Psychoanalysis , Feminist Philosophy , Feminist Theory , Philosophy , Psychology , Schizophrenia
164-481: Luce Irigaray (born 3 May 1930) is a Belgian -born French feminist, philosopher, linguist , psycholinguist , psychoanalyst , and cultural theorist who examines the uses and misuses of language in relation to women. Irigaray's first and most well known book, published in 1974, was Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), which analyzes the texts of Freud , Hegel , Plato , Aristotle , Descartes , and Kant through
328-527: A "major" and a "minor" doctoral thesis . These were La vie familiale et sociale des indiens Nambikwara ( The Family and Social Life of the Nambikwara Indians ) and Les structures élémentaires de la parenté ( The Elementary Structures of Kinship ). In 2008, he became the first member of the Académie française to reach the age of 100 and one of the few living authors to have his works published in
492-532: A baccalaureate in June 1925 (age of 16). In his last year (1924), he was introduced to philosophy, including the works of Marx and Kant , and began shifting to the political left (however, unlike many other socialists, he never became communist). From 1925, he spent the next two years at the prestigious Lycée Condorcet preparing for the entrance exam to the highly selective École normale supérieure . However, for reasons that are not entirely clear, he decided not to take
656-463: A balanced budget, some tax reforms , a labor-market reform, scheduled nuclear phase-out and instigated legislation allowing more stringent war crime and more lenient soft drug usage prosecution. Restrictions on euthanasia were reduced, and in 2003, Belgium became one of the first countries in the world to legalise same-sex marriage . The government promoted active diplomacy in Africa and opposed
820-534: A bridge between body and spirit. Her first major book, Speculum of the Other Woman, based on her second dissertation, was published in 1974. In Speculum, Irigaray engages in close analyses of phallocentrism in Western philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, analyzing texts by Freud, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant. The book's most cited essay, "The Blind Spot of an Old Dream," critiques Freud's lecture on femininity. In 1977, Irigaray published This Sex Which
984-399: A category defined by previous anthropologists, but also forms of thought common to all human beings. The first half of the book lays out Lévi-Strauss's theory of culture and mind, while the second half expands this account into a theory of history and social change. This latter part of the book engaged Lévi-Strauss in a heated debate with Jean-Paul Sartre over the nature of human freedom. On
1148-402: A comprehensive organization of data that partly had been ordered by other researchers. The overall goal was to find out why family relations differed among various South American cultures. The father might have great authority over the son in one group, for example, with the relationship rigidly restricted by taboos . In another group, the mother's brother would have that kind of relationship with
1312-828: A decade after the other regions) is included in both the Flemish and French Communities, and the territory of the German-speaking Community lies wholly within the Walloon Region. Conflicts about jurisdiction between the bodies are resolved by the Constitutional Court of Belgium . The structure is intended as a compromise to allow different cultures to live together peacefully. The Federal State's authority includes justice, defense, federal police, social security, nuclear energy, monetary policy and public debt, and other aspects of public finances. State-owned companies include
1476-523: A degree of cultural and historical validity, but not when they are deployed to self-replicate a similar form of the gender-othering they originally sought to overcome. In Fashionable Nonsense , Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont criticized Irigaray's use of hard-science terminology in her writings. Among the criticisms, they question the purported interest Einstein had in "accelerations without electromagnetic reequilibrations"; confusing special relativity and general relativity ; and her claim that E = mc
1640-520: A discipline in France, including the Laboratory for Social Anthropology where new students could be trained, and a new journal, l'Homme , for publishing the results of their research. In 1962, Lévi-Strauss published what is for many people his most important work, La Pensée Sauvage , translated into English as The Savage Mind (and later as Wild Thought ). The French title is an untranslatable pun, as
1804-485: A few weeks in any one place and was never able to converse easily with any of his native informants in their native language, which is uncharacteristic of anthropological research methods of participatory interaction with subjects to gain a full understanding of a culture. In the 1980s, he discussed why he became vegetarian in pieces published in Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica and other publications anthologized in
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#17329055775581968-409: A global democratic community. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference , she introduces the idea of relationships between men and women centered around a bond other than reproduction. She acknowledges themes including finiteness and intersubjectivity , embodied divinity, and the emotional distinction between the two sexes. She concludes that Western culture is unethical due to gender discrimination. Irigaray
2132-668: A large semi-independent enclave. The Eighty Years' War (1568–1648) was triggered by the Spanish government's policy towards Protestantism , which was becoming popular in the Low Countries. The rebellious northern United Provinces ( Belgica Foederata in Latin , the "Federated Netherlands") eventually separated from the Southern Netherlands ( Belgica Regia , the "Royal Netherlands"). The southern part continued to be ruled successively by
2296-446: A master order was to rate all the positions in a kinship system along several dimensions. For example, the father was older than the son, the father produced the son, the father had the same sex as the son, and so on; the matrilineal uncle was older and of the same sex, but did not produce the son, and so on. An exhaustive collection of such observations might cause an overall pattern to emerge. However, for Lévi-Strauss, this kind of work
2460-539: A new government . By 30 March 2011, this set a new world record for the elapsed time without an official government, previously held by war-torn Iraq . Finally, in December 2011 the Di Rupo Government led by Walloon socialist Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo was sworn in. The 2014 federal election (coinciding with the regional elections ) resulted in a further electoral gain for the Flemish nationalist N-VA, although
2624-542: A person derived by participating in a custom. In the United States, where the shape of anthropology was set by the German-educated Franz Boas , the preference was for historical accounts. This approach had obvious problems, which Lévi-Strauss praises Boas for facing squarely. Historical information seldom is available for non-literate cultures. The anthropologist fills in with comparisons to other cultures and
2788-945: A policy of mediation. The Belgians have been strong advocates of European integration . The headquarters of NATO and of several of the institutions of the European Union are located in Belgium. The Belgian Armed Forces had 23,200 active personnel in 2023, including 8,500 in the Land Component , 1,400 in the Naval Component , 4,900 in the Air Component , 1,450 in the Medical Component , and 6,950 in joint service, in addition to 5,900 reserve personnel. In 2019, Belgium's defense budget totaled €4.303 billion ($ 4.921 billion) representing .93% of its GDP. The operational commands of
2952-518: A relationship. And it does not offer the possibility of inferring the origins of the structure. A proper solution to the puzzle is to find a basic unit of kinship which can explain all the variations. It is a cluster of four roles – brother, sister, father, son. These are the roles that must be involved in any society that has an incest taboo requiring a man to obtain a wife from some man outside his own hereditary line. A brother may give away his sister, for example, whose son might reciprocate in
3116-464: A result, males seek "to have them all," or seek a surplus like the excess of commodity buying power, capital, that capitalists seek constantly. Irigaray speculates thus that perhaps, "the way women are used matters less than their number." In this further analogy of women "on the market," understood through Marxist terms, Irigaray points out that women, like commodities, are moved between men based on their exchange value rather than just their use value, and
3280-502: A sense of control over events when the outcome is uncertain. In the Trobriand Islands , he found proof of this claim in the rites surrounding abortions and weaving skirts. But in the same tribes, there is no magic attached to making clay pots even though it is no more certain a business than weaving. So, the explanation is not consistent. Furthermore, these explanations tend to be used in an ad hoc, superficial way – one postulates
3444-420: A significant body of work on Hegel , Descartes , Plato , Aristotle and Levinas , Spinoza , as well as Merleau-Ponty . Her academic work is largely influenced by a wide range of philosophers and cannot be limited to one approach. She continued to conduct empirical studies about language in a variety of settings, researching the differences between the way men and women speak. This focus on sexual difference
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#17329055775583608-604: A study of the differences between the language of male and female patients. It has also been noted that in her writings, Irigaray has stated a concern that an interest in her biography would affect the interpretation of her ideas, as the entrance of women into intellectual discussions has often also included the challenging of women's point of view based on biographical material. Her most extensive autobiographical statements thus far are gathered in Through Vegetal Being (co-authored with Michael Marder ). Overall, she maintains
3772-452: A time when we are trying to give meaning to globalization, to build a fairer and more humane world, I would like Claude Lévi-Strauss's universal echo to resonate more strongly". In a similar vein, a statement by Lévi-Strauss was broadcast on National Public Radio in the remembrance produced by All Things Considered on 3 November 2009: "There is today a frightful disappearance of living species, be they plants or animals. And it's clear that
3936-468: A trait of personality when needed. However, the accepted way of discussing organizational function did not work either. Different societies might have institutions that were similar in many obvious ways and yet, served different functions. Many tribal cultures divide the tribe into two groups and have elaborate rules about how the two groups may interact. However, exactly what they may do—trade, intermarry—is different in different tribes; for that matter, so are
4100-507: A visiting professor of ethnology. The couple lived and did their anthropological work in Brazil from 1935 to 1939. During this time, while he was a visiting professor of sociology, Claude undertook his only ethnographic fieldwork. He accompanied Dina, a trained ethnographer in her own right, who was also a visiting professor at the University of São Paulo, where they conducted research forays into
4264-399: Is Not One ( Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un ) which was subsequently translated into English with that title and published in 1985, along with Speculum . In addition to more commentary on psychoanalysis, including discussions of Lacan's work, This Sex Which is Not One also comments on political economy, drawing on structuralist writers such as Lévi-Strauss . For example, Irigaray argues that
4428-581: Is a sovereign state and a federal constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system . Its institutional organization is complex and is structured on both regional and linguistic grounds. It is divided into three highly autonomous regions : the Flemish Region (Flanders) in the north, the Walloon Region (Wallonia) in the south, and the Brussels-Capital Region in the middle. Brussels
4592-514: Is a "sexed equation" because "it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us". In reviewing Sokal and Bricmont's book, Richard Dawkins wrote that Irigaray's assertion that fluid mechanics was unfairly neglected in physics due to its association with "feminine" fluids (in contrast to "masculine" solids ) was "daffy absurdity". Belgium – in Europe (light green & dark grey) – in
4756-459: Is active in a feminist movement in Italy, but she refused to belong to any one movement because she does not like the competitive dynamic between the feminist movements. Some feminists criticize Irigaray's perceived essentialist positions. However, there is much debate among scholars as to whether or not Irigaray's theory of sexual difference is, indeed, an essentialist one. The perception that her work
4920-440: Is around 23% of the total land area, equivalent to 689,300 hectares (ha) of forest in 2020, up from 677,400 hectares (ha) in 1990. In 2020, naturally regenerating forest covered 251,200 hectares (ha) and planted forest covered 438,200 hectares (ha). For the year 2015, 47% of the forest area was reported to be under public ownership , 53% private ownership and 0% with ownership listed as other or unknown. The territory of Belgium
5084-477: Is based on civil law and originates from the Napoleonic code . The Court of Cassation is the court of last resort, with the courts of appeal one level below. Belgium's political institutions are complex; most political power rests on representation of the main cultural communities . Since about 1970, the significant national Belgian political parties have split into distinct components that mainly represent
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5248-407: Is concerned with the objective data of field research. He notes that it is logically possible for a different atom of kinship structure to exist–sister, sister's brother, brother's wife, daughter – but there are no real-world examples of relationships that can be derived from that grouping. The trouble with this view has been shown by Australian anthropologist Augustus Elkin, who insisted on
5412-495: Is divided into three Regions, two of which, the Flemish Region and Walloon Region , are in turn subdivided into provinces ; the third Region, the Brussels Capital Region , is neither a province nor a part of a province. Belgium is a constitutional , popular monarchy and a federal parliamentary democracy . The bicameral federal parliament is composed of a Senate and a Chamber of Representatives . The former
5576-521: Is essentialist concentrates on her attention to sexual difference, taking this to constitute a rehearsal of heteronormative sexuality. As Helen Fielding states, the uneasiness among feminists about Irigaray's discussion of masculinity and femininity does not so much reveal Irigaray's heteronormative bias as much as it "arises out of an inherited cultural understanding [on the part of her critics] that posits nature as either unchanging organism or as matter that can be ordered, manipulated and inscribed upon. Hence
5740-524: Is forced to rely on theories that have no evidential basis, the old notion of universal stages of development or the claim that cultural resemblances are based on some unrecognized past contact between groups. Boas came to believe that no overall pattern in social development could be proven; for him, there was no single history, only histories. There are three broad choices involved in the divergence of these schools; each had to decide: Social scientists in all traditions relied on cross-cultural studies, as it
5904-442: Is her natural qualities. Thus, a woman’s self is divided between her use and exchange values, and she is only desired for the exchange value. This system creates three types of women: the mother, who is all use value; the virgin, who is all exchange value; and the prostitute, who embodies both use and exchange value. She further uses additional Marxist foundations to argue that women are in demand due to their perceived shortage and as
6068-461: Is just one particular instance of a universal law of human thought. In studying myth, Lévi-Strauss tries "to reduce apparently arbitrary data to some kind of order, and to attain a level at which a kind of necessity becomes apparent, underlying the illusions of liberty." Laurie suggests that for Levi-Strauss, "operations embedded within animal myths provide opportunities to resolve collective problems of classification and hierarchy, marking lines between
6232-505: Is less widely read than the much shorter and more accessible Pensée Sauvage , despite its position as Lévi-Strauss's masterwork. Lévi-Strauss completed the final volume of Mythologiques in 1971. On 14 May 1973, he was elected to the Académie française, France's highest honour for a writer. He was a member of other notable academies worldwide, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters . In 1956, he became foreign member of
6396-658: Is lowest in January at 3 °C (37.4 °F) and highest in July at 18 °C (64.4 °F). The average precipitation per month varies between 54 mm (2.1 in) for February and April, to 78 mm (3.1 in) for July. Averages for the years 2000 to 2006 show daily temperature minimums of 7 °C (44.6 °F) and maximums of 14 °C (57.2 °F) and monthly rainfall of 74 mm (2.9 in); these are about 1 °C and nearly 10 millimeters above last century's normal values, respectively. Phytogeographically , Belgium
6560-493: Is made up of 50 senators appointed by the parliaments of the communities and regions and 10 co-opted senators . Prior to 2014, most of the Senate's members were directly elected. The Chamber 's 150 representatives are elected under a proportional voting system from 11 electoral districts . Belgium has compulsory voting and thus maintains one of the highest rates of voter turnout in the world. The King (currently Philippe )
6724-639: Is more than double that of Flanders, which boomed after the Second World War. Belgium is a developed country , with an advanced high-income economy . The country is one of the six founding members of the European Union , and its capital, Brussels, is the de facto capital of the European Union itself, hosting the official seats of the European Commission , the Council of the European Union , and
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6888-505: Is not structuralist in this sense. Lévi-Strauss's later works are more controversial, in part because they impinge on the subject matter of other scholars. He believed that modern life and all history were founded on the same categories and transformations that he had discovered in the Brazilian backcountry — The Raw and the Cooked , From Honey to Ashes, The Naked Man (to borrow some titles from
7052-608: Is now the Benelux, the so-called Burgundian Netherlands . "Burgundy" and "Flanders" were the first two common names used for the Burgundian Netherlands which was the predecessor of the Austrian Netherlands, the predecessor of modern Belgium. The union, technically stretching between two kingdoms, gave the area economic and political stability which led to an even greater prosperity and artistic creation. Born in Belgium,
7216-698: Is shared between the Atlantic European and Central European provinces of the Circumboreal Region within the Boreal Kingdom . According to the World Wide Fund for Nature , the territory of Belgium belongs to the terrestrial ecoregions of Atlantic mixed forests and Western European broadleaf forests . Belgium had a 2018 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 1.36/10, ranking it 163rd globally out of 172 countries. In Belgium forest cover
7380-614: Is the head of state , though with limited prerogatives . He appoints ministers, including a Prime Minister, that have the confidence of the Chamber of Representatives to form the federal government . The Council of Ministers is composed of no more than fifteen members. With the possible exception of the Prime Minister, the Council of Ministers is composed of an equal number of Dutch-speaking members and French-speaking members. The judicial system
7544-661: Is the key characteristic of Irigaray's oeuvre, since she is seeking to provide a site from which a feminine language can eventuate. Through her research, Irigaray discovered a correlation between the suppression of female thought in the Western world and language of men and women. She concluded that there are gendered language patterns that denote dominance in men and subjectivity in women. Since 1990, Irigaray's work has turned increasingly toward women and men together. In Between East and West, From Singularity to Community (1999) and in The Way of Love (2002), she imagines new forms of love for
7708-554: Is the smallest and most densely populated region, as well as the richest region in terms of GDP per capita . Belgium is also home to two main linguistic communities: the Flemish Community ( Dutch -speaking), which constitutes about 60 percent of the population, and the French Community ( French -speaking), which constitutes about 40 percent of the population. A small German-speaking Community , making up around one percent of
7872-417: Is to that between husband and wife, that is, A is to B as C is to D. Therefore, if we know A, B, and C, we can predict D. An example of this law is illustrated in the diagram. The four relation units are marked with A to D. Lévi-Strauss noted that if A is positive, B is negative, and C is negative, then it can inferred that D is positive, thereby satisfying the constraint 'A is to B as C is to D'; in this case,
8036-469: The Mythologiques ). For instance, he compares anthropology to musical serialism and defends his "philosophical" approach. He also pointed out that the modern view of primitive cultures was simplistic in denying them a history. The categories of myth did not persist among them because nothing had happened–it was easy to find the evidence of defeat, migration , exile, and repeated displacements of all
8200-654: The 22nd most densely populated country in the world and the 6th most densely populated country in Europe, with a density of 383/km (990/sq mi). Belgium is part of an area known as the Low Countries , historically a somewhat larger region than the Benelux group of states, as it also included parts of northern France. The capital and largest metropolitan region is Brussels ; other major cities are Antwerp , Ghent , Charleroi , Liège , Bruges , Namur , and Leuven . Belgium
8364-492: The Belgian Post Group and Belgian Railways . The Federal Government is responsible for the obligations of Belgium and its federalized institutions towards the European Union and NATO. It controls substantial parts of public health, home affairs and foreign affairs. The budget—without the debt—controlled by the federal government amounts to about 50% of the national fiscal income. The federal government employs around 12% of
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#17329055775588528-643: The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade . On the death of Maurice Druon on 14 April 2009, he became the dean of the Académie , its longest-serving member. He died on 30 October 2009, at age 100. The death was announced four days later. French President Nicolas Sarkozy described him as "one of the greatest ethnologists of all time". Bernard Kouchner , the French Foreign Minister , said Lévi-Strauss "broke with an ethnocentric vision of history and humanity ... At
8692-682: The European Council , as well as one of two seats of the European Parliament (the other being Strasbourg ). Belgium is also a founding member of the Eurozone , NATO , OECD , and WTO , and a part of the trilateral Benelux Union and the Schengen Area . Brussels also hosts the headquarters of many major international organizations, such as NATO . According to Julius Caesar , the Belgae were
8856-639: The European Union (light green) Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium , is a country in Northwestern Europe . The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to the south, and the North Sea to the west. It covers an area of 30,689 km (11,849 sq mi) and has a population of more than 11.7 million, making it
9020-567: The Grand-croix de la Légion d'honneur , was a Commandeur de l'ordre national du Mérite , and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres . In 2005, he received the XVII Premi Internacional Catalunya ( Generalitat of Catalonia ). After his retirement, he continued to publish occasional meditations on art, music, philosophy, and poetry. Lévi-Strauss sought to apply the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure to anthropology. At
9184-518: The Great Depression had hit France, and Lévi-Strauss found himself needing to provide not only for himself but his parents as well. In 1935, after a few years of secondary school teaching, he took up a last-minute offer to be part of a French cultural mission to Brazil in which he would serve as a visiting professor of sociology at the University of São Paulo while his then-wife, Dina , served as
9348-715: The Habsburg Emperor Charles ;V was heir of the Burgundians, but also of the royal families of Austria , Castile and Aragon . With the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549 he gave the Seventeen Provinces more legitimacy as a stable entity, rather than just a temporary personal union . He also increased the influence of these Netherlands over the Prince-Bishopric of Liège , which continued to exist as
9512-524: The Holy Roman Empire . The lordships and bishoprics along the "March" (frontier) between the two great kingdoms maintained important connections between each other. For example, the county of Flanders expanded over the Scheldt into the empire, and during several periods was ruled by the same lords as the county of Hainaut . In the 13th and 14th centuries, the cloth industry and commerce boomed especially in
9676-701: The Industrial Revolution , and during the course of the 20th century, possessed a number of colonies , notably the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi . These colonies gained independence between 1960 and 1962. The second half of the 20th century was marked by rising tensions between the Dutch-speakers and French-speakers, fueled by differences in political culture and the unequal economic development of Flanders and Wallonia. This continuing antagonism has led to several far-reaching state reforms , resulting in
9840-865: The Mato Grosso and the Amazon Rainforest . They first studied the Guaycuru and Bororó Indian tribes , staying among them for a few days. In 1938, they returned for a second, more than half-year-long expedition to study the Nambikwara and Tupi -Kawahib societies. At this time, his wife had an eye infection that prevented her from completing the study, which he concluded. This experience cemented Lévi-Strauss's professional identity as an anthropologist . Edmund Leach suggests, from Lévi-Strauss's own accounts in Tristes Tropiques , that he could not have spent more than
10004-785: The Michel Government . It was the first time N-VA was part of the federal cabinet, while the French-speaking side was represented only by the MR, which achieved a minority of the public votes in Wallonia. In May 2019 federal elections in the Flemish-speaking northern region of Flanders far-right Vlaams Belang party made major gains. In the French-speaking southern area of Wallonia the Socialists were strong. The moderate Flemish nationalist party
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#173290557755810168-412: The Netherlands ( 450 km ). Its total surface, including water area, is 30,689 km (11,849 sq mi). Before 2018, its total area was believed to be 30,528 km (11,787 sq mi). However, when the country's statistics were measured in 2018, a new calculation method was used. Unlike previous calculations, this one included the area from the coast to the low-water line, revealing
10332-414: The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences . He then became a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1960 and the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1967. He received the Erasmus Prize in 1973, the Meister-Eckhart-Prize for philosophy in 2003, and several honorary doctorates from universities such as Oxford , Harvard , Yale , and Columbia . He also was the recipient of
10496-401: The Spanish ( Spanish Netherlands ) and the Austrian House of Habsburgs ( Austrian Netherlands ) and comprised most of modern Belgium. This was the theatre of several more protracted conflicts during much of the 17th and 18th centuries involving France, including the Franco-Dutch War (1672–1678), the Nine Years' War (1688–1697), the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), and part of
10660-429: The United Kingdom of the Netherlands occurred at the dissolution of the First French Empire in 1814, after the abdication of Napoleon. In 1830, the Belgian Revolution led to the re-separation of the Southern Provinces from the Netherlands and to the establishment of a Catholic and bourgeois, officially French-speaking and neutral, independent Belgium under a provisional government and a national congress . Since
10824-449: The University of Louvain in 1954, a master's degree from the same university in 1956, and taught at a high school in Brussels from 1956 to 1959. In 1960, she moved to Paris to pursue a master's degree in Psychology from the University of Paris , which she earned in 1961. She also received a specialist diploma in Psychopathology from the school in 1962. In 1968, she received a doctorate in Linguistics from Paris X Nanterre . Her thesis
10988-399: The War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748). Following the campaigns of 1794 in the French Revolutionary Wars , the Low Countries – including territories that were never nominally under Habsburg rule, such as the Prince-Bishopric of Liège – were annexed by the French First Republic , ending Austrian rule in the region. A reunification of the Low Countries as
11152-425: The Western Roman Empire , the Roman provinces of Belgica and Germania were inhabited by a mix of a Romanized population and Germanic -speaking Franks who came to dominate the military and political class. During the 5th century, the area came under the rule of the Frankish Merovingian kings, who initially established a kingdom ruling over the Romanized population in what is now northern France, and then conquered
11316-414: The war against the Islamic State , and in eastern Europe for the NATO presence there. Claude L%C3%A9vi-Strauss Claude Lévi-Strauss ( / k l ɔː d ˈ l eɪ v i ˈ s t r aʊ s / klawd LAY -vee STROWSS ; French: [klod levi stʁos] ; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of
11480-456: The "savage" mind had the same structures as the "civilized" mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere. These observations culminated in his famous book Tristes Tropiques (1955) which established his position as one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought. As well as sociology , his ideas reached into many fields in the humanities , including philosophy . Structuralism has been defined as "the search for
11644-422: The 19th century were the Catholic Party and the Liberal Party , with the Belgian Labour Party emerging towards the end of the 19th century. French was originally the official language used by the nobility and the bourgeoisie , especially after the rejection of the Dutch monarchy. French progressively lost its dominance as Dutch began to recover its status. This recognition became official in 1898, and in 1967,
11808-441: The Académie française Hélène Carrère d'Encausse said: "He was a thinker, a philosopher.... We will not find another like him". The Elementary Structures of Kinship was published in 1949 and quickly came to be regarded as one of the most important anthropological works on kinship. It was even reviewed favorably by Simone de Beauvoir , who saw it as an important statement of the position of women in non-Western cultures. A play on
11972-721: The Ardennes are more rugged and rocky with caves and small gorges . Extending westward into France, this area is eastwardly connected to the Eifel in Germany by the High Fens plateau, on which the Signal de Botrange forms the country's highest point at 694 m (2,277 ft). The climate is maritime temperate with significant precipitation in all seasons ( Köppen climate classification : Cfb ), like most of northwest Europe. The average temperature
12136-639: The Belgian state to assume responsibility for the government of the colony, henceforth called the Belgian Congo . A Belgian commission in 1919 estimated that Congo's population was half what it was in 1879. Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914 as part of the Schlieffen Plan to attack France , and much of the Western Front fighting of World War I occurred in western parts of the country. The opening months of
12300-649: The Communities and Regions were created in 1980, Flemish politicians decided to merge both. Thus the Flemings just have one single institutional body of parliament and government is empowered for all except federal and specific municipal matters. The overlapping boundaries of the Regions and Communities have created two notable peculiarities: the territory of the Brussels-Capital Region (which came into existence nearly
12464-688: The County of Flanders and it became one of the richest areas in Europe. This prosperity played a role in conflicts between Flanders and the king of France . Famously, Flemish militias scored a surprise victory at the Battle of the Golden Spurs against a strong force of mounted knights in 1302, but France soon regained control of the rebellious province. In the 15th century, the Duke of Burgundy in France took control of Flanders, and from there proceeded to unite much of what
12628-603: The European Union, for which Belgium hosts major administrations and institutions, including the European Commission , the Council of the European Union and the extraordinary and committee sessions of the European Parliament . In the early 1990s, Belgium saw several large corruption scandals notably surrounding Marc Dutroux , Andre Cools , the Dioxin Affair , Agusta Scandal and the murder of Karel van Noppen . Belgium shares borders with France ( 620 km ), Germany ( 162/167 km ), Luxembourg ( 148 km ), and
12792-539: The Flemings refused to do so and succeeded progressively in making Dutch an equal language in the education system. Following World War II, Belgian politics became increasingly dominated by the autonomy of its two main linguistic communities. Intercommunal tensions rose and the constitution was amended to minimize the potential for conflict. Based on the four language areas defined in 1962–63 (the Dutch, bilingual, French and German language areas), consecutive revisions of
12956-604: The Lacanian and Freudian schools of psychoanalysis. This criticism brought her recognition, but she was removed from her position as an instructor at the University of Vincennes as well as ostracized from the Lacanian community. She held a research post at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique since 1964, where she is now a Director of Research in Philosophy. Her initial research focused on dementia patients, about whom she produced
13120-497: The Latin name of a large Roman province covering most of Northern Gaul, including the Belgae and Treveri. However, areas closer to the lower Rhine frontier, including the eastern part of modern Belgium, subsequently became part of the frontier province of Germania Inferior , which continued to interact with their neighbours outside the empire. At the time when central government collapsed in
13284-555: The N-VA remained the largest party in parliament. In July 2019 prime minister Charles Michel was selected to hold the post of President of the European Council . His successor Sophie Wilmès was Belgium's first female prime minister. She led the caretaker government since October 2019. The Flemish Liberal party politician Alexander De Croo became new prime minister in October 2020. The parties had agreed on federal government 16 months after
13448-533: The Regions' and Communities' Governments is the broadest of all the Federating units of all the Federations all over the world. Because of its location at the crossroads of Western Europe , Belgium has historically been the route of invading armies from its larger neighbors. With virtually defenseless borders, Belgium has traditionally sought to avoid domination by the more powerful nations which surround it through
13612-628: The Roman province of Gallia Belgica in 22 BC. In the Middle Ages , the region was part of the Carolingian Empire , and much of it was later part of the Holy Roman Empire , and subsequently the Burgundian Netherlands . Belgium's central location has meant that the area has been relatively prosperous, connected commercially and politically to its bigger neighbours. The country as it exists today
13776-565: The U.S. It is noteworthy that he received none of the medals and honours usually awarded to Resistants, let alone created Compagnon de la Libération . After a brief stint from 1946 to 1947 as a cultural attaché to the French embassy in Washington, DC , Lévi-Strauss returned to Paris in 1948. At this time, he received his state doctorate from the Sorbonne by submitting, in the French tradition, both
13940-414: The activities in a given kind of society would partake of the same character; some sort of internal logic would cause one level of culture to evolve into the next. On this view, a society can easily be thought of as an organism, the parts functioning together as do the parts of a body. In contrast, the more influential functionalism of Bronisław Malinowski described the satisfaction of individual needs, what
14104-507: The artist Claude Lorrain , whose work he admired and later wrote about. During the First World War , from age 6 to 10, he lived with his maternal grandfather, who was the Rabbi of Versailles. Despite his religious environment early on, Claude Lévi-Strauss was an atheist or agnostic, at least in his adult life. From 1918 to 1925 he studied at Lycée Janson de Sailly high school, receiving
14268-419: The belief that biographical details pertaining to her personal life hold the possibility to be used against her within the male dominated educational establishment as a tool to discredit her work. However, at age 91, she published A New Culture of Energy: Beyond East and West (2021) in which she discusses her decades-long practices of yoga asanas (postures) and pranayama (breathing) and maintains that yoga builds
14432-507: The belief that there was no one "authentic" version of a myth, rather that they were all manifestations of the same language, he sought to find the fundamental units of myth, namely, the mytheme . Lévi-Strauss broke each of the versions of a myth down into a series of sentences, consisting of a relation between a function and a subject. Sentences with the same function were given the same number and bundled together. These are mythemes. What Lévi-Strauss believed he had discovered when he examined
14596-399: The cabinet to the king, as no progress in constitutional reforms had been made. In December 2008, Leterme once more offered his resignation after a crisis surrounding the sale of Fortis to BNP Paribas . At this juncture, his resignation was accepted and Christian Democratic and Flemish Herman Van Rompuy was sworn in as Prime Minister on 30 December 2008. After Herman Van Rompuy
14760-591: The central figures on which structuralist thought is based). In addition, Lévi-Strauss was also exposed to the American anthropology espoused by Franz Boas , who taught at Columbia University . In 1942, while having dinner at the Faculty House at Columbia, Boas died in Lévi-Strauss's arms. This intimate association with Boas gave his early work a distinctive American inclination that helped facilitate its acceptance in
14924-731: The civil servants. Communities exercise their authority only within linguistically determined geographical boundaries, originally oriented towards the individuals of a Community's language: culture (including audiovisual media), education and the use of the relevant language. Extensions to personal matters less directly connected with language comprise health policy (curative and preventive medicine) and assistance to individuals (protection of youth, social welfare, aid to families, immigrant assistance services, and so on.). Regions have authority in fields that can be broadly associated with their territory. These include economy, employment, agriculture, water policy, housing, public works, energy, transport,
15088-426: The classical view of anthropology, putting the secondary family members first and insisting on analyzing the relations between units instead of the units themselves. In his own analysis of the formation of the identities that arise through marriages between tribes, Lévi-Strauss noted that the relation between the uncle and the nephew was to the relation between brother and sister, as the relation between father and son
15252-470: The concern over essentialism is itself grounded in the binary thinking that preserves a hierarchy of...culture over nature." W. A. Borody has criticised Irigaray's phallogocentric argument as misrepresenting the history of philosophies of "indeterminateness" in the West. Irigaray's "black and white" claims that the masculine equates to determinateness and that the feminine equates to indeterminateness which contain
15416-562: The country in May 1940 , and 40,690 Belgians, over half of them Jews, were killed during the subsequent occupation and the Holocaust . From September 1944 to February 1945 the Allies liberated Belgium. After World War II , a general strike forced King Leopold III to abdicate in 1951 in favour of his son, Prince Baudouin , since many Belgians thought he had collaborated with Germany during
15580-521: The country to be 160 km (62 sq mi) larger in surface area than previously thought. Its land area alone is 30,494 square kilometers. It lies between latitudes 49°30' and 51°30' N, and longitudes 2°33' and 6°24' E. Belgium has three main geographical regions; the coastal plain in the northwest and the central plateau both belong to the Anglo-Belgian Basin, and the Ardennes uplands in
15744-407: The country's constitution in 1970, 1980, 1988 and 1993 established a unique form of a federal state with segregated political power into three levels: The constitutional language areas determine the official languages in their municipalities, as well as the geographical limits of the empowered institutions for specific matters. Although this would allow for seven parliaments and governments when
15908-563: The criteria for distinguishing the groups. Nor will it do to say that dividing in two is a universal need of organizations, because there are a lot of tribes that thrive without it. For Lévi-Strauss, the methods of linguistics became a model for all his earlier examinations of society. His analogies usually are from phonology (though also later from music, mathematics, chaos theory , cybernetics , and so on). "A really scientific analysis must be real, simplifying, and explanatory," he writes. Phonemic analysis reveals features that are real, in
16072-446: The cultural outlook and forms of social organization that persisted for centuries around that sea. He is right in that history is difficult to build up in a non-literate society, nevertheless, Jean Guiart's anthropological and José Garanger's archaeological work in central Vanuatu, bringing to the fore the skeletons of former chiefs described in local myths, who had thus been living persons, shows that there can be some means of ascertaining
16236-420: The density of human beings has become so great, if I can say so, that they have begun to poison themselves. And the world which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world that I like." The Daily Telegraph said in its obituary that Lévi-Strauss was "one of the dominating postwar influences in French intellectual life and the leading exponent of Structuralism in the social sciences". Permanent secretary of
16400-573: The desire will always be surplus – making women almost seem like capital, in this case, to be accumulated. "As commodities, women are thus two things at once: utilitarian objects and bearers of value." Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions (1982) could be read as a response to Merleau‐Ponty 's article “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” in The Visible and the Invisible . Like Merleau‐Ponty, Irigaray describes corporeal intertwining or vision and touch. Counteracting
16564-429: The discussion of novels, political speeches, sports, and movies. His reasoning makes the best sense when contrasted against the background of an earlier generation's social theory. He wrote about this relationship for decades. A preference for "functionalist" explanations dominated the social sciences from the turn of the 20th century through the 1950s, which is to say that anthropologists and sociologists tried to state
16728-633: The elections. Following a usage which can be traced back to the Burgundian and Habsburg courts, in the 19th century it was necessary to speak French to belong to the governing upper class, and those who could only speak Dutch were effectively second-class citizens. Late that century, and continuing into the 20th century, Flemish movements evolved to counter this situation. While the people in Southern Belgium spoke French or dialects of French, and most Brusselers adopted French as their first language,
16892-453: The element of earth as the ground of life and speech and his "oblivion" or forgetting of air. Irigaray employs three different modes in her investigations into the nature of gender, language, and identity : the analytic, the essayistic, and the lyrical poetic . As of October 2021, she is active in the Women's Movements in both France and Italy . Luce Irigaray received a bachelor's degree from
17056-621: The environment, town and country planning, nature conservation, credit and foreign trade. They supervise the provinces, municipalities and intercommunal utility companies. In several fields, the different levels each have their own say on specifics. With education, for instance, the autonomy of the Communities neither includes decisions about the compulsory aspect nor allows for setting minimum requirements for awarding qualifications, which remain federal matters. Each level of government can be involved in scientific research and international relations associated with its powers. The treaty-making power of
17220-499: The exam. In 1926, he went to Sorbonne in Paris, studying law and philosophy , as well as engaging in socialist politics and activism. In 1929, he opted for philosophy over law (which he found boring), and from 1930 to 1931, put politics aside to focus on preparing for the agrégation in philosophy, in order to qualify as a professor. In 1931, he passed the agrégation, coming in 3rd place, and youngest in his class at age 22. By this time,
17384-494: The fifth section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études , the 'Religious Sciences' section where Marcel Mauss was previously professor, the title of which chair he renamed "Comparative Religion of Non-Literate Peoples". While Lévi-Strauss was well known in academic circles, in 1955 he became one of France's best-known intellectuals by publishing Tristes Tropiques in Paris that year by Plon (best-known translated into English in 1973, published by Penguin). Essentially, this book
17548-767: The four components are subordinate to the Staff Department for Operations and Training of the Ministry of Defense , which is headed by the Assistant Chief of Staff Operations and Training , and to the Chief of Defense . The Belgian military consists of volunteers (conscription was abolished in 1995), and citizens of other EU states, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, or Lichtenstein are also able to join. Belgium has troops deployed in several African countries as part of UN or EU missions, in Iraq for
17712-535: The government, and on 26 April 2010 King Albert officially accepted the resignation. The Parliamentary elections in Belgium on 13 June 2010 saw the Flemish nationalist N-VA become the largest party in Flanders, and the Socialist Party PS the largest party in Wallonia. Until December 2011, Belgium was governed by Leterme's caretaker government awaiting the end of the deadlocked negotiations for formation of
17876-470: The history of some groups which otherwise would be deemed a historical. Another issue is the experience that the same person can tell one a myth highly charged in symbols, and some years later a sort of chronological history claiming to be chronic of a descent line (e.g., in the Loyalty islands and New Zealand), the two texts having in common that they each deal in topographical detail with the land-tenure claims of
18040-462: The incest taboo, one is facing an objective limit of what the human mind has accepted so far. One could hypothesize some biological imperative underlying it, but so far as social order is concerned, the taboo has the effect of an irreducible fact. The social scientist can only work with the structures of human thought that arise from it. And structural explanations can be tested and refuted. A mere analytic scheme that wishes causal relations into existence
18204-554: The incumbent coalition (composed of Flemish and French-speaking Social Democrats, Liberals, and Christian Democrats) maintains a solid majority in Parliament and in all electoral constituencies. On 22 July 2014, King Philippe nominated Charles Michel (MR) and Kris Peeters (CD&V) to lead the formation of a new federal cabinet composed of the Flemish parties N-VA, CD&V, Open Vld and the French-speaking MR, which resulted in
18368-524: The inhabitants of the northernmost part of Gaul . They lived in a region stretching from Paris to the Rhine , which is much bigger than modern Belgium. However, he also specifically used the Latin word " Belgium " to refer to a politically dominant part of that region, which is now in northernmost France. In contrast, modern Belgium, together with neighbouring parts of the Netherlands and Germany, corresponds to
18532-463: The installation of Leopold I as king on 21 July 1831, now celebrated as Belgium's National Day , Belgium has been a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy , with a laicist constitution based on the Napoleonic code . Although the franchise was initially restricted, universal suffrage for men was introduced after the general strike of 1893 (with plural voting until 1919) and for women in 1949. The main political parties of
18696-467: The invasion of Iraq . It is the only country that does not have age restrictions on euthanasia. Verhofstadt's coalition fared badly in the June 2007 elections . For more than a year, the country experienced a political crisis . This crisis was such that many observers speculated on a possible partition of Belgium . From 21 December 2007 until 20 March 2008 the temporary Verhofstadt III Government
18860-458: The job of myth to be a sleight of hand, an association of an irreconcilable binary opposition with a reconcilable binary opposition, creating the illusion, or belief, that the former had been resolved. Lévi-Strauss sees a basic paradox in the study of myth . On one hand, mythical stories are fantastic and unpredictable: the content of myth seems completely arbitrary. On the other hand, the myths of different cultures are surprisingly similar: On
19024-491: The kinds known to recorded history. Instead, the mythic categories had encompassed these changes. He argued for a view of human life as existing in two timelines simultaneously, the eventful one of history and the long cycles in which one set of fundamental mythic patterns dominates and then perhaps another. In this respect, his work resembles that of Fernand Braudel , the historian of the Mediterranean and 'la longue durée,'
19188-607: The lands of the most northerly Belgae – the Morini , Menapii , Nervii , Germani Cisrhenani , and Aduatuci . Caesar found these peoples particularly warlike and economically undeveloped, and described them as kinsmen of the Germanic tribes east of the Rhine. The area around Arlon in southern Belgium was a part of the country of the powerful Treveri , to whom some of them paid tribute. After Caesar's conquests, Gallia Belgica first came to be
19352-561: The lens of phallocentrism . Irigaray is the author of works analyzing many thinkers, including This Sex Which Is Not One (1977), which discusses Lacan 's work as well as political economy; Elemental Passions (1982) can be read as a response to Merleau‐Ponty 's article “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” in The Visible and the Invisible , and in The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (1999), Irigaray critiques Heidegger 's emphasis on
19516-526: The myth's cultural evolution from one end of the Western Hemisphere to the other. He accomplished this in a typically structuralist way, examining the underlying structure of relationships among the elements of the story rather than focusing on the content of the story itself. While Pensée Sauvage was a statement of Lévi-Strauss's big-picture theory, Mythologiques was an extended, four-volume example of analysis. Richly detailed and extremely long, it
19680-494: The narcissistic strain in Merleau‐Ponty's chiasm, she assumes that sexual difference must precede the intertwining. The subject is marked by the alterity or the “more than one” and encoded as a historically contingent gendered conflict. Some of Irigaray's books written in her lyrical mode are imaginary dialogues with significant contributors to Western philosophy, such as Nietzsche and Heidegger . However, Irigaray also writes
19844-422: The next generation by allowing his sister to marry exogamously . The underlying demand is a continued circulation of women to keep various clans peacefully related. Right or wrong, this solution displays the qualities of structural thinking. Even though Lévi-Strauss frequently speaks of treating culture as the product of the axioms and corollaries that underlie it, or the phonemic differences that constitute it, he
20008-591: The one hand it would seem that in the course of a myth anything is likely to happen. ... But on the other hand, this apparent arbitrariness is belied by the astounding similarity between myths collected in widely different regions. Therefore the problem: If the content of myth is contingent [i.e., arbitrary], how are we to explain the fact that myths throughout the world are so similar? Lévi-Strauss proposed that universal laws must govern mythical thought and resolve this seeming paradox, producing similar myths in different cultures. Each myth may seem unique, but he proposed it
20172-479: The one hand, Sartre's existentialist philosophy committed him to a position that human beings fundamentally were free to act as they pleased. On the other hand, Sartre also was a leftist who was committed to ideas such as that individuals were constrained by the ideologies imposed on them by the powerful. Lévi-Strauss presented his structuralist notion of agency in opposition to Sartre. Echoes of this debate between structuralism and existentialism eventually inspired
20336-635: The other Frankish kingdoms. During the 8th century, the empire of the Franks came to be ruled by the Carolingian dynasty , whose centre of power included the area which is now eastern Belgium. Over the centuries, it was divided up in many ways, but the Treaty of Verdun in 843 divided the Carolingian Empire into three kingdoms whose borders had a lasting impact on medieval political boundaries. Most of modern Belgium
20500-823: The parliament accepted a Dutch version of the Constitution . The Berlin Conference of 1885 ceded control of the Congo Free State to King Leopold II as his private possession. From around 1900 there was growing international concern for the extreme and savage treatment of the Congolese population under Leopold II , for whom the Congo was primarily a source of revenue from ivory and rubber production. Many Congolese were killed by Leopold's agents for failing to meet production quotas for ivory and rubber. In 1908, this outcry led
20664-432: The phallic economy places women alongside signs and currency, since all forms of exchange are conducted exclusively between men. Irigaray draws upon Karl Marx ’s theory of capital and commodities to claim that women are exchanged between men in the same way as any other commodity is. She argues that our entire society is predicated on this exchange of women. Her exchange value is determined by society, while her use value
20828-488: The point that in a four-class marriage system, the preferred marriage was with a classificatory mother's brother's daughter and never with the true one. Lévi-Strauss's atom of kinship structure deals only with consanguineal kin. There is a big difference between the two situations, in that the kinship structure involving the classificatory kin relations allows for the building of a system which can bring together thousands of people. Lévi-Strauss's atom of kinship stops working once
20992-504: The political and linguistic interests of these communities. The major parties in each community, though close to the political center, belong to three main groups: Christian Democrats , Liberals , and Social Democrats . Further notable parties came into being well after the middle of last century, mainly to represent linguistic , nationalist, or environmental interests, and recently smaller ones of some specific liberal nature. A string of Christian Democrat coalition governments from 1958
21156-523: The population, exists in the East Cantons . The Brussels-Capital Region is officially bilingual in French and Dutch, although French is the majority language and lingua franca . Belgium's linguistic diversity and related political conflicts are reflected in its complex system of governance, made up of six different governments . In antiquity the region around Belgium was inhabited by the Belgae , and became
21320-523: The posthumous book Nous sommes tous des cannibales (2013): A day will come when the thought that to feed themselves, men of the past raised and massacred living beings and complacently exposed their shredded flesh in displays shall no doubt inspire the same repulsion as that of the travellers of the 16th and 17th century facing cannibal meals of savage American primitives in America, Oceania, Asia or Africa. Lévi-Strauss returned to France in 1939 to take part in
21484-444: The psychoanalytic seminars of Jacques Lacan and joined the École Freudienne de Paris (Freudian School of Paris), directed by Lacan. She was expelled from this school in 1974, after the publication of her second doctoral thesis ( doctorat d'État ), Speculum of the Other Woman ( Speculum: La fonction de la femme dans le discours philosophique , later retitled as Speculum: De l'autre femme ), which received much criticism from both
21648-429: The purpose of a social act or institution. The existence of a thing was explained, if it fulfilled a function. The only strong alternative to that kind of analysis was a historical explanation, accounting for the existence of a social fact by stating how it came to be. The idea of social function developed in two different ways, however. The English anthropologist Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown , who had read and admired
21812-554: The relations are contrasting. The goal of Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology , then, was to simplify the masses of empirical data into generalized, comprehensible relations between units, which allow for predictive laws to be identified, such as A is to B as C is to D. Lévi-Strauss's theory is set forth in Structural Anthropology (1958). Briefly, he considers culture a system of symbolic communication, to be investigated with methods that others have used more narrowly in
21976-542: The relations between mythemes was that a myth consists of juxtaposed binary oppositions . Oedipus , for example, consists of the overrating of blood relations and the underrating of blood relations, the autochthonous origin of humans, and the denial of their autochthonous origin. Influenced by Hegel , Lévi-Strauss believed that the human mind thinks fundamentally in these binary oppositions and their unification (the thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad), and that these are what makes meaning possible. Furthermore, he considered
22140-521: The said descent line (see Douglas Oliver on the Siwai in Bougainville). Lévi-Strauss would agree to these aspects be explained inside his seminar but would never touch them on his own. The anthropological data content of the myths was not his problem. He was only interested in the formal aspects of each story, considered by him as the result of the workings of the collective unconscious of each group, which idea
22304-472: The sense that users of the language can recognize and respond to them. At the same time, a phoneme is an abstraction from language – not a sound, but a category of sound defined by the way it is distinguished from other categories through rules unique to the language. The entire sound structure of a language may be generated from a relatively small number of rules. In the study of the kinship systems that first concerned him, this ideal of explanation allowed
22468-461: The son, while the father's relationship was relaxed and playful. A number of partial patterns had been noted. Relations between the mother and father, for example, had some sort of reciprocity with those of father and son– if the mother had a dominant social status and was formal with the father, for example, then the father usually had close relations with the son. But these smaller patterns joined in inconsistent ways. One possible way of finding
22632-523: The southeast to the Hercynian orogenic belt . The Paris Basin reaches a small fourth area at Belgium's southernmost tip, Belgian Lorraine . The coastal plain consists mainly of sand dunes and polders . Further inland lies a smooth, slowly rising landscape irrigated by numerous waterways, with fertile valleys and the northeastern sandy plain of the Campine ( Kempen ). The thickly forested hills and plateaus of
22796-565: The theories of structuralism and structural anthropology . He held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France between 1959 and 1982, was elected a member of the Académie française in 1973 and was a member of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He received numerous honors from universities and institutions throughout the world. Lévi-Strauss argued that
22960-439: The time, the family was traditionally considered the fundamental object of analysis but was seen primarily as a self-contained unit consisting of a husband, a wife, and their children. Nephews, cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents all were treated as secondary. Lévi-Strauss argued that akin to Saussure's notion of linguistic value , families acquire determinate identities only through relations with one another. Thus, he inverted
23124-481: The title of Durkheim's famous Elementary Forms of the Religious Life , Lévi-Strauss' Elementary Structures re-examined how people organized their families by examining the logical structures that underlay relationships rather than their contents. While British anthropologists such as Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown argued that kinship was based on descent from a common ancestor, Lévi-Strauss argued that kinship
23288-448: The transition from a unitary to a federal arrangement between 1970 and 1993. Despite the reforms, tensions have persisted: there is particularly significant separatist sentiment among the Flemish ; language laws such as the municipalities with language facilities have been the source of much controversy; and the government formation period following the 2010 federal election set a world record at 589 days. Unemployment in Wallonia
23452-415: The true MoBrDa is missing. Lévi-Strauss also developed the concept of the house society to describe those societies where the domestic unit is more central to the social organization than the descent group or lineage. The purpose of structuralist explanation is to organize real data in the simplest effective way. All science, he says, is either structuralist or reductionist. In confronting such matters as
23616-452: The underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity." He won the 1986 International Nonino Prize in Italy. Gustave Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in 1908 to French-Jewish (turned agnostic) parents who were living in Brussels , where his father was working as a portrait painter at the time. He grew up in Paris, living on a street of the upscale 16th arrondissement named after
23780-681: The war effort and was assigned as a liaison agent to the Maginot Line . After the French capitulation in 1940, he was employed at a lycée in Montpellier , but then was dismissed under the Vichy racial laws (Lévi-Strauss's family, originally from Alsace, was of Jewish ancestry). Around that time, he and his first wife separated. She stayed behind and worked in the French resistance , while he managed to escape Vichy France by boat to Martinique , from where he
23944-704: The war were known as the Rape of Belgium due to German excesses. Belgium assumed control of the German colonies of Ruanda-Urundi (modern-day Rwanda and Burundi ) during the war, and in 1924 the League of Nations mandated them to Belgium. In the aftermath of the First World War, Belgium annexed the Prussian districts of Eupen and Malmedy in 1925, thereby causing the presence of a German-speaking minority. German forces again invaded
24108-493: The war. The Belgian Congo gained independence in 1960 during the Congo Crisis ; Ruanda-Urundi followed with its independence two years later. Belgium joined NATO as a founding member and formed the Benelux group of nations with the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Belgium became one of the six founding members of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 and of the European Atomic Energy Community and European Economic Community , established in 1957. The latter has now become
24272-465: The word pensée means both 'thought' and ' pansy ', while sauvage has a range of meanings different from English 'savage'. Lévi-Strauss supposedly suggested that the English title be Pansies for Thought , borrowing from a speech by Ophelia in Shakespeare 's Hamlet (Act IV, Scene V). French editions of La Pensée Sauvage are often printed with an image of wild pansies on the cover. The Savage Mind discusses not just "primitive" thought,
24436-413: The work of the French sociologist Émile Durkheim , argued that the goal of anthropological research was to find the collective function, such as what a religious creed or a set of rules about marriage did for the social order as a whole. Behind this approach was an old idea, the view that civilization developed through a series of phases from the primitive to the modern, everywhere in the same manner. All of
24600-401: The work of younger authors such as Pierre Bourdieu . Now a worldwide celebrity, Lévi-Strauss spent the second half of the 1960s working on his master project, a four-volume study called Mythologiques . In it, he followed a single myth from the tip of South America and all of its variations from group to group north through Central America and eventually into the Arctic Circle , thus tracing
24764-402: Was a memoir detailing his time as a French expatriate throughout the 1930s and his travels. Lévi-Strauss combined exquisitely beautiful prose, dazzling philosophical meditation, and ethnographic analysis of the Amazonian peoples to produce a masterpiece. The organizers of the Prix Goncourt , for instance, lamented that they were not able to award Lévi-Strauss the prize because Tristes Tropiques
24928-475: Was always necessary to supplement information about a society with information about others. Thus, some idea of a common human nature was implicit in each approach. The critical distinction, then, remained twofold: For Lévi-Strauss, the choice was for the demands of the social order. He had no difficulty bringing out the inconsistencies and triviality of individualistic accounts. Malinowski said, for example, that magic beliefs come into being when people need to feel
25092-415: Was based on the alliance between two families that formed when women from one group married men from another. Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lévi-Strauss continued to publish and experienced considerable professional success. On his return to France, he became involved with the administration of the CNRS and the Musée de l'Homme before finally becoming a professor ( directeur d'études ) of
25256-438: Was broken in 1999 after the first dioxin crisis , a major food contamination scandal. A "rainbow coalition" emerged from six parties: the Flemish and the French-speaking Liberals, Social Democrats and Greens. Later, a " purple coalition " of Liberals and Social Democrats formed after the Greens lost most of their seats in the 2003 election . The government led by Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt from 1999 to 2007 achieved
25420-427: Was considered "analytical in appearance only". It results in a chart that is far more difficult to understand than the original data and is based on arbitrary abstractions (empirically, fathers are older than sons, but it is only the researcher who declares that this feature explains their relations). Furthermore, it does not explain anything. The explanation it offers is tautological —if age is crucial, then age explains
25584-426: Was designated the first permanent President of the European Council on 19 November 2009, he offered the resignation of his government to King Albert II on 25 November 2009. A few hours later, the new government under Prime Minister Yves Leterme was sworn in. On 22 April 2010, Leterme again offered the resignation of his cabinet to the king after one of the coalition partners, the OpenVLD , withdrew from
25748-411: Was established following the 1830 Belgian Revolution , when it seceded from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands , which had incorporated the Southern Netherlands (which comprised most of modern-day Belgium) after the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Belgium has been called "the Battlefield of Europe", a reputation reinforced in the 20th century by both world wars . Belgium was an early participant in
25912-410: Was finally able to continue travelling. ( Victor Serge describes conversations with Lévi-Strauss aboard the freighter Capitaine Paul-Lemerle from Marseilles to Martinique in his Notebooks.). In 1941, he was offered a position at the New School for Social Research in New York City and granted admission to the United States. A series of voyages brought him, via South America, to Puerto Rico , where he
26076-405: Was in office. This was a coalition of the Flemish and Francophone Christian Democrats , the Flemish and Francophone Liberals together with the Francophone Social Democrats . On that day a new government , led by Flemish Christian Democrat Yves Leterme , the actual winner of the federal elections of June 2007 , was sworn in by the king. On 15 July 2008 Leterme offered the resignation of
26240-426: Was in the Middle Kingdom , later known as Lotharingia , but the coastal county of Flanders , west of the Scheldt , became the northernmost part of West Francia , the predecessor of France . In 870 in the Treaty of Meerssen , modern Belgium lands all became part of the western kingdom for a period, but in 880 in the Treaty of Ribemont , Lotharingia came under the lasting control of the eastern kingdom, which became
26404-548: Was investigated by the FBI after German letters in his luggage aroused the suspicions of customs agents. Lévi-Strauss spent most of the war in New York City. Along with Jacques Maritain , Henri Focillon , and Roman Jakobson , he was a founding member of the École Libre des Hautes Études , a sort of university-in-exile for French academics. The war years in New York were formative for Lévi-Strauss in several ways. His relationship with Jakobson helped shape his theoretical outlook (Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss are considered to be two of
26568-421: Was nonfiction. Lévi-Strauss was named to a chair in social anthropology at the Collège de France in 1959. At roughly the same time he published Structural Anthropology , a collection of his essays that provided both examples and programmatic statements about structuralism. At the same time as he was laying the groundwork for an intellectual program, he began a series of institutions to establish anthropology as
26732-472: Was taken from the linguists, but cannot be proved in any way although he was adamant about its existence and would never accept any discussion on this point. Similar to his anthropological theories, Lévi-Strauss identified myths as a type of speech through which a language could be discovered. His work is a structuralist theory of mythology which attempted to explain how seemingly fantastical and arbitrary tales could be so similar across cultures. Because he had
26896-424: Was titled Approche psycholinguistique du langage des déments . She completed a PhD in linguistics in 1968 from the University of Vincennes in Saint-Denis (University of Paris VIII). Her dissertation on speech patterns of subjects suffering from dementia became her first book, Le langage des déments , published in 1973. In 1974, she earned a second PhD in Philosophy. In the 1960s, Irigaray started attending
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