940.
From 1927 to 1932, Claude obtained degrees in law and philosophy at the University of Paris, then taught in a local high school, the Lycée Janson de Sailly, where his fellow teachers included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He later became a professor of sociology at the French-influenced University of São Paulo in Brazil.
Determined to become an anthropologist, he began making trips into the country’s interior, accompanied by his wife, Dina Dreyfus, whom he married in 1932. “I was envisaging a way of reconciling my professional education with my taste for adventure,” he said in “Conversations,” adding: “I felt I was reliving the adventures of the first 16th-century explorers.”
His marriage to Ms. Dreyfus ended in divorce, as did a subsequent marriage, in 1946, to Rose-Marie Ullmo, with whom he had a son, Laurent. In 1954 he married Monique Roman, and they, too, had a son, Matthieu. Besides Laurent, Mr. Lévi-Strauss is survived by his wife and Matthieu as well as Matthieu’s two sons.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss left teaching in 1937 and devoted himself to fieldwork, returning to France in 1939 for further study. But on the eve of war, he was drafted into the French Army to serve as a liaison with British troops. In “Tristes Tropiques,” he writes of his “disorderly retreat” from the Maginot Line after Hitler’s invasion of France, fleeing in cattle trucks, sleeping in “sheep folds.”
In 1941, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was invited to become a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, with help from the Rockefeller Foundation. He called it “the most fruitful period of my life,” spending time in the reading room of the New York Public Library and befriending the distinguished American anthropologist Franz Boas.
He also became part of a circle of artists and Surrealists, including Max Ernst, André Breton and Sartre’s future mistress, Dolorès Vanetti. Ms. Vanetti, who shared his “passion for objects,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss said in “Conversations,” regularly visited an antique shop on Third Avenue in Manhattan that sold artifacts from the Pacific Northwest, leaving Mr. Lévi-Strauss with the “impression that all the essentials of humanity’s artistic treasures could be found in New York.'
After the war, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was so intent on pursuing his studies in New York that he was given the position of cultural attaché by the French government until 1947. On his return to France, he earned a doctorate in letters from the University of Paris in 1948 and was associate curator at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris in 1948 and 1949. His first major book, “The Elementary Structures of Kinship,” was published in 1949. (Several years later, the jury of the Prix Goncourt, France’s most famous literary award, said that it would have given the prize to “Tristes Tropiques,” his hybrid of memoir and anthropological travelogue, had it been fiction.)
After the Rockefeller Foundation gave the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris a grant to create a department of social and economic sciences, Mr. Lévi-Strauss became the director of studies at the school, remaining in the post from 1950 to 1974.
Other positions followed. From 1953 to 1960, he served as secretary general of the International Social Science Council at Unesco. In 1959, he was appointed professor at the Collège de France. He was elected to the French Academy in 1973. By 1960, Mr. Lévi-Strauss had founded L’Homme, a journal modeled on The American Anthropologist.
By the 1980s, structuralism as imagined by Mr. Lévi-Strauss had been displaced by French thinkers who became known as poststructuralists: writers like Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. They rejected the idea of timeless universals and argued that history and experience were far more important in shaping human consciousness than universal laws.
“French society, and especially Parisian, is gluttonous,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss responded. “Every five years or so, it needs to stuff something new in its mouth. And so five years ago it was structuralism, and now it is something else. I practically don’t dare use the word ‘structuralist’ anymore, since it has been so badly deformed. I am certainly not the father of structuralism.”
But Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s version of structuralism may end up surviving post-structuralism, just as he survived most of its avatars. His monumental four-volume work, “Mythologiques,” may ensure his legacy, as a creator of mythologies if not their explicator.
The final volume ends by suggesting that the logic of mythology is so powerful that myths almost have a life independent from the peoples who tell them. In his view, they speak through the medium of humanity and become, in turn, the tools with which humanity comes to terms with the world’s greatest mystery: the possibility of not being, the burden of mortality."
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By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: November 3, 2009
Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called “primitive man” and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and ’70s, has died at 100.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist and father of structuralism, has died at the age of 100.
His death was announced Tuesday, the same day he was buried in the village of Lignerolles, in the Côte-d’Or region southeast of Paris, where he had a country home.
“He had expressed the wish to have a discreet and sober funeral, with his family, in his country house,” his son said. “He was attached to this place; he liked to take walks in the forest, and the cemetery where he is now buried is just on the edge of this forest.”
A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of “structuralism,” a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France. And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.
A descendant of a distinguished French-Jewish artistic family, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was a quintessential French intellectual, as comfortable in the public sphere as in the academy. He taught at universities in Paris, New York and São Paulo and also worked for the United Nations and the French government.
His legacy is imposing. “Mythologiques,” his four-volume work about the structure of native mythology in the Americas, attempts nothing less than an interpretation of the world of culture and custom, shaped by analysis of several hundred myths of little-known tribes and traditions. The volumes — “The Raw and the Cooked,” “From Honey to Ashes,” “The Origin of Table Manners” and “The Naked Man,” published from 1964 to 1971 — challenge the reader with their complex interweaving of theme and detail.
In his analysis of myth and culture, Mr. Lévi-Strauss might contrast imagery of monkeys and jaguars; consider the differences in meaning of roasted and boiled food (cannibals, he suggested, tended to boil their friends and roast their enemies); and establish connections between weird mythological tales and ornate laws of marriage and kinship.
Many of his books include diagrams that look like maps of interstellar geometry, formulas that evoke mathematical techniques, and black-and-white photographs of scarified faces and exotic ritual that he made during his field work.
His interpretations of North and South American myths were pivotal in changing Western thinking about so-called primitive societies. He began challenging the conventional wisdom about them shortly after beginning his anthropological research in the 1930s — an experience that became the basis of an acclaimed 1955 book, “Tristes Tropiques,” a sort of anthropological meditation based on his travels in Brazil and elsewhere.
The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, basing their approaches to life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food, clothing and shelter.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss rescued his subjects from this limited perspective. Beginning with the Caduveo and Bororo tribes in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, where he did his first and primary fieldwork, he found among them a dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins, a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths, and an implicit sense of order and design, even among tribes who practiced ruthless warfare.
His work elevated the status of “the savage mind, ” a phrase that became the English title of one of his most forceful surveys, “La Pensée Sauvage” (1962).
“The thirst for objective knowledge,” he wrote, “is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive.’ ”
The world of primitive tribes was fast disappearing, he wrote. From 1900 to 1950, more than 90 tribes and 15 languages had disappeared in Brazil alone. This was another of his recurring themes. He worried about the growth of a “mass civilization,” of a modern “monoculture.” He sometimes expressed exasperated self-disgust with the West and its “own filth, thrown in the face of mankind.”
In this seeming elevation of the savage mind and denigration of Western modernity, he was writing within the tradition of French Romanticism, inspired by the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom Mr. Lévi-Strauss revered. It was a view that helped build Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s public reputation in the era of countercultural romanticism in the 1960s and ’70s.
But such simplified romanticism was also a distortion of his ideas. For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, the savage was not intrinsically noble or in any way “closer to nature.” Mr. Lévi-Strauss was withering, for example, when describing the Caduveo, whom he portrayed as a tribe so in rebellion against nature — and thus doomed — that it even shunned procreation, choosing to “reproduce” by abducting children from enemy tribes.
His descriptions of American Indian tribes bear little relation to the sentimental and pastoral clichés that have become commonplace. Mr. Lévi-Strauss also made sharp distinctions between the primitive and the modern, focusing on the development of writing and historical awareness. It was an awareness of history, in his view, that allowed the development of science and the evolution and expansion of the West. But he worried about the fate of the West. It was, he wrote in The New York Review of Books, “allowing itself to forget or destroy its own heritage.”
With the fading of myth’s power in the modern West, he also suggested that music had taken on myth’s function. Music, he argued, had the ability to suggest, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society.
But Mr. Lévi-Strauss rejected Rousseau’s idea that humankind’s problems derive from society’s distortions of nature. In Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s view, there is no alternative to such distortions. Each society must shape itself out of nature’s raw material, he believed, with law and reason as the essential tools.
This application of reason, he argued, created universals that could be found across all cultures and times. He became known as a structuralist because of his conviction that a structural unity underlies all of humanity’s mythmaking, and he showed how those universal motifs played out in societies, even in the ways a village was laid out.
For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, for example, every culture’s mythology was built around oppositions: hot and cold, raw and cooked, animal and human. And it is through these opposing “binary” concepts, he said, that humanity makes sense of the world.
This was quite different from what most anthropologists had been concerned with. Anthropology had traditionally sought to disclose differences among cultures rather than discovering universals. It had been preoccupied not with abstract ideas but with the particularities of rituals and customs, collecting and cataloguing them.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s “structural” approach, seeking universals about the human mind, cut against that notion of anthropology. He did not try to determine the various purposes served by a society’s practices and rituals. He was never interested in the kind of fieldwork that anthropologists of a later generation, like Clifford Geertz, took on, closely observing and analyzing a society as if from the inside. (He began “Tristes Tropiques” with the statement “I hate traveling and explorers.”)
To his mind, as he wrote in “The Raw and the Cooked,” translated from “Le Cru et le Cuit” (1964), he had taken “ethnographic research in the direction of psychology, logic, and philosophy.”
In radio talks for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1977 (published as “Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture”), Mr. Lévi-Strauss demonstrated how a structural examination of myth might proceed. He cited a report that in 17th-century Peru, when the weather became exceedingly cold, a priest would summon all those who had been born feet first, or who had a harelip, or who were twins. They were accused of being responsible for the weather and were ordered to repent, to correct the aberrations. But why these groups? Why harelips and twins?
Mr. Lévi-Strauss cited a series of North American myths that associate twins with opposing natural forces: threat and promise, danger and expectation. One myth, for example, includes a magical hare, a rabbit, whose nose is split in a fight, resulting, literally, in a harelip, suggesting an incipient twinness. With his injunctions, the Peruvian priest seemed aware of associations between cosmic disorder and the latent powers of twins.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s ideas shook his field. But his critics were plentiful. They attacked him for ignoring history and geography, using myths from one place and time to help illuminate myths from another, without demonstrating any direct connection or influence.
In an influential critical survey of his work in 1970, the Cambridge University anthropologist Edmund Leach wrote of Mr. Lévi-Strauss: “Even now, despite his immense prestige, the critics among his professional colleagues greatly outnumber the disciples.”
Mr. Leach himself doubted whether Mr. Lévi-Strauss, during his fieldwork in Brazil, could have conversed with “any of his native informants in their native language” or stayed long enough to confirm his first impressions. Some of Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s theoretical arguments, including his explanation of cannibals and their tastes, have been challenged by empirical research.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss conceded that his strength was in his interpretations of what he discovered and thought that his critics did not sufficiently credit the cumulative impact of those speculations. “Why not admit it?” he once said to an interviewer, Didier Eribon, in “Conversations with Lévi-Strauss” (1988). “I was fairly quick to discover that I was more a man for the study than for the field.”
Claude Lévi-Strauss was born on Nov. 28, 1908, in Belgium to Raymond Lévi-Strauss and the former Emma Levy. He grew up in France, near Versailles, where his grandfather was a rabbi and his father a portrait painter. His great-grandfather Isaac Strauss was a Strasbourg violinist mentioned by Berlioz in his memoirs. As a child, he loved to collect disparate objects and juxtapose them. “I had a passion for exotic curios,” he says in “Conversations.” “My small savings all went to the secondhand shops.” A large collection of Jewish antiquities from his family’s collection, he said, was displayed in the Musée de Cluny; others were looted after France fell to the Nazis in 1940.
From 1927 to 1932, Claude obtained degrees in law and philosophy at the University of Paris, then taught in a local high school, the Lycée Janson de Sailly, where his fellow teachers included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He later became a professor of sociology at the French-influenced University of São Paulo in Brazil.
Determined to become an anthropologist, he began making trips into the country’s interior, accompanied by his wife, Dina Dreyfus, whom he married in 1932. “I was envisaging a way of reconciling my professional education with my taste for adventure,” he said in “Conversations,” adding: “I felt I was reliving the adventures of the first 16th-century explorers.”
His marriage to Ms. Dreyfus ended in divorce, as did a subsequent marriage, in 1946, to Rose-Marie Ullmo, with whom he had a son, Laurent. In 1954 he married Monique Roman, and they, too, had a son, Matthieu. Besides Laurent, Mr. Lévi-Strauss is survived by his wife and Matthieu as well as Matthieu’s two sons.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss left teaching in 1937 and devoted himself to fieldwork, returning to France in 1939 for further study. But on the eve of war, he was drafted into the French Army to serve as a liaison with British troops. In “Tristes Tropiques,” he writes of his “disorderly retreat” from the Maginot Line after Hitler’s invasion of France, fleeing in cattle trucks, sleeping in “sheep folds.”
In 1941, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was invited to become a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, with help from the Rockefeller Foundation. He called it “the most fruitful period of my life,” spending time in the reading room of the New York Public Library and befriending the distinguished American anthropologist Franz Boas.
He also became part of a circle of artists and Surrealists, including Max Ernst, André Breton and Sartre’s future mistress, Dolorès Vanetti. Ms. Vanetti, who shared his “passion for objects,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss said in “Conversations,” regularly visited an antique shop on Third Avenue in Manhattan that sold artifacts from the Pacific Northwest, leaving Mr. Lévi-Strauss with the “impression that all the essentials of humanity’s artistic treasures could be found in New York.'
After the war, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was so intent on pursuing his studies in New York that he was given the position of cultural attaché by the French government until 1947. On his return to France, he earned a doctorate in letters from the University of Paris in 1948 and was associate curator at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris in 1948 and 1949. His first major book, “The Elementary Structures of Kinship,” was published in 1949. (Several years later, the jury of the Prix Goncourt, France’s most famous literary award, said that it would have given the prize to “Tristes Tropiques,” his hybrid of memoir and anthropological travelogue, had it been fiction.)
After the Rockefeller Foundation gave the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris a grant to create a department of social and economic sciences, Mr. Lévi-Strauss became the director of studies at the school, remaining in the post from 1950 to 1974.
Other positions followed. From 1953 to 1960, he served as secretary general of the International Social Science Council at Unesco. In 1959, he was appointed professor at the Collège de France. He was elected to the French Academy in 1973. By 1960, Mr. Lévi-Strauss had founded L’Homme, a journal modeled on The American Anthropologist.
By the 1980s, structuralism as imagined by Mr. Lévi-Strauss had been displaced by French thinkers who became known as poststructuralists: writers like Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. They rejected the idea of timeless universals and argued that history and experience were far more important in shaping human consciousness than universal laws.
“French society, and especially Parisian, is gluttonous,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss responded. “Every five years or so, it needs to stuff something new in its mouth. And so five years ago it was structuralism, and now it is something else. I practically don’t dare use the word ‘structuralist’ anymore, since it has been so badly deformed. I am certainly not the father of structuralism.”
But Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s version of structuralism may end up surviving post-structuralism, just as he survived most of its avatars. His monumental four-volume work, “Mythologiques,” may ensure his legacy, as a creator of mythologies if not their explicator.
The final volume ends by suggesting that the logic of mythology is so powerful that myths almost have a life independent from the peoples who tell them. In his view, they speak through the medium of humanity and become, in turn, the tools with which humanity comes to terms with the world’s greatest mystery: the possibility of not being, the burden of mortality."
Claude Lévi-Strauss Dies at 100 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com
Claude Lévi-Strauss Dies at 100 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com: "Claude Lévi-Strauss Dies at 100
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By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: November 3, 2009
Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called “primitive man” and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and ’70s, has died at 100.
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Mr. Lévi-Strauss in Brazil in the 1930s.
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Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist and father of structuralism, has died at the age of 100.
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His son Laurent said Mr. Lévi-Strauss died of cardiac arrest Friday at his home in Paris. His death was announced Tuesday, the same day he was buried in the village of Lignerolles, in the Côte-d’Or region southeast of Paris, where he had a country home.
“He had expressed the wish to have a discreet and sober funeral, with his family, in his country house,” his son said. “He was attached to this place; he liked to take walks in the forest, and the cemetery where he is now buried is just on the edge of this forest.”
A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of “structuralism,” a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France. And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.
“People realize he is one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century,” Philippe Descola, the chairman of the anthropology department at the Collège de France, said last November in an interview with The New York Times on the centenary of Mr. Levi-Strauss’s birth. Mr. Lévi-Strauss was so revered that at least 25 countries celebrated his 100th birthday.
A descendant of a distinguished French-Jewish artistic family, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was a quintessential French intellectual, as comfortable in the public sphere as in the academy. He taught at universities in Paris, New York and São Paulo and also worked for the United Nations and the French government.
His legacy is imposing. “Mythologiques,” his four-volume work about the structure of native mythology in the Americas, attempts nothing less than an interpretation of the world of culture and custom, shaped by analysis of several hundred myths of little-known tribes and traditions. The volumes — “The Raw and the Cooked,” “From Honey to Ashes,” “The Origin of Table Manners” and “The Naked Man,” published from 1964 to 1971 — challenge the reader with their complex interweaving of theme and detail.
In his analysis of myth and culture, Mr. Lévi-Strauss might contrast imagery of monkeys and jaguars; consider the differences in meaning of roasted and boiled food (cannibals, he suggested, tended to boil their friends and roast their enemies); and establish connections between weird mythological tales and ornate laws of marriage and kinship.
Many of his books include diagrams that look like maps of interstellar geometry, formulas that evoke mathematical techniques, and black-and-white photographs of scarified faces and exotic ritual that he made during his field work.
His interpretations of North and South American myths were pivotal in changing Western thinking about so-called primitive societies. He began challenging the conventional wisdom about them shortly after beginning his anthropological research in the 1930s — an experience that became the basis of an acclaimed 1955 book, “Tristes Tropiques,” a sort of anthropological meditation based on his travels in Brazil and elsewhere.
The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, basing their approaches to life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food, clothing and shelter.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss rescued his subjects from this limited perspective. Beginning with the Caduveo and Bororo tribes in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, where he did his first and primary fieldwork, he found among them a dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins, a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths, and an implicit sense of order and design, even among tribes who practiced ruthless warfare.
His work elevated the status of “the savage mind, ” a phrase that became the English title of one of his most forceful surveys, “La Pensée Sauvage” (1962).
“The thirst for objective knowledge,” he wrote, “is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive.’ ”
The world of primitive tribes was fast disappearing, he wrote. From 1900 to 1950, more than 90 tribes and 15 languages had disappeared in Brazil alone. This was another of his recurring themes. He worried about the growth of a “mass civilization,” of a modern “monoculture.” He sometimes expressed exasperated self-disgust with the West and its “own filth, thrown in the face of mankind.”
In this seeming elevation of the savage mind and denigration of Western modernity, he was writing within the tradition of French Romanticism, inspired by the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom Mr. Lévi-Strauss revered. It was a view that helped build Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s public reputation in the era of countercultural romanticism in the 1960s and ’70s.
But such simplified romanticism was also a distortion of his ideas. For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, the savage was not intrinsically noble or in any way “closer to nature.” Mr. Lévi-Strauss was withering, for example, when describing the Caduveo, whom he portrayed as a tribe so in rebellion against nature — and thus doomed — that it even shunned procreation, choosing to “reproduce” by abducting children from enemy tribes.
His descriptions of American Indian tribes bear little relation to the sentimental and pastoral clichés that have become commonplace. Mr. Lévi-Strauss also made sharp distinctions between the primitive and the modern, focusing on the development of writing and historical awareness. It was an awareness of history, in his view, that allowed the development of science and the evolution and expansion of the West. But he worried about the fate of the West. It was, he wrote in The New York Review of Books, “allowing itself to forget or destroy its own heritage.”
With the fading of myth’s power in the modern West, he also suggested that music had taken on myth’s function. Music, he argued, had the ability to suggest, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society.
But Mr. Lévi-Strauss rejected Rousseau’s idea that humankind’s problems derive from society’s distortions of nature. In Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s view, there is no alternative to such distortions. Each society must shape itself out of nature’s raw material, he believed, with law and reason as the essential tools.
This application of reason, he argued, created universals that could be found across all cultures and times. He became known as a structuralist because of his conviction that a structural unity underlies all of humanity’s mythmaking, and he showed how those universal motifs played out in societies, even in the ways a village was laid out.
For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, for example, every culture’s mythology was built around oppositions: hot and cold, raw and cooked, animal and human. And it is through these opposing “binary” concepts, he said, that humanity makes sense of the world.
This was quite different from what most anthropologists had been concerned with. Anthropology had traditionally sought to disclose differences among cultures rather than discovering universals. It had been preoccupied not with abstract ideas but with the particularities of rituals and customs, collecting and cataloguing them.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s “structural” approach, seeking universals about the human mind, cut against that notion of anthropology. He did not try to determine the various purposes served by a society’s practices and rituals. He was never interested in the kind of fieldwork that anthropologists of a later generation, like Clifford Geertz, took on, closely observing and analyzing a society as if from the inside. (He began “Tristes Tropiques” with the statement “I hate traveling and explorers.”)
To his mind, as he wrote in “The Raw and the Cooked,” translated from “Le Cru et le Cuit” (1964), he had taken “ethnographic research in the direction of psychology, logic, and philosophy.”
In radio talks for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1977 (published as “Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture”), Mr. Lévi-Strauss demonstrated how a structural examination of myth might proceed. He cited a report that in 17th-century Peru, when the weather became exceedingly cold, a priest would summon all those who had been born feet first, or who had a harelip, or who were twins. They were accused of being responsible for the weather and were ordered to repent, to correct the aberrations. But why these groups? Why harelips and twins?
Mr. Lévi-Strauss cited a series of North American myths that associate twins with opposing natural forces: threat and promise, danger and expectation. One myth, for example, includes a magical hare, a rabbit, whose nose is split in a fight, resulting, literally, in a harelip, suggesting an incipient twinness. With his injunctions, the Peruvian priest seemed aware of associations between cosmic disorder and the latent powers of twins.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s ideas shook his field. But his critics were plentiful. They attacked him for ignoring history and geography, using myths from one place and time to help illuminate myths from another, without demonstrating any direct connection or influence.
In an influential critical survey of his work in 1970, the Cambridge University anthropologist Edmund Leach wrote of Mr. Lévi-Strauss: “Even now, despite his immense prestige, the critics among his professional colleagues greatly outnumber the disciples.”
Mr. Leach himself doubted whether Mr. Lévi-Strauss, during his fieldwork in Brazil, could have conversed with “any of his native informants in their native language” or stayed long enough to confirm his first impressions. Some of Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s theoretical arguments, including his explanation of cannibals and their tastes, have been challenged by empirical research.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss conceded that his strength was in his interpretations of what he discovered and thought that his critics did not sufficiently credit the cumulative impact of those speculations. “Why not admit it?” he once said to an interviewer, Didier Eribon, in “Conversations with Lévi-Strauss” (1988). “I was fairly quick to discover that I was more a man for the study than for the field.”
Claude Lévi-Strauss was born on Nov. 28, 1908, in Belgium to Raymond Lévi-Strauss and the former Emma Levy. He grew up in France, near Versailles, where his grandfather was a rabbi and his father a portrait painter. His great-grandfather Isaac Strauss was a Strasbourg violinist mentioned by Berlioz in his memoirs. As a child, he loved to collect disparate objects and juxtapose them. “I had a passion for exotic curios,” he says in “Conversations.” “My small savings all went to the secondhand shops.” A large collection of Jewish antiquities from his family’s collection, he said, was displayed in the Musée de Cluny; others were looted after France fell to the Nazis in 1940.
From 1927 to 1932, Claude obtained degrees in law and philosophy at the University of Paris, then taught in a local high school, the Lycée Janson de Sailly, where his fellow teachers included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He later became a professor of sociology at the French-influenced University of São Paulo in Brazil.
Determined to become an anthropologist, he began making trips into the country’s interior, accompanied by his wife, Dina Dreyfus, whom he married in 1932. “I was envisaging a way of reconciling my professional education with my taste for adventure,” he said in “Conversations,” adding: “I felt I was reliving the adventures of the first 16th-century explorers.”
His marriage to Ms. Dreyfus ended in divorce, as did a subsequent marriage, in 1946, to Rose-Marie Ullmo, with whom he had a son, Laurent. In 1954 he married Monique Roman, and they, too, had a son, Matthieu. Besides Laurent, Mr. Lévi-Strauss is survived by his wife and Matthieu as well as Matthieu’s two sons.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss left teaching in 1937 and devoted himself to fieldwork, returning to France in 1939 for further study. But on the eve of war, he was drafted into the French Army to serve as a liaison with British troops. In “Tristes Tropiques,” he writes of his “disorderly retreat” from the Maginot Line after Hitler’s invasion of France, fleeing in cattle trucks, sleeping in “sheep folds.”
In 1941, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was invited to become a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, with help from the Rockefeller Foundation. He called it “the most fruitful period of my life,” spending time in the reading room of the New York Public Library and befriending the distinguished American anthropologist Franz Boas.
He also became part of a circle of artists and Surrealists, including Max Ernst, André Breton and Sartre’s future mistress, Dolorès Vanetti. Ms. Vanetti, who shared his “passion for objects,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss said in “Conversations,” regularly visited an antique shop on Third Avenue in Manhattan that sold artifacts from the Pacific Northwest, leaving Mr. Lévi-Strauss with the “impression that all the essentials of humanity’s artistic treasures could be found in New York.'
After the war, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was so intent on pursuing his studies in New York that he was given the position of cultural attaché by the French government until 1947. On his return to France, he earned a doctorate in letters from the University of Paris in 1948 and was associate curator at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris in 1948 and 1949. His first major book, “The Elementary Structures of Kinship,” was published in 1949. (Several years later, the jury of the Prix Goncourt, France’s most famous literary award, said that it would have given the prize to “Tristes Tropiques,” his hybrid of memoir and anthropological travelogue, had it been fiction.)
After the Rockefeller Foundation gave the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris a grant to create a department of social and economic sciences, Mr. Lévi-Strauss became the director of studies at the school, remaining in the post from 1950 to 1974.
Other positions followed. From 1953 to 1960, he served as secretary general of the International Social Science Council at Unesco. In 1959, he was appointed professor at the Collège de France. He was elected to the French Academy in 1973. By 1960, Mr. Lévi-Strauss had founded L’Homme, a journal modeled on The American Anthropologist.
By the 1980s, structuralism as imagined by Mr. Lévi-Strauss had been displaced by French thinkers who became known as poststructuralists: writers like Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. They rejected the idea of timeless universals and argued that history and experience were far more important in shaping human consciousness than universal laws.
“French society, and especially Parisian, is gluttonous,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss responded. “Every five years or so, it needs to stuff something new in its mouth. And so five years ago it was structuralism, and now it is something else. I practically don’t dare use the word ‘structuralist’ anymore, since it has been so badly deformed. I am certainly not the father of structuralism.”
But Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s version of structuralism may end up surviving post-structuralism, just as he survived most of its avatars. His monumental four-volume work, “Mythologiques,” may ensure his legacy, as a creator of mythologies if not their explicator.
The final volume ends by suggesting that the logic of mythology is so powerful that myths almost have a life independent from the peoples who tell them. In his view, they speak through the medium of humanity and become, in turn, the tools with which humanity comes to terms with the world’s greatest mystery: the possibility of not being, the burden of mortality."
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By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: November 3, 2009
Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called “primitive man” and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and ’70s, has died at 100.
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Mr. Lévi-Strauss in Brazil in the 1930s.
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Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist and father of structuralism, has died at the age of 100.
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His son Laurent said Mr. Lévi-Strauss died of cardiac arrest Friday at his home in Paris. His death was announced Tuesday, the same day he was buried in the village of Lignerolles, in the Côte-d’Or region southeast of Paris, where he had a country home.
“He had expressed the wish to have a discreet and sober funeral, with his family, in his country house,” his son said. “He was attached to this place; he liked to take walks in the forest, and the cemetery where he is now buried is just on the edge of this forest.”
A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of “structuralism,” a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France. And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.
“People realize he is one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century,” Philippe Descola, the chairman of the anthropology department at the Collège de France, said last November in an interview with The New York Times on the centenary of Mr. Levi-Strauss’s birth. Mr. Lévi-Strauss was so revered that at least 25 countries celebrated his 100th birthday.
A descendant of a distinguished French-Jewish artistic family, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was a quintessential French intellectual, as comfortable in the public sphere as in the academy. He taught at universities in Paris, New York and São Paulo and also worked for the United Nations and the French government.
His legacy is imposing. “Mythologiques,” his four-volume work about the structure of native mythology in the Americas, attempts nothing less than an interpretation of the world of culture and custom, shaped by analysis of several hundred myths of little-known tribes and traditions. The volumes — “The Raw and the Cooked,” “From Honey to Ashes,” “The Origin of Table Manners” and “The Naked Man,” published from 1964 to 1971 — challenge the reader with their complex interweaving of theme and detail.
In his analysis of myth and culture, Mr. Lévi-Strauss might contrast imagery of monkeys and jaguars; consider the differences in meaning of roasted and boiled food (cannibals, he suggested, tended to boil their friends and roast their enemies); and establish connections between weird mythological tales and ornate laws of marriage and kinship.
Many of his books include diagrams that look like maps of interstellar geometry, formulas that evoke mathematical techniques, and black-and-white photographs of scarified faces and exotic ritual that he made during his field work.
His interpretations of North and South American myths were pivotal in changing Western thinking about so-called primitive societies. He began challenging the conventional wisdom about them shortly after beginning his anthropological research in the 1930s — an experience that became the basis of an acclaimed 1955 book, “Tristes Tropiques,” a sort of anthropological meditation based on his travels in Brazil and elsewhere.
The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, basing their approaches to life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food, clothing and shelter.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss rescued his subjects from this limited perspective. Beginning with the Caduveo and Bororo tribes in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, where he did his first and primary fieldwork, he found among them a dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins, a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths, and an implicit sense of order and design, even among tribes who practiced ruthless warfare.
His work elevated the status of “the savage mind, ” a phrase that became the English title of one of his most forceful surveys, “La Pensée Sauvage” (1962).
“The thirst for objective knowledge,” he wrote, “is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive.’ ”
The world of primitive tribes was fast disappearing, he wrote. From 1900 to 1950, more than 90 tribes and 15 languages had disappeared in Brazil alone. This was another of his recurring themes. He worried about the growth of a “mass civilization,” of a modern “monoculture.” He sometimes expressed exasperated self-disgust with the West and its “own filth, thrown in the face of mankind.”
In this seeming elevation of the savage mind and denigration of Western modernity, he was writing within the tradition of French Romanticism, inspired by the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom Mr. Lévi-Strauss revered. It was a view that helped build Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s public reputation in the era of countercultural romanticism in the 1960s and ’70s.
But such simplified romanticism was also a distortion of his ideas. For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, the savage was not intrinsically noble or in any way “closer to nature.” Mr. Lévi-Strauss was withering, for example, when describing the Caduveo, whom he portrayed as a tribe so in rebellion against nature — and thus doomed — that it even shunned procreation, choosing to “reproduce” by abducting children from enemy tribes.
His descriptions of American Indian tribes bear little relation to the sentimental and pastoral clichés that have become commonplace. Mr. Lévi-Strauss also made sharp distinctions between the primitive and the modern, focusing on the development of writing and historical awareness. It was an awareness of history, in his view, that allowed the development of science and the evolution and expansion of the West. But he worried about the fate of the West. It was, he wrote in The New York Review of Books, “allowing itself to forget or destroy its own heritage.”
With the fading of myth’s power in the modern West, he also suggested that music had taken on myth’s function. Music, he argued, had the ability to suggest, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society.
But Mr. Lévi-Strauss rejected Rousseau’s idea that humankind’s problems derive from society’s distortions of nature. In Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s view, there is no alternative to such distortions. Each society must shape itself out of nature’s raw material, he believed, with law and reason as the essential tools.
This application of reason, he argued, created universals that could be found across all cultures and times. He became known as a structuralist because of his conviction that a structural unity underlies all of humanity’s mythmaking, and he showed how those universal motifs played out in societies, even in the ways a village was laid out.
For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, for example, every culture’s mythology was built around oppositions: hot and cold, raw and cooked, animal and human. And it is through these opposing “binary” concepts, he said, that humanity makes sense of the world.
This was quite different from what most anthropologists had been concerned with. Anthropology had traditionally sought to disclose differences among cultures rather than discovering universals. It had been preoccupied not with abstract ideas but with the particularities of rituals and customs, collecting and cataloguing them.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s “structural” approach, seeking universals about the human mind, cut against that notion of anthropology. He did not try to determine the various purposes served by a society’s practices and rituals. He was never interested in the kind of fieldwork that anthropologists of a later generation, like Clifford Geertz, took on, closely observing and analyzing a society as if from the inside. (He began “Tristes Tropiques” with the statement “I hate traveling and explorers.”)
To his mind, as he wrote in “The Raw and the Cooked,” translated from “Le Cru et le Cuit” (1964), he had taken “ethnographic research in the direction of psychology, logic, and philosophy.”
In radio talks for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1977 (published as “Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture”), Mr. Lévi-Strauss demonstrated how a structural examination of myth might proceed. He cited a report that in 17th-century Peru, when the weather became exceedingly cold, a priest would summon all those who had been born feet first, or who had a harelip, or who were twins. They were accused of being responsible for the weather and were ordered to repent, to correct the aberrations. But why these groups? Why harelips and twins?
Mr. Lévi-Strauss cited a series of North American myths that associate twins with opposing natural forces: threat and promise, danger and expectation. One myth, for example, includes a magical hare, a rabbit, whose nose is split in a fight, resulting, literally, in a harelip, suggesting an incipient twinness. With his injunctions, the Peruvian priest seemed aware of associations between cosmic disorder and the latent powers of twins.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s ideas shook his field. But his critics were plentiful. They attacked him for ignoring history and geography, using myths from one place and time to help illuminate myths from another, without demonstrating any direct connection or influence.
In an influential critical survey of his work in 1970, the Cambridge University anthropologist Edmund Leach wrote of Mr. Lévi-Strauss: “Even now, despite his immense prestige, the critics among his professional colleagues greatly outnumber the disciples.”
Mr. Leach himself doubted whether Mr. Lévi-Strauss, during his fieldwork in Brazil, could have conversed with “any of his native informants in their native language” or stayed long enough to confirm his first impressions. Some of Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s theoretical arguments, including his explanation of cannibals and their tastes, have been challenged by empirical research.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss conceded that his strength was in his interpretations of what he discovered and thought that his critics did not sufficiently credit the cumulative impact of those speculations. “Why not admit it?” he once said to an interviewer, Didier Eribon, in “Conversations with Lévi-Strauss” (1988). “I was fairly quick to discover that I was more a man for the study than for the field.”
Claude Lévi-Strauss was born on Nov. 28, 1908, in Belgium to Raymond Lévi-Strauss and the former Emma Levy. He grew up in France, near Versailles, where his grandfather was a rabbi and his father a portrait painter. His great-grandfather Isaac Strauss was a Strasbourg violinist mentioned by Berlioz in his memoirs. As a child, he loved to collect disparate objects and juxtapose them. “I had a passion for exotic curios,” he says in “Conversations.” “My small savings all went to the secondhand shops.” A large collection of Jewish antiquities from his family’s collection, he said, was displayed in the Musée de Cluny; others were looted after France fell to the Nazis in 1940.
From 1927 to 1932, Claude obtained degrees in law and philosophy at the University of Paris, then taught in a local high school, the Lycée Janson de Sailly, where his fellow teachers included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He later became a professor of sociology at the French-influenced University of São Paulo in Brazil.
Determined to become an anthropologist, he began making trips into the country’s interior, accompanied by his wife, Dina Dreyfus, whom he married in 1932. “I was envisaging a way of reconciling my professional education with my taste for adventure,” he said in “Conversations,” adding: “I felt I was reliving the adventures of the first 16th-century explorers.”
His marriage to Ms. Dreyfus ended in divorce, as did a subsequent marriage, in 1946, to Rose-Marie Ullmo, with whom he had a son, Laurent. In 1954 he married Monique Roman, and they, too, had a son, Matthieu. Besides Laurent, Mr. Lévi-Strauss is survived by his wife and Matthieu as well as Matthieu’s two sons.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss left teaching in 1937 and devoted himself to fieldwork, returning to France in 1939 for further study. But on the eve of war, he was drafted into the French Army to serve as a liaison with British troops. In “Tristes Tropiques,” he writes of his “disorderly retreat” from the Maginot Line after Hitler’s invasion of France, fleeing in cattle trucks, sleeping in “sheep folds.”
In 1941, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was invited to become a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, with help from the Rockefeller Foundation. He called it “the most fruitful period of my life,” spending time in the reading room of the New York Public Library and befriending the distinguished American anthropologist Franz Boas.
He also became part of a circle of artists and Surrealists, including Max Ernst, André Breton and Sartre’s future mistress, Dolorès Vanetti. Ms. Vanetti, who shared his “passion for objects,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss said in “Conversations,” regularly visited an antique shop on Third Avenue in Manhattan that sold artifacts from the Pacific Northwest, leaving Mr. Lévi-Strauss with the “impression that all the essentials of humanity’s artistic treasures could be found in New York.'
After the war, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was so intent on pursuing his studies in New York that he was given the position of cultural attaché by the French government until 1947. On his return to France, he earned a doctorate in letters from the University of Paris in 1948 and was associate curator at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris in 1948 and 1949. His first major book, “The Elementary Structures of Kinship,” was published in 1949. (Several years later, the jury of the Prix Goncourt, France’s most famous literary award, said that it would have given the prize to “Tristes Tropiques,” his hybrid of memoir and anthropological travelogue, had it been fiction.)
After the Rockefeller Foundation gave the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris a grant to create a department of social and economic sciences, Mr. Lévi-Strauss became the director of studies at the school, remaining in the post from 1950 to 1974.
Other positions followed. From 1953 to 1960, he served as secretary general of the International Social Science Council at Unesco. In 1959, he was appointed professor at the Collège de France. He was elected to the French Academy in 1973. By 1960, Mr. Lévi-Strauss had founded L’Homme, a journal modeled on The American Anthropologist.
By the 1980s, structuralism as imagined by Mr. Lévi-Strauss had been displaced by French thinkers who became known as poststructuralists: writers like Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. They rejected the idea of timeless universals and argued that history and experience were far more important in shaping human consciousness than universal laws.
“French society, and especially Parisian, is gluttonous,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss responded. “Every five years or so, it needs to stuff something new in its mouth. And so five years ago it was structuralism, and now it is something else. I practically don’t dare use the word ‘structuralist’ anymore, since it has been so badly deformed. I am certainly not the father of structuralism.”
But Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s version of structuralism may end up surviving post-structuralism, just as he survived most of its avatars. His monumental four-volume work, “Mythologiques,” may ensure his legacy, as a creator of mythologies if not their explicator.
The final volume ends by suggesting that the logic of mythology is so powerful that myths almost have a life independent from the peoples who tell them. In his view, they speak through the medium of humanity and become, in turn, the tools with which humanity comes to terms with the world’s greatest mystery: the possibility of not being, the burden of mortality."
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Facebook | Sreejith V T Nandakumar: K. Satchidanandan on V T Nandakumar.
Facebook | Sreejith V T Nandakumar: K. Satchidanandan on V T Nandakumar.: "Samakalika Malayalam, 23rd June 2000:
'NANDETTAN'
by
Satchidanandan
V T Nandakumar was a writer caught between heaven and Hades.
I stood witness to the ashes that were once Nandettan, floating over one of the tiny lakes, scattered as shattered memories of the pristine immensities of Bharatha Puzha in Thiru Navaaya. Along with my sister, brother and the children of Nandettan. I don’t know what was the final prayer those ashes made to that liquid Sita, which kept on threatening in silkened soft voice to vanish underneath. Was it, take my hand and lead me into the secrets of earth? Or, perhaps, sour my sublime soul to the unknowns beyond the skies?
Nandettan, better known as V T Nandakumar was an artist caught between heaven and Hades.
My close encounter with a writer for the first time was through Nandettan. I was witness to his rise, fall and resurrection.
I remember that leisurely afternoon when Nandettan had come to our home in Pullut, crossing the courtyard where sun had spread its carpet, hibiscus and basil bloomed in smiles. My father was resting in the armchair, reading the Express daily. Someone whom youth had not quite divorced yet; someone with straight hair, shining face and seemingly dreamy eyes because of their slightly veiled iris. Someone who was, on our family scale, tall. Since I was a regular reader of Jayakeralam, I was familiar with his writing. It was hard to believe that this man with a child-like innocence was the one behind those works: because all of them were permeated with a sense about evil. It was only later, in the sixties of modernity, that an omniscience of this kind about the diabolic had manifested in Malayalam literature.
It was Basheer and Uroob who were Nandettan’s favorite Malayalam novelists. To the best of my knowledge, he was friends with them as well. I came to know him better after he had got married to my sister. I was sixteen or seventeen. A season when poetry was gushing forth and I was translating Shelley, Keats, Omar Khayyam and Wordsworth. But I was not very familiar with contemporary European literature. It was Nandettan who had introduced Sartre, Kafka and Camus to me. His other picks were Hemingway, Steinbeck, Flaubert and Stendhal.
It is heard that Nandettan was one of the first communists in Kodungallur. He was close friends with E. Gopala Krishna Menon, K.V.K Varrier, C. Achyutha Menon and their ilk. ‘Naalathe Mazhavillu’ vividly describes those days. It was “Raktham Illatha Manushyan’ that had catapulted Nandettan to fame. I have always felt it could have been a masterpiece.
Nandettan was working at the ‘Employees Insurance Corporation’ when he married my sister. He had to put up with a lot in the capacity if a trade union leader. After working in Thrissur, Kannur and Kottarakkara, finally he put in his papers. If he had received the emoluments that were to come to him is suspect. It took courage to decide to make a livelihood out of writing during those days. Life suddenly became insecure, once he lost a steady income. He had to sustain three lives. And that was only the beginning of the trials. Serial novels, initially: ‘ Daivathinte Maranam, Vandipparambanmar, Ente Karnan. In between, a fortnightly titled ‘Yaathra’ from Ernakulam. (It was in ‘Yaathra’ that I had written my first column; as well as a liberal translation of Camus’ Outsider, as suggested by Nandettan.) Then, a small treadle press in our home in Pullut. These were not, clearly, up his street. He never had the discipline or dexterity to run a business. Everyone took advantage of his good intentions. A good number of scripts for movies, many of which, hits in the box office. But even there, he failed to succeed in financial negotiations. It was my sister’s Life Insurance agency that had sustained the family. Nandettan had supported her in the profession. I have only heresay about his vagabond life before marriage and the many types of jobs that he had done, including that of a medical representative. It was this vagrant life outside Kerala that inspired his novels like Raktham Illatha Manushyan and Chattayum Malayum. I still feel they contain a certain power and courage.
Nandettan was an engaging conversationalist. He had a special flair for narrating ghost stories. Even as an adult, I had spent sleepless nights, listening to those tales. He was rather proud of my adolescent literary activities, though he had never told me directly. By and by, his maverick lifestyle settled down somewhat. The institutional responsibilities of a family reigned in that whirlwind too. I had felt he experienced immense guilt for describing Krishna in a devious way in Ente Karnan, which was anathema for my mother. Gradually, he felt it was wrong, himself. He discontinued the novel. I feel it was this guilt that had prompted him to romance Viswa Hindu Parishad. Yet, it’s my belief that he never changed his stance on this, though losing its edge a bit. It had astonished and pained me, this volte-face of Nandettan who was a Communist and a trade unionist. It seemed he had lost the art of conversation, along with this.
I had negotiated my path through the extreme left in the meanwhile. Nandettan never disputed me. He merely cautioned me when I was arrested. His Amityville was devoid of horrors, was firm and deep. An eclectic lodge. P.K. Abdul Khader, ex-Congress MP who was shot dead, Dr. Sageer, Dr. Manmohan, Ramadas Vaidyar, Dr. Siddiq, Appukkutty Gupthan who owned Jayakeralam…and others including Omcheri. I had always got only love and affection from him.
I am not sure how Nandettan had assessed himself as a writer. He had always quarreled with literary institutions and refused to repose trust in them. After growing up, we had never discussed literature. After all, we were traveling in different directions. Nandettan failed to become an acclaimed writer. But he could not compete with the Mills and Boons of Malayalam, despite switching from Kafka to English detective novels and suffering from a critical mass of agony. The truth is, he was so committed to reality. He refused to write about anything outside his first-hand knowledge. Randu Penkuttikal could have easily become pornography. But it puts forward a female bonding – not Lesbiansism – a feminine affinity. It may contain a tender and oblique Eros. But it is not at all direct same-sex lust. His model was a couple of girls who could not leave each other. I have felt that it was this realism that had always constrained him from growing beyond a certain limit. Was he the soliloquist in Andrea del Sarto by Robert Browning? An artist who had everything and yet missed out on something crucial?
This much I know: his earnest life that lived three-fourth of a century to see the dawn of the millennium speaks volumes about an artist’s fate and challenges in our times. Even his failures are eloquent – like wounds with lips."
'NANDETTAN'
by
Satchidanandan
V T Nandakumar was a writer caught between heaven and Hades.
I stood witness to the ashes that were once Nandettan, floating over one of the tiny lakes, scattered as shattered memories of the pristine immensities of Bharatha Puzha in Thiru Navaaya. Along with my sister, brother and the children of Nandettan. I don’t know what was the final prayer those ashes made to that liquid Sita, which kept on threatening in silkened soft voice to vanish underneath. Was it, take my hand and lead me into the secrets of earth? Or, perhaps, sour my sublime soul to the unknowns beyond the skies?
Nandettan, better known as V T Nandakumar was an artist caught between heaven and Hades.
My close encounter with a writer for the first time was through Nandettan. I was witness to his rise, fall and resurrection.
I remember that leisurely afternoon when Nandettan had come to our home in Pullut, crossing the courtyard where sun had spread its carpet, hibiscus and basil bloomed in smiles. My father was resting in the armchair, reading the Express daily. Someone whom youth had not quite divorced yet; someone with straight hair, shining face and seemingly dreamy eyes because of their slightly veiled iris. Someone who was, on our family scale, tall. Since I was a regular reader of Jayakeralam, I was familiar with his writing. It was hard to believe that this man with a child-like innocence was the one behind those works: because all of them were permeated with a sense about evil. It was only later, in the sixties of modernity, that an omniscience of this kind about the diabolic had manifested in Malayalam literature.
It was Basheer and Uroob who were Nandettan’s favorite Malayalam novelists. To the best of my knowledge, he was friends with them as well. I came to know him better after he had got married to my sister. I was sixteen or seventeen. A season when poetry was gushing forth and I was translating Shelley, Keats, Omar Khayyam and Wordsworth. But I was not very familiar with contemporary European literature. It was Nandettan who had introduced Sartre, Kafka and Camus to me. His other picks were Hemingway, Steinbeck, Flaubert and Stendhal.
It is heard that Nandettan was one of the first communists in Kodungallur. He was close friends with E. Gopala Krishna Menon, K.V.K Varrier, C. Achyutha Menon and their ilk. ‘Naalathe Mazhavillu’ vividly describes those days. It was “Raktham Illatha Manushyan’ that had catapulted Nandettan to fame. I have always felt it could have been a masterpiece.
Nandettan was working at the ‘Employees Insurance Corporation’ when he married my sister. He had to put up with a lot in the capacity if a trade union leader. After working in Thrissur, Kannur and Kottarakkara, finally he put in his papers. If he had received the emoluments that were to come to him is suspect. It took courage to decide to make a livelihood out of writing during those days. Life suddenly became insecure, once he lost a steady income. He had to sustain three lives. And that was only the beginning of the trials. Serial novels, initially: ‘ Daivathinte Maranam, Vandipparambanmar, Ente Karnan. In between, a fortnightly titled ‘Yaathra’ from Ernakulam. (It was in ‘Yaathra’ that I had written my first column; as well as a liberal translation of Camus’ Outsider, as suggested by Nandettan.) Then, a small treadle press in our home in Pullut. These were not, clearly, up his street. He never had the discipline or dexterity to run a business. Everyone took advantage of his good intentions. A good number of scripts for movies, many of which, hits in the box office. But even there, he failed to succeed in financial negotiations. It was my sister’s Life Insurance agency that had sustained the family. Nandettan had supported her in the profession. I have only heresay about his vagabond life before marriage and the many types of jobs that he had done, including that of a medical representative. It was this vagrant life outside Kerala that inspired his novels like Raktham Illatha Manushyan and Chattayum Malayum. I still feel they contain a certain power and courage.
Nandettan was an engaging conversationalist. He had a special flair for narrating ghost stories. Even as an adult, I had spent sleepless nights, listening to those tales. He was rather proud of my adolescent literary activities, though he had never told me directly. By and by, his maverick lifestyle settled down somewhat. The institutional responsibilities of a family reigned in that whirlwind too. I had felt he experienced immense guilt for describing Krishna in a devious way in Ente Karnan, which was anathema for my mother. Gradually, he felt it was wrong, himself. He discontinued the novel. I feel it was this guilt that had prompted him to romance Viswa Hindu Parishad. Yet, it’s my belief that he never changed his stance on this, though losing its edge a bit. It had astonished and pained me, this volte-face of Nandettan who was a Communist and a trade unionist. It seemed he had lost the art of conversation, along with this.
I had negotiated my path through the extreme left in the meanwhile. Nandettan never disputed me. He merely cautioned me when I was arrested. His Amityville was devoid of horrors, was firm and deep. An eclectic lodge. P.K. Abdul Khader, ex-Congress MP who was shot dead, Dr. Sageer, Dr. Manmohan, Ramadas Vaidyar, Dr. Siddiq, Appukkutty Gupthan who owned Jayakeralam…and others including Omcheri. I had always got only love and affection from him.
I am not sure how Nandettan had assessed himself as a writer. He had always quarreled with literary institutions and refused to repose trust in them. After growing up, we had never discussed literature. After all, we were traveling in different directions. Nandettan failed to become an acclaimed writer. But he could not compete with the Mills and Boons of Malayalam, despite switching from Kafka to English detective novels and suffering from a critical mass of agony. The truth is, he was so committed to reality. He refused to write about anything outside his first-hand knowledge. Randu Penkuttikal could have easily become pornography. But it puts forward a female bonding – not Lesbiansism – a feminine affinity. It may contain a tender and oblique Eros. But it is not at all direct same-sex lust. His model was a couple of girls who could not leave each other. I have felt that it was this realism that had always constrained him from growing beyond a certain limit. Was he the soliloquist in Andrea del Sarto by Robert Browning? An artist who had everything and yet missed out on something crucial?
This much I know: his earnest life that lived three-fourth of a century to see the dawn of the millennium speaks volumes about an artist’s fate and challenges in our times. Even his failures are eloquent – like wounds with lips."
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Monday, October 26, 2009
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Anandan Sivamani...
Anandan Sivamani (born 1959), popularly known as Sivamani, is a percussionist based in India. He plays many instruments including drums, Octoban, Darbuka, Udukai, and Kanjira, as well as many more. He has a huge fan following in India, and is an extremely creative percussionist. He recently performed drumming during the IPL Championships in 2008. Although he was affliated to the Chennai Super Kings team, he kept all the spectators enthralled.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Beyond the Years
Beyond the Years (Cheon nyeon hak) (2007) is a South Korean film. Celebrated director Im Kwon-taek's 100th film, it is based on the novel The Wanderer of Seonhakdong, and was presented at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival.[2] Despite being an informal sequel to Im's phenomenally successful Sopyonje (1993), Beyond the Years was not popular with Korean audiences.[3] Beyond the Years is the story of Dong-ho, a pansori drummer who returns to his childhood village in search of his blind stepsister, Song-hwa.
Beyond the Years" is a love story between a female traditional Korean pansori singer and a male drummer who are not actually blood-related but have been brought up as sibling. The story uses Korean scenery for its background. The movie was also produced by Im, who became the country's "All-Korean director" after his "Sopyonje," which overwhelmed the critics.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
After Him
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUxkC0M5RVc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xTBiGyHxnk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sx29deBYL2E
It’s an intense tale of a mother’s grief after the accidental death of her 20-year- old soDuration: 81 minsGenre: DramaDirector: Gaël MorelLead actor: Catherine Deneuve.
DENEUVE plays Camille, the mother. After her son’s death Camille focuses on her son’s best friend Franck, (THOMAS DUMERCHEZ), who was actually driving the car when the accident occurred. There’s an intensity in her that veers towards obsession.AFTER HIM never quite delivers in terms of drama although there’s a tremendous reality to the sadness. Co-writer/director Gael Morel seems to be satisfied with creating an unsettled mood to the film, garnering terrific performances from his cast in the process.But the film doesn’t go very much beyond the rather superficial premise that Camille is determined that Franck fulfil the promise that has been denied to her son.It’s all very European in style, particularly the ending, but there’s a sense of something missing here and it isn’t grief.
review
Catherine Deneuve is not just an actress but a country. For those of a certain (or even uncertain) age, she embodies an idea of France - incredible elegance, a touch of haughtiness, a sophistication that could only come from Paris, clad in YSL and her own fragrance. Untouchable, unworldly, flawless.
In the 1960s, she was the belle du jour, the face that every director and leading actor wanted to have - in every sense. She played whores and killers, vampires and gold-diggers, actresses and princesses and, later, even an American factory worker (in Lars von Trier's oddball Dancer In The Dark). In the 1980s, she became the official visage for Marianne, the symbol of France. La Reine Catherine, the French ideal.
That can be hard to live up to. Maintaining a legendary face takes work and it's a battle you can't win. Age shall weary them and the years condemn. Deneuve is now 64 and her face has begun to disobey her commands. I don't know if she has had facelifts, nor care, but I think there's less expression in her face than there once was. And no, I don't think that's always true of older actors - some become more expressive as they age, because they are better actors.
Then again, in this case, it may be the performance. Deneuve has always been good at coldly minimal roles. She has said that directors often have to get her to ramp her performance up, rather than down, because she tends to underplay. In this movie, it's the other way around: she starts huge and then keeps reducing the emotions, until she's almost completely inscrutable. It's an intriguing performance because it's like an attempt to erase the character. Maybe that's part of the attraction for Deneuve. Who would blame her, after almost 50 years in the footlights, for playing a woman who wants to become invisible?
The film is about grief, a tricky subject. Everyone knows a little about it and most of us have seen it done badly on film. At one end you get floods of tears; at the other, cold fury, with barren bleakness in between. Few films manage the gravity of it without becoming histrionic; once they succumb to that, it's all over. Life's too short to watch other people's unconvincing grief. If you're going to go after it, you'd better nail it. Anything less is pretentious.
For the first couple of reels of Apres Lui, the story of a woman whose son has been killed in a car accident, I was unconvinced. The director Gael Morel ( Le Clan) just seems to do the obvious but without clarity. The opening shows two young men horsing around as they dress in women's clothes. Deneuve breezes in wearing jeans and helps them with their make-up
They could be gay, except they talk about girls. It turns out they are going to a buck's party. Next thing, the phone rings and Camille (Deneuve) is told her son is dead. Apparently the French police do this sort of thing over the phone. She begins to wail, then calls her daughter Laure (Elodie Bouchez), to tell her. The crying continues through the identification of the body at the hospital with her ex-husband Francois (Guy Marchand), and the bleak funeral. En route to the wake Camille stops by the tree where her son Mathieu (Adrien Jolivet) died. She finds his friend Franck (Thomas Dumerchez) sitting there with a bunch of flowers, crying. She takes him to the wake. Both Laure and her father attack him for coming but Camille will not let them throw him out. So begins the relationship that will become the most important in Camille's life.
Morel, who was an actor in Andre Techine's wonderful 1994 film Wild Reeds, makes few concessions to clarity or brevity in these scenes. The light is so dim in the opening scene that I didn't recognise Franck as the same boy - the one who dressed up with Mathieu. That made it momentarily difficult to work out why people were so hostile to him at the wake. Morel withholds the news that Franck drove the car. Everyone on screen knows it but the audience is kept in the dark - literally. This is an unusual technique but characteristic of a certain kind of French film, in which keeping the audience informed is akin to pandering.
The combination of the twilight gloom and the depiction of grief as simple weeping just about did me in but then the film changes. Camille stops crying and begins to pursue her friendship with Franck. She goes to the university, where both young men were studying, to find out about his grades. She pursues his parents, who are migrants from Portugal, to ensure he returns to class. She gives him a job in her bookshop to provide a stipend. The cameraman is allowed to use lights, too.
The effect is to save the film and set it off in the direction Morel was always intending, towards mystery. This gives Deneuve something to do, as Camille tries to reconnect with her son's energy through Franck. The longer the film goes, the more nuanced the performance becomes. Deneuve convinces us that Camille's grief is getting worse, not better, and her awareness of what she's doing is receding, rather than improving. The more unhinged she becomes, the quieter and more moving Deneuve's performance.
As I say, it's hard to know how much of her stony visage is acting and how much is the result of what we might call maintenance. I think it's mostly the former but either way, it works pretty well for this role.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Gayatri,the playback singer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EP7JsGVfUu0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ls5xwbhR_XY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRbUpO3UQKg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ra30EBb2M0
Gayatri Asokan started her playback career with the song "Deena Dayalo Rama" for the film "Arayannagalude Veedu" under music director Raveendran. "Enthe Nee Kanna" for "Sasneham Sumitra" won her the Kerala State award for the best female playback singer in 2003. Her memorable hits include "Chanjadi Adi" from "Makalkku", & "Thumbikkinnaram" from "Naran" the Mohanlal starrer. She has also sung a song in the V. K Prakash Movie "Moonnamathoral" which was released recently.
Gayathri was first trained in Carnatic music by Sri Mangat Natesan and Sri Vamanan Namboodiri at Trichur. Later she started training in Hindustani Music under "Dr. Alka Deo Marulkar" in Pune and later under "Pandit Vinayaka Torvi" in Bangalore which she is continuing. A person who has influenced Gayatri a lot is Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. She is an active member of the Art of living foundation.
She is also a Hindustani classical music singer, a Bhajan singer and has given Hindustani concerts and programs based on film songs abroad. She has sung in many Albums and has also sung and given music for a new Album for the Art of Living foundation which is to be released in September 2006 by HMV worldwide. She has also shared the stage with eminent singers like Yesudas, Jayachandran, SP Balasubramanyam, S. Janaki, Shankar Mahadevan, Madhu Balakrishnan and Pradip Somasundaran. She recently sang for a music album of music maestro Ilayaraja, Thiruvasagam which was released by Sony Music.
Gayathri and Vidhu Pratap on music and More
`Work hard, be happy'
`Work hard, be happy'
It is a euphonious duet when two award winning playback singers get together. There is not a single discordant note in their conversation. As Gayathri Ashokan and Vidhu Pratap get together for a Take Two interview, there is fun, banter and above all music. Gayathri, who hit the limelight with her soulful song `Deenadayalo Rama... ' in `Arayanagalude Veedu' won the Kerala State Award for her song `Endee Nee Kannaa' in the movie `Sasneham Sumithra.'
Vidhu, who was selected as the first `Voice of the Year' award in a music competition conducted by a private channel in 1997-98 made waves with his songs in `Meesa Madhavan,' `Swapnakoodu' and the song `Sukamanee Nilavu' in `Nammal.' He won the State award for the best male playback singer in 2000. Saraswathy Nagarajan and Bimal Sivaji record.
Two lines of an impromptu `oppana' sung by Vidhu welcome Gayathri to Vidhu's house in Kaithumukku. Gayathri is getting married to Sai, a dentist in Kozhikode, on January 4.
Vidhu: So, you are going to lose all you fans.
Gayathri: My fans enjoy my songs. Getting married has nothing to do with it. How about you?
Vidhu: I am not old enough to get married. I am only 24 (laughs).
Gayathri: Let us talk about music.
Vidhu: I am just back after a recording in Kochi for a movie. It began at 12.30 a.m. After the first recording was over at 3.00 a.m., I went back, slept and returned to the studio at 6 a.m. But I did not feel tired. It was quite alright. However, on the way back, I was feeling very sleepy.
Gayathri: Rehman also does most of his work at night. I had been to see the rushes of Jairaj's film `Makalku.' Quite a few singers have sung for the movie. Hariharan, Adnan Sami, Jassie Gift and Manjari have also sung for the movie.
Vidhu: Will you continue as a playback singer after your marriage.
Gayathri: Yes. My fiancée does not have a problem about that.
Vidhu: Is it an arranged marriage?
Gayathri: Yes. The horoscopes were matched...
Vidhu: I believe in horoscopes too. But difficult to predict what kind of a marriage I will have...
Gayathri: Let us talk about you. When did you decide to be a singer? You sing a number of Tamil songs and your diction and pronunciation are pucca. What I like about your songs is that you have an individual style and never try to mimic anyone.
Vidhu: Well, my mother Laila hails from Amaravila. A lot of people there speak Tamil. Perhaps that is why my Tamil is good. As a student, I was not into music alone. During my school days in Christ Nagar, I used to participate in monoacts, mimicry and singing. So, I was not exposed to too much of songs. Like many kids, I was also learning Carnatic music. My first teacher was Sreekanteswaram Saraswathy Ambal. Now my guru is B. Sasikumar. It was after I won the Voice of the Year Award that I seriously thought about becoming a singer.
Father's pride
Gayathri: I have heard that your father, Prathapan, is the person who really motivated you to become a singer.
Vidhu: Yes. Ninety per cent of the effort was my father's. He backed me and encouraged and, most importantly, supported me financially. After I won the `Voice of the Year' award, I got some offers to sing for concerts. I first sang for a movie called `Paadamudra' when I was in Class IV. My first real break was `Devadasi.' I have a song in `Rasikan.' When did you decide to become a singer. You come from a family of musicians.
Gayathri: But I was not focussed like you people. I used to enjoy music a great deal and was learning Carnatic music. My grandmother, Ammukutty, was a good singer and my Valliamma (mother's sister) used to play the veena beautifully. She was a professor at Stella Marris in Chennai. Then, when I was doing my BA, I became a great fan of Hariharan and that is when I decided that I had to learn Hindustani music. I went to Pune as my guru Alka Marulkar was staying there. I stayed there to learn Hindustani.
Vidhu: Don't you think that Hariharan's ghazals and songs had a great influence in making Hindustani music so popular in Kerala?
Gayathri: Absolutely. He has a great voice and moreover since he is a South Indian, a lot of people were able to relate to him better. How did you take care of your voice? I have heard that male singers go through a difficult phase when their voice breaks.
Vidhu: It is very difficult and frustrating. You not sure whether to begin on a high or low note. Suddenly, in the middle, your voice lets you down. That was a difficult period.
Gayathri: During that time, doing the wrong riyaz could damage your voice.
Vidhu: During that time Vazhuthacaud Sunil, who had passed his Ghanabhooshanam was not too busy then. He used to come at 5 a.m. and I had to get up and practise. Sometimes I used to get angry as I had to get up early. But now I feel that was good for my voice.
Gayathri chechi, you have a younger brother?
Gayathri: His name is Ganesh and he is an engineer.
Vidhu: Ask Gayathri chechi what she calls her father? Neshu. And do you know what they call their mother? Nunia (Gayathri laughs out loud). That is the language in their house. Her father's real name is Ashokan.
Gayathri: From Ashokan it first became `Ashu' then it became Neshu.
Vidhu: They have such short forms for many such things. I was able to decipher her language only after working with her for four or five years.
Gayathri: We have done a number of stage shows together and they are usually a hit. Is it not Vidhu? Vidhu dances... Vidhu: She will not ...
Gayathri: I don't dance to impress anybody.
Vidhu: When we do a show it is for the audience.
Gayathri: But that does not mean you `work out' on the stage. He even tried to moon walk.
Vidhu: I try to entertain the audience.
Gayathri: Have you learnt dancing?
Favourite songs
Vidhu: For some time. The audience enjoy our concerts. I like Gayathri chechi's songs such as `Deendayalo' and `Endee Nee Kanna.' The song that won her the award...
Gayathri: As soon as I heard `Sukamanee... ' during a stage show, I was attracted to that song. It is a very romantic one and the song creates a mood. Vidhu: Gayathri, don't you sing fast numbers?
Gayathri: Only if I get fast numbers.
Vidhu: There is one thing. One is lucky to get to sing melodies.
Gayathri: Have you planned your career?
Vidhu: Mine is a not a planned life at all.
Gayathri: But you should have planned something in secret?
Vidhu: That has to remain a secret. There is nothing like that. I don't know how long I will be able to stay on in this field. I wish to be in the field for a long time. Then there is enough competition in this field. Work hard and be happy.
Vidhu: If the husband and wife are from the same profession, there would be problems. I would prefer her to be in some other profession. So what is your ambition?
Gayathri: Talking about my ambition, well, I have spent time and energy to go to Bangalore and learn Hindustani music. My guru is Pandit Vinayak Torvi. Right now, I want to be a singer. Maybe later, when I mature as a singer I may set up a school.
Gayathri’s Mantra
Playback singer Gayathri Asokan’s interests go beyond music. But she tells Saraswathy Nagarajan that her goal is to become a Hindustani vocalist.
"Yes, films have given me a great deal of exposure and I do enjoy my assignments. But in another six or seven years, I want to become a competent Hindustani vocalist,” asserts the student of Bangalore-based Hindustani vocalist Vinayak Torve and Alka Marulakar. She adds that she furthers her learning by tuning in to all kinds of music on youtube. “I think the Net is a fantastic place for any serious student of music. Indian classical, Western, Jazz , ghazals, rock, instrumental… there is so much that is easily available,” smiles Gayathri.
Avid reader
Gayathri’s taste in literature is equally Catholic. “I enjoy a wide range of books and authors. I am a fan of Milan Kundera. But my all-time favourites are Latin American authors, particularly Mario Vargas Llosa, Jose Saramago, Marques… Of Llosa’s books, ‘Way to Paradise,’ which delves into the life of artist Paul Gauguin, is a particular favourite. It is about the angst, elation and intensity of being an artist; a little like Somerset Maugham’s ‘The Moon and the Sixpence,’ but I find this much deeper,” says Gayathri with the passion and enthusiasm of a true bibliophile.
The literature postgraduate says airports are a great place to pick up books. “Some of them turn out be trash but I have also discovered some gems,” adds Gayathri, an avid traveller thanks to her concerts and stage programmes. Her sojourns to different places on the globe have also whetted the foodie in her.
“A vegetarian foodie who did not know how to cook,” laughs Gayathri. She says she used to feel “very unfeminine” as she equated cooking as something all women did and to her dismay she could not cook even a single dish.
“Usually, it a shishya who looks after the guru. But in my case, it was my gurus, both excellent cooks, who kept feeding me all kinds of goodies. Recently, my parents built a traditional house near Mulamkunnathukavu and I go there for a break. I do riyaz, go for long walks in the countryside, watch the grass grow and cook simple dishes. I enjoy cooking now,” says Gayathri with all the zeal of the newly initiated.
However she adds that the kitchen is not where she hangs out in Thrissur. “Jyotsna (playback singer) and I are great pals and cine buffs. We love watching all the latest Bollywood flicks. I have another group of friends in Bangalore. We hangout in restaurants, play snooker… I try to spend a few days in Bangalore every month as both my gurus are there,” says Gayathri, a disciple of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.
Musical journey
Tracing her evolution as a singer, Gayathri says although music is in her genes with two trained Carnatic musicians (her grandmother Ammukutty and aunt Thulasi) in her family, she used to see it as a hobby and not a vocation.
“I used to win several prizes for music during my student days. My plan was to do a post graduation in management or mass communication and perhaps take up a job after that,” recounts Gayathri. “But,” she adds laughing, “while still in college I joined a band that used to belt out film songs for various stage programmes in and around Thrissur. It was considered pretty scandalous then.”
It was during the same time that the late Philip Francis, a ghazal singer and tabla player, introduced her to Hindustani music and that “made me yearn to learn Hindustani.” Gayathri remembers meeting Alka Marulkar after a concert in Kochi. “I requested her to make me her student. She told me to sing a bhajan and that must have given her hope for she told me to come to Pune to learn in the gurukul tradition.”
Philip was again the one who introduced her to music director Raveendran Master during a short vacation in Thrissur, her home town. That led the way to filmdom. “After that I began to get many assignments in Kerala and found it difficult to continue in Pune. Luckily, I found Vinayak Torve and so I was able go on with my lessons,” explains Gayathri.
The singer has already composed the song in her album ‘Vishuddhi.’ Her ambition is make a mark in world music and as a classical singer. And a role on the silver screen?
“Well, there is a shot of me singing in ‘Madhavenal’ and I have also dubbed for a short film ‘Chaulatayude Baaki.’ But, as an actor, well, I have not made up my mind. My focus is all on my music,” says Gayathri
Friday, July 24, 2009
Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TN5OlSbbgfM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1XIEioSv9U
Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman -Mrudangam Vidwan
Born on 17-12-1935,in Tanjore. His father, a medical practitioner and himself an accomplished musician, had with insight and intuition nurtured the inborn talents of his son and got him rightly initiated into mrudangam .
Sri Sivaraman learnt this divine art under four great and illustrious masters: Sri Arupathi Natesa Iyer, Sri Tanjavoor Vaidyanatha Iyer, Sri Palghat Mani Iyer, Sri Kumbakonam Rangu Iyengar. The pursuit of this art under the gurukula system for well over fifteen years did not deter him to qualify for law. He is a double graduate of The University of Madras (B.A., B.L.).
Behind the professional glory and mastery of Umayalpuram Sivaraman lies a massive substratum of toil and training. Even as a three year old kid, Sivaraman revealed his ‘laya sense’ playing his fingers on whatever objects they chanced to touch upon and producing diverse ‘talas’ and such an act fetched him the gift of a kanjira from his grandmother. As a boy of ten, Sivaraman had his ‘arangetram’ (first concert) and the debut was held in the precincts of Kalahastheeswaraswami temple in the temple town of Kumbakonam.
His new techniques, innovations and creative ability in accompaniment, solo renditions, and jugalbandhi programmes with his North Indian counterparts have earned him a special place in the world of art, worthy of emulation by other artists. Having made his debut at a tender age of ten, Sivaraman has been in the field as a ‘top notcher’ for half a century now, accompanying a galaxy of maestros of recent past and artistes of great merit today, both vocal and instrumental.
His percussion career has been a colourful spectrum of accompaniment to a legion of musical maestros in Carnatic music – Sri Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar, Sri Musiri Subramania Iyer, Sri Palladam Sanjeeva Rao, Sri Mysore Chowdiah, Sri Rajamanickam Pillai, Sri Papa Venkataramiah, Sri Dwaram Venkataswami Naidu, Sri Mudikondan Venkatarama Iyer, Sri G. N. Balasubramaniam, Sri Madurai Mani Iyer, Sri Maharajapuram Viswanatha Iyer, Sri Alathur Brothers, Sri Chembai Vaidyanatha Bhagavathar, Dr Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, Dr M. Balamuralikrishna, Sri Nedunuri Krishnamurthi, Sri Voleti Venkateswarulu, Sri S. Balachander, Sri T.R. Mahalingam, etc. He has to his credit several jugalbandhi concerts with the top artistes of Hindustani music like Pt. Ravishankar, Sri Hariprasad Chaurasia, Pt. Ram Narain and top tabla artistes like Pt. Kishen Maharaj, Pt. Samta Prasad, Ustad Allah Rakha, Mr. Zakhir Hussain and others. In these concerts, Sivaraman has won great approbation from his North Indian Counterparts and the audience.
Besides his professional career, he had undertaken the very laudable task of doing original research in the art of mrudangam. This resulted in his highly acclaimed lecture demonstrations done in all important centres in India and abroad, which enabled him to disseminate knowledge of this divine art to art lovers, music conferences, music seminars and the like. He is the only mrudangam vidwan who has explored and placed before the world of art lovers authentic information on the techniques and nuances of mrudangam for more than two decades. He has introduced the fibre glass mrudangam to Carnatic music for the first time, improvised a mechanical jig to eliminate human error in the moulding of skins for both sides of the instrument and has done research work on tanned and untanned skins for the mrudangam. His analysis of the ingredients of the black patch has given much insight on the overtones produced by different strokes on the mrudangam.
Sri Sivaraman has contributed informative articles on mrudangam in Sri Shanmukhananda Sabha's (Bombay) Journal, Bhavan's Journal; Vadya Kala - a publication of the Development Centre for Musical Instruments, Madras (Ministry of Commerce - Handicrafts, Govt. of India) and to several other journals and publications. He has played mrudangam in several professional recordings and in the special feature 'The Drums of India', in the United States. He has also planned and played in the cassette ‘Garland of Rhythm’ which has given a new dimension to the concept of thani avarthanam (mrudangam solo). He had the unique honour of playing Tala Vadya Kutcheri-s in the Annual Film Fare festival in 1973 and 1975. He also participated in the ‘Tala Vadya Utsav’ at New Delhi in 1985 and played a jugalbandhi concert. He played mrudangam in a special programme known as ‘Mrudangam Drum Set Jugalbandhi’ in Max Muller Bhavan, Madras, along with two leading drummers from West Germany. He has served as a judge in the panel constituted by the Ministry of Education and Culture, Government of India. He has served as a judge in the All India Radio panel, for selection of artistes. He was invited to play mrudangam in the popular and successful Tamil movie 'Mrudanga Chakravarthy'. Sri Sivaraman is a ‘A’ Top Grade artiste in All India Radio and Doordarshan Television. He has presided over the Annual Music Conference of the Indian Fine Arts Society, Madras, in 1984 and was conferred the title of Sangeetha Kala Sikhamani. Sri Sivaraman has been appointed as the Director for ‘Tanjore Vaidyanatha Iyer School for Percussion’ recently started by the Music Academy, Madras.
His innovations include analysis of the ingredients of the black patch on the right side of the mrudangam, on the overtones produced from the right side drum head, synthesis of the traditional and the modern approaches in playing on the instrument, research in using tanned and untanned skins and hides of the instrument, evolving new patterns of rhythmic designs (mora-s and korvai-s), has improvised and is using a mechanical contrivance to eliminate human error in the moulding skins for mrudangam on both sides and he has made a fibre glass mrudangam and used it in concerts.
He has given lecture demonstrations at The Music Academy, Madras; Tamil Nadu Isai Kalluri; University of Madras; National Museum, New Delhi; Sri Shanmukhananda Sabha, Bombay; Karnataka Gana Kala Parishat, Bangalore; Music College, Madurai; Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Coimbatore; Indira Kala Viswa Vidyalaya, Khiragarh; The Conservatorium of Music, The University of Sydney; and in the United States of America etc. He has gone abroad several times on concert tours and special programmes. He has visited the USSR, USA, Canada, UK, France, West Germany, East Germany, Poland, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Indonesia, Bangkok, Ceylon, Muscat, Bahrain, Australia, etc. In his visit to the U.K., he participated in the Tala Vadya Kutcheri for the Festival of India, 1982, and again for the same festival in New York and Washington D.C., U.S.A., in 1985. He has also been invited to perform concerts and jazz concerts in Sri Lanka and Belgium.
When Sri Sivaraman completed 50 years of service to Carnatic music in 1996, His Excellency Shri K. R. Narayanan, Vice-President of India, honoured Sivaraman at a public function held at Madras on 10th March 1996.
He has been working for the upkeep of the traditional way of playing without sacrificing the modern impact, greater understanding, and wide appreciation for the instrument, dedication to the art of mrudangam, its propagation, and scientific improvisations in the construction of mrudangam. His mrudangam playing is considered to be in a class of its own, winning critical acclaim from the top-most musicians and music lovers.
CD's/Audio Cassettes featuring Umayalpuram Sivaraman:
1. CD recorded in Tokyo, Japan. Title: "Percussion of India" presented by Umayalpuram K Sivaraman -
World Music Library; Seven Seas; KICC 5168, King Records Co. Ltd. 2-12-13 OTOWA BUNKYO-KU TOKYO 112.Japan
2. CD recorded at Stuttgart, Germany Title :" Who's to know" - L.Shankar, Umayalpuram Sivaraman, Zakir Hussain.
Recorded by ECM Stereo 8272692 ECM records, GLEICHMANN STRABE 10 MUNCHEN 60
3. CD recorded in India Title:" Garland of Rhythm" ( By Magnasound & OMI Inc) - Solo by Umayalpuram Sivaraman.
Manufactured and marketed by OMI Music Inc, 71 Rosedale Avenue, Unit A-10, Brampton, Ontario-L6X1K4, Canada.
This CD has been produced as Ist edition and later as 2nd edition.
4. CD recorded in Brussels Title:" AKA Moon- Ganesh" , a CD dedicated by the famous Jazz band AKA Moon to
Umayalpuram Sivaraman. Sivaraman has played and composed a few pieces in this
CD. Produced and marketed by CARBON 7, 23 Eisenhower,1030, Brussels, Belgium Telephone: 32-2-2429703. Fax: 32-2-2453885
5. CD recorded in India Title: "Drums of India". Mrudangam Solo by Umayalpuram Sivaraman.
Produced and marketed by HMV(RPG Group).
The Gramaphone company of India, 6B- Nungambakkam High Road,Chennai 600034. Phone 044-8273449, 044-8274526.
e-mail: Southrm.mad@gcil.sprintrpg.ems.vsnl.net.in
6. CD Titled: "Masters of Percussion". Mrudangam Duet by Umayalpuram Sivaraman and Zakir Hussain.
Produced and marketed by Moment Records.
Moment Records, 237 Crescent Road, San Anselmo, CA 94960
7. CD recorded in Brussels Title:" AKA Moon- ELOHIM " with Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman as a guest artist
CD. Produced and marketed by CARBON 7, 23 Eisenhower,1030, Brussels, Belgium Telephone: 32-2-2429703. Fax: 32-2-2453885
8. CD Titled:" BIG BANG" - featuring a duet by Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman and Zakir Hussain
CD. Produced and marketed by Ellipsis Arts, 20 Lumber Road, Suite 1, Roslyn, NY 11576-9894
Monday, July 20, 2009
The Feelings Factory
Elsa Zylberstein in The Feelings Factory: Directed by Jean-Marc Moutout.
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=26938043
Synopsis
Eloïse, 36, is a property lawyer in Paris. Young, good-looking and successful, she is nonetheless single. To end her solitude, and because deep down she desires a love-life that she initiates and controls like her career, she signs up with a speed-dating club. After all, isn't that all about being fast and efficient, too? Seven men, seven women, seven minutes to work their charm. Then the bell rings.
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=26938043
Synopsis
Eloïse, 36, is a property lawyer in Paris. Young, good-looking and successful, she is nonetheless single. To end her solitude, and because deep down she desires a love-life that she initiates and controls like her career, she signs up with a speed-dating club. After all, isn't that all about being fast and efficient, too? Seven men, seven women, seven minutes to work their charm. Then the bell rings.
Review
A thirtysomething singleton turns to speed dating as an answer to her emotional emptiness in "The Feelings Factory," a quizzical relationships dramedy elevated by a terrif central performance by Elsa Zylberstein. Not so much an examination of the speed-dating phenom -- whose touchstone pic remains last year's shamefully ignored "Shoppen" by Ralf Westhoff -- this is more a look at New Millennium me-culture, but played sympathetically without grandstanding its social subtext. It's a solid bet for upscale auds on the foreign arthouse circuit.
Main titles reminiscent of '60s pop-art pics establish a light mood as Eloise Hautier (Zylberstein), 36, is seen in confident work mode as a property lawyer at a venerable firm where she's a junior partner. However, outside work, she has little personal life beyond other professional types, so decides to try out a speed-dating agency run by the smooth Sonia (Nathaly Coualy).
Each session, held in a sanitized, retro-'60s cocktail bar, involves seven men and seven women, each getting seven minutes with each other before a bell rings. Script has some sharply written fun with these mini-encounters, with Eloise as nervous and overeager as the men she meets. But whereas "Shoppen" was almost entirely concerned with the actual speed-dating process, it's only the starting point of the main story in "Factory."
The most promising candidate seems to be Jean-Luc (Bruno Putzulu), a handsome, confident business-type who meets Eloise's vague demands of "the same intellectual standing." Lunch leads to dinner, which leads to great sex, and Eloise confides in a girlfriend that she's fallen in love.
Meanwhile, script slowly makes clear that Eloise herself is not all she seems. She's seeing a doctor (Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass, wasted in a cameo role) about her dizzy spells and chronic amenorrhea, and is worried she may never be able to have kids.
Parallel to this, she bumps into the seemingly least promising candidate at her speed-dating sesh -- the shy, self-critical, balding Andre (Jacques Bonnaffe). Unknown to her, he follows her back to work after their chat in a bookshop.
As she learns more about her medical condition, and the relationship with Jean-Luc starts to go cold, she spends time with the depressive Andre, who also -- in a scene that traverses an entire emotional spectrum in a few minutes -- turns out to be much more complex than she imagined.
From a very different perspective than his first feature, downsizing drama "Work Hard Play Hard" (2003), writer-director Jean-Marc Moutout shows an acute eye (and ear) for the emotional pressures on ambitious 21st-centurers who want it all on plate, now. "We've never been freer, but never more analyzed and told what to do," says one. And in one of the pic's most tender scenes, Eloise is gently told by her sick grandmother that, for her generation, marriage was always been more about family and affection than just sex and me-me self-analysis.
Pic's theme is less fresh than the way Moutout treats it, keeping the viewer as unsettled as its central character in what will happen next and juggling several emotional balls at the same time. Unexpected coda contains a neat throwaway twist.
On-screen chemistry between all the players is easy and convincing, with Zylberstein deftly maneuvering her way through the film's quicksand moods and avoiding playing simply a ditz. Technical package is thoroughly pro.
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