From Montaigne to Montaigne

Two previously unpublished lectures charting the renowned anthropologists intellectual engagement with the sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne In January 1937, between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 Lvi-Strauss gave a talk to the Confdration gnrale du travail in Paris. Only recently discovered in the archives of the Bibliothque national de France, this lecture, Ethnography: The Revolutionary Science, discussed the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, to whom Lvi-Strauss would return in remarks delivered more than a half-century later, in the spring of 1992. Bracketing the career of one of the most celebrated anthropologists of the twentieth century, these two talks reveal how Lvi-Strausss ethnography begins and ends with Montaigneand how his reading of his intellectual forebear and his understanding of anthropology evolve along the way. Published here for the first time, these lectures offer new insight into the development of ethnography and the thinking of one of its most important practitioners. Essays by Emmanuel Dsveaux, who edited the original French volume De Montaigne Montaigne, and Peter Skafish expand the context of Lvi-Strausss talks with contemporary perspectives and commentary.