Gathering for the first time all of Claude Levi-Strauss's writings on Japanese civilization, The Other Face of the Moon forms a sustained meditation into the French anthropologist's dictum that to understand one's own culture, one must regard it from the point of view of another.

Exposure to Japanese art was influential in Levi-Strauss's early intellectual growth, and between 1977 and 1988 he visited the country five times. The essays, lectures, and interviews of this volume, written between 1979 and 2001, are the product of these journeys. They investigate an astonishing range of subjects-among them Japan's founding myths, Noh and Kabuki theater, the distinctiveness of the Japanese musical scale, the artisanship of Jomon pottery, and the relationship between Japanese graphic arts and cuisine. For Levi-Strauss, Japan occupied a unique place among world cultures. Molded in the ancient past by Chinese influences, it had more recently incorporated much from Europe and the United States. But the substance of these borrowings was so carefully assimilated that Japanese culture never lost its specificity. As though viewed from the hidden side of the moon, Asia, Europe, and America all find, in Japan, images of themselves profoundly transformed.

As in Levi-Strauss's classic ethnography Tristes Tropiques, this new English translation presents the voice of one of France's most public intellectuals at its most personal.

About the Author
Claude Levi-Strauss was chair of Social Anthropology at the College de France (1959-1982). Junzo Kawada is a cultural anthropologist in Japan.

Reviews
Levi-Strauss was certainly not the only French intellectual to develop a fascination for Japan. Indeed, Japan's sculptured landscapes, highly stylized rituals and philosophies of self-denial struck a particular chord with his structuralist contemporaries, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. But the impressions gathered here are distinctively his, and indeed sometimes read as if they were lifted straight from the Mythologiques... There is much to admire [here]... Still fizzing with ideas as he approached eighty, Claude Levi-Strauss never relented on his increasingly lonely structuralist quest. His fascination for Japanese traditions, similar to his lifelong obsession with ethnography in general, stemmed in part from his feeling of alienation from modernity.
-- Patrick Wilcken * Times Literary Supplement *
This new slim compendium of eminent anthropologist Levi-Strauss's lectures, interviews, and musings reflect his adoration and intellectual curiosity about all things Japanese. Interweaving moments of personal and professional significance, Levi-Strauss recounts the trajectory of an intrigue generated by a childhood fascination with Japanese prints given to him by his father that later evolved into his love of Japanese literature, food, and practices... This collection illuminates the zeal that motivates Levi-Strauss's anthropological work and is therefore a pleasant read for anyone with an interest in Japan, cultural difference, or anthropological studies. * Publishers Weekly *


Awards
Nominated for FAF Translation Prize 2014.



Book Information
ISBN 9780674072923
Author Claude Levi-Strauss
Format Hardback
Page Count 192
Imprint The Belknap Press
Publisher Harvard University Press