The Story of Lynx

In this comparatively accessible later work, anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss illustrates his trademark methods of comparative and contextual analysis, his deep respect for American Indian cultures and systems of thought, and his unique gifts as a creative interpreter of the social world. _The Story of Lynx_ takes up new work but also offers new readers a glipse of the larger set of projects Levi-Strauss pursued over the course of much of the 20th century. Readers in particularly will get a taste of the mythological analysis at the center of his great four volume work known collectively as _Mythologiques_. At the center of _The Story of Lynx_ is a quest to understand ideologies of twinship and the broader set of principles that have come to be known among anthropologists as dual organization and as "dualism" as a wider social ideology. Here Levi-Strauss focuses on an interconnected series of myths from the Northwest of North America. The stories, rich in themselves, center on the adventures of Lynx and Coyote and explore such themes as the origin of fog, the nature of (in)appropriate marriage, the cosmology of Sun and Moon, and the significance of bodily ornament. The stories, explored comparatively and in the contexts of the societies in which they are told, reveal complex patterns both in historical relationships between groups and in the social philosophies and ideologies out of which they emerge. Levi-Strauss' project is advanced here in two particular domains--an exploration of the ways European tales were incorporated into native mythologies and in trying together his findings about dualism in the mythological and sociological domains. He also offers a defense of his work against what he holds were misreadings by other scholars. For students and other interested readers seeking an entry point and introduction to Levi-Strauss' larger body of work on Native American mythology, _the History of Lynx_ is a logical and rewarding beginning. Students more interested in the link between myth and visual art, would be similarly rewarded by his _Way of the Masks_. His collections of essays and his masterworks _Triste Tropiques_, _The Savage Mind_ and _The Elementary Structures of Kinship_ remain landmark works in anthropology, depite now well-established moves by many contemporary scholars away from structuralist theories toward so-called post-structural and post-colonial ones.