Abstract
This is by no means the first attempt to link Claude Lévi-Strauss with Buddhist thought.1 It is my purpose to make it, however, the most thorough and least eccentric comparison to date. I want to set the record straight about the nature and significance of Buddhist parallels in the thought of Lévi-Strauss.
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Notes
H. S. Hughes, ‘Structure and Society’, Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Anthropologist as Hero, E. Hayes and T. Hayes, eds (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1970), 22–46.
H. S. Hughes, ‘Structure and Society’, in Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Anthropologist as Hero, E. Hayes and T. Hayes, eds (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1970), 45.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (New York: Atheneum, 1961), 397.
Susan Sontag, ‘The Anthropologist as Hero’, in Claude Lévi-Strauss: the Anthropologist as Hero, E. and T. Hayes, eds (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970), 184–96;
Robert L. Zimmerman, ‘Lévi-Strauss and the Primitive’, in Claude Lévi-Strauss: the Anthropologist as Hero, E. and T. Hayes, eds. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970), 216–34.
Octavio Paz, Claude Lévi-Strauss: an Introduction (New York: Delta, 1970), 150.
Thomas Luckmann, Invisible Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1967).
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Scope of Anthropology (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), 17.
Padmasiri De Silva, Buddhist and Freudian Psychology (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Lake House, 1974), 31.
Ino Rossi, The Unconscious in Culture (New York: Dutton, 1974), 71–5.
K. N. Jayatilleke, Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge (London: Allen & Unwin, 1963), passim.
Edward Sarkisyanz, Buddhist Backgrounds of the Burmese Revolution (The Hague: Mouton, 1965).
U Ba Swe, ‘The Burmese Revolution’, quoted in George O. Totten, ‘Buddhism and Socialism in Japan and Burma’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 2 (1960): 301.
A. K. Warder, ‘Early Buddhism and other Contemporary Systems’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 18 (1956): 43–63.
Bardwell Smith, ‘Sinhalese Buddhism and the Dilemmas of Reinterpretation’, The Two Wheels of the Dhamma, Bardwell Smith, ed. (Chambersburg: American Academy of Religion, 1972), 106.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 212, and ‘The Story of Asdiwal’, N. Mann, tr. The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism, Edmund R. Leach, ed. (London: Tavistock, 1967), 16–17.
A. Akoun, J. Mousseau and F. Morlin, ‘A Convention with Claude Lévi-Strauss’, Psychology Today 5/12 (1972): 82.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), 247.
Rune Johanson, The Psychology of Nirvāna (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), Ch. XIV.
Y. Karunadasa, The Buddhist Analysis of Matter (Colombo: Department of Cultural Affairs, 1967), 65f.
Ivan Strenski, ‘Falsifying Deep Structures’, Man 9 (1974): 574–7.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 101.
Lucien Stryk, World of the Buddha (New York: Doubleday, 1969), 173–4.
Edmund R. Leach, Lévi-Strauss (London: Fontana, 1970), 37.
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© 1993 Ivan Strenski
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Strenski, I. (1993). Lévi-Strauss and the Buddhists. In: Religion in Relation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11866-3_7
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