![The raw and the cooked jim harrison The raw and the cooked jim harrison](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125616603/321021384.jpg)
Author by: Jim Harrison Languange: en Publisher by: Atlantic Books Format Available: PDF, ePub, Mobi Total Read: 44 Total Download: 157 File Size: 51,7 Mb Description: A classic collection full of salty wisdom, from 'the Henry Miller of food writing' (Wall Street Journal) and author of Legends of the Fall. Food is an extreme sport for Jim Harrison. As a seven-month old baby he was found chewing the leather binding of the family Bible with 'its slightly beefy flavour'; from then on, when he didn't have his nose in a book he could be found eating - everything.
The Raw and the Cooked collects his musings on meat, marinades and a million other things besides, from the man who likes to wrestle his dinner to the ground then wash it down with a really good 1967 Latour.
In short, The Raw and the Cooked is an unwieldy melding of ill-used terms that seem logical but only until one delves beneath the surface to discover that Claude Levi-Strauss is asking the reader to disengage for too long a willing suspension of disbelief. Claude Levi-Strauss, a French anthropologist, was the founder of structural anthropology. This theoretical position assumes that there are structural propensities in the human mind that lead unconsciously toward categorization of physical and social objects, hence such book titles as The Raw and the Cooked (1964) and such expositions of his work by others as The Unconscious in Culture.
Why are the stars placed just this way? The stories of how humans are connected to animals - all peoples have stories and myths to explain the incomprehensible 'why' of existence. Levi-Strauss was bucking traditional anthropological thought by contending that there isn't much distance between the primitive mind and the supposedly evolved mind.
It won't surprise anyone to know that many collected myths from oral tradition cultures were mutated by the missionaries who then brought the altered stori Why are the stars placed just this way? The stories of how humans are connected to animals - all peoples have stories and myths to explain the incomprehensible 'why' of existence. Levi-Strauss was bucking traditional anthropological thought by contending that there isn't much distance between the primitive mind and the supposedly evolved mind. It won't surprise anyone to know that many collected myths from oral tradition cultures were mutated by the missionaries who then brought the altered stories to our awareness. Levi-Strauss's dedication to truth using his philosophical humanitarian mind is a gift we all need to unwrap more thoroughly. I read this book in the late 80s with the ambition of getting through all four volumes of mythologiques. That didn't happen.
However, I did learn a lot about ethnographic paradigmatic structuralism from this book. The book starts out making an analogy between music and myth. A piece of music is only music when it has one or more motifs which repeat and vary in structured ways. So avant-garde atonal serial music is not music. Myth works exactly the same way; recurring motifs hold a story together I read this book in the late 80s with the ambition of getting through all four volumes of mythologiques. That didn't happen. However, I did learn a lot about ethnographic paradigmatic structuralism from this book.
The book starts out making an analogy between music and myth. A piece of music is only music when it has one or more motifs which repeat and vary in structured ways.
So avant-garde atonal serial music is not music. Myth works exactly the same way; recurring motifs hold a story together. To L-S the motif itself is not meaningful, as only the patterning and arrangement of motifs in the composition of the music/myth gives the work significance. The notes of a song played on an instrument do not have meaning the same way that spoken words strung together in a sentence have meaning. But these instrumental or mythic performances do have meanings and comprise ideas.
However, there is much to dislike about this book. I feel I did not learn much about Native South Americans.
Also, L-S ignores obvious psychoanalytical or ideological interpretations of mythic symbolism. They just are not what he is after. And the endless barrage of myths and their mutations, flayed out in purely structural terms, can be overwhelming not to mention tedious and boring at times.
But I am glad I had the discipline to read it. Better books by L-S are Totemism, Savage Mind, and Tristes Tropiques.