From Montaigne to Montaigne

Two previously unpublished lectures charting the renowned anthropologist’s intellectual engagement with the sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne

In January 1937, between the two ethnographic trips he would describe in Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss gave a talk to the Confédération générale du travail in Paris. Only recently discovered in the archives of the Bibliothèque national de France, this lecture, “Ethnography: The Revolutionary Science,” discussed the French ...