Two approaches to the humanities: Claude Lévi-Strauss and Germaine Tillion

This article compares two different approaches to the humanities in general and to anthropology in particular, represented by two renowned French scholars, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) and Germaine Tillion (1907–2008). While Lévi- Strauss emphasized the importance of an objective stance in the humanities and wanted to eliminate all subjectivity, Tillion desired to reserve an exclusive role for subjectivity, preferring human individuals to abstractions. The article suggests looking for the reason for these opposite positions within the disparate experiences the two scholars had during World War II: an American university life for Lévi-Strauss, and “humanist classes” in a German concentration camp for Tillion. A person who had been through the schooling at Ravensbrück could not arrive at the same conception of the field as another whose experiences came from the campus of an American university

Germaine Tillion face à l’extrême

Germaine Tillion n’est pas seulement une ethnologue qui a connu les camps de concentration ; elle a voulu aussi adopter l’attitude de l’ethnologue au camp et profiter de son expérience de déportée dans ses enquêtes ethnologiques. à Ravensbrück, elle cherche à comprendre le système concentrationnaire, qu’elle explique aux autres détenues sous forme de conférences ou d’une « opérette-revue ». En tant qu’historienne et ethnologue, elle cherche à articuler données objectives et expériences subjectives, à trouver le juste équilibre entre identification et distanciation par rapport à ceux qu’elle étudie.Germaine Tillion is not just an anthropologist who lived through a concentration camp; she tended to adopt an anthropologist’s point of view even when confined at the camp and would later draw on her experience as a deportee in her professional research. In Ravensbrück, she strived to understand the concentration camp system, which she then explained to the other detainees in the form of lectures or of a “musical review”. As a historian and anthropologist, she endeavours to find the right balance between objective data and her subjective experiences, always walking the line between identifying with her subject and maintaining her distance

The genre of everyday life

The present essay shows the new genres of the seventeenth century Dutch painting (portrait, landscape and genre painting), viewed as painting of everyday life, as an alternative proposition to the historical painting then dominant in the academic categorization. What used to be marginal, peripheral and of secondary importance became the main motif in the majority of Dutch painting. Minor genres came to prominence and acquired autonomous status. The interest in the elements of everyday life could be traced in European art earlier but it was the seventeenth century Dutch artists that ultimately led “low” and realistic subject themes to come into their own commercially and artistically. Occasionally, even religious themes were presented as genre scenes, thus introducing to the presented images an air of ambivalence. In the works of Dutch painters, the uniqueness of high subject themes was opposed by pictures of everyday life and the repetitiveness of everyday domestic activities, not shunning, however, the allegorical potential contained in some of the depictions

Freud sobre a enunciação

Eu me proponho resumir aqui, para o uso daqueles que estudam a linguagem, algumas observações de Freud, dispersas em diversos escritos, e consagradas aos problemas da enunciação (termo do qual Freud não se serve)

[著書の紹介と翻訳] 『国替えを余儀なくされた男』 : ツヴェタン・トドロフ Seuil, octobre 1996

原著：ツヴェタン・トドロフ　翻訳：川神,傅