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Books
In Search of Us: Adventures in Anthropology by Lucy Moore
Roger Caldwell considers the quest of anthropologists.
When the young Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), then a bored teacher of philosophy in Paris, received an offer to work in Brazil, he embraced the opportunity to remake himself as an anthropologist, conducting fieldwork among the remote tribes of the Mato Grosso. He thus exchanged what he saw as ‘the claustrophobic Turkish-bath atmosphere’ of philosophical reflection for the ‘open air’ of ethnography. Later, though, he came to realize that he had never truly broken with philosophy. In the end, he felt, ‘we’re always doing philosophy’.
In Search of Us (2022) by Lucy Moore covers the heroic period of social anthropology between the late nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth, when it matured into the discipline we recognize today.
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