Claude Lévi-Strauss - The Other Face of the Moon [2013][A]

Book Description
Publication Date: January 28, 2013
Gathering all of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s writings on Japan, this sustained meditation follows his dictum that to understand one’s own culture, one must see it from another’s point of view. For Lévi-Strauss, Japan occupied a unique place among world cultures. This English translation presents one of France’s most public figures at his most personal.
Exposure to Japanese art was influential in Lévi-Strauss’s early intellectual growth, and between 1977 and 1988 he visited the country five times. The essays, lectures, and interviews of this volume, written between 1979 and 2001, are the product of these journeys. They investigate an astonishing range of subjects—among them Japan’s founding myths, Noh and Kabuki theater, the distinctiveness of the Japanese musical scale, the artisanship of Jomon pottery, and the relationship between Japanese graphic arts and cuisine. For Lévi-Strauss, Japan occupied a unique place among world cultures. Molded in the ancient past by Chinese influences, it had more recently incorporated much from Europe and the United States. But the substance of these borrowings was so carefully assimilated that Japanese culture never lost its specificity. As though viewed from the hidden side of the moon, Asia, Europe, and America all find, in Japan, images of themselves profoundly transformed.
As in Lévi-Strauss’s classic ethnography Tristes Tropiques, this new English translation presents the voice of one of France’s most public intellectuals at its most personal.

Reviews
Lévi-Strauss was certainly not the only French intellectual to develop a fascination for Japan. Indeed, Japan's sculptured landscapes, highly stylized rituals and philosophies of self-denial struck a particular chord with his structuralist contemporaries, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. But the impressions gathered here are distinctively his, and indeed sometimes read as if they were lifted straight from the Mythologiques... There is much to admire [here]... Still fizzing with ideas as he approached eighty, Claude Lévi-Strauss never relented on his increasingly lonely structuralist quest. His fascination for Japanese traditions, similar to his lifelong obsession with ethnography in general, stemmed in part from his feeling of alienation from modernity.(Patrick Wilcken Times Literary Supplement 2013-07-05)

This new slim compendium of eminent anthropologist Lévi-Strauss's lectures, interviews, and musings reflect his adoration and intellectual curiosity about all things Japanese. Interweaving moments of personal and professional significance, Lévi-Strauss recounts the trajectory of an intrigue generated by a childhood fascination with Japanese prints given to him by his father that later evolved into his love of Japanese literature, food, and practices... This collection illuminates the zeal that motivates Lévi-Strauss's anthropological work and is therefore a pleasant read for anyone with an interest in Japan, cultural difference, or anthropological studies. (Publishers Weekly 2013-03-18)

About the Author and translator
Claude Lévi-Strauss was chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France (1959–1982).
Junzo Kawada is a cultural anthropologist in Japan.