CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS (1908-2009) Structuralism and Anthropology Although it has long roots, stretching back to the beginning of the twentieth century, Structuralism found a home in philosophy and reigned as the leading movement from the beginning of the 1950s to the...
THE STRUCTURE OF STRUCTURALISM Structuralism Every society has its songs, its dances, the stories it tells, the myths it makes, the histories it writes. Every culture has ways of loving and mating, way of forming families and raising children. Each tribe has its...
ART AND MATERIAL CULTURE CLIFFORD GEERTZ and ART HISTORY Gathered together at the Warburg Library and impacted by the neo-Kantian revival in the beginning of the Twentieth Century, Aby Warburg and Ernst Cassirer created diachronic analyses of cultural symbols from the...
ART AND MATERIAL CULTURE CLIFFORD GEERTZ and PHILOSOPHY “Art, Clifford Geertz once remarked, “is notoriously hard to talk about.” However, Clifford Geertz provided art history with a way to talk about art through material culture. A term familiar to anthropology,...
THEORIES OF THE POSTMODERN From Mauss to Lévi-Strauss to Lacan, the Signifier Floated The search for origins are always futile but the process often turns up interesting moments in time. For example, when did Postmodernism begin? The answer depends upon the place one...
JULIA KRISTEVA (1941-) Abjection Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1980/1982) was a turning point in her career and in postmodern theory because she re-located the origin of psychoanalysis in the notion of abjection. Following in the footsteps of Luce Irigaray, this...
