The Raw and the Cooked is the first volume from Mythologiques, a structural study of Amerindian mythology written by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. The original French title was Le Cru et le cuit. In the introduction, Lévi-Strauss writes of his confidence that "certain categorical opposites drawn from everyday experience with the most basic sorts of things — e.g. 'raw' and 'cooked,' 'fresh' and 'rotten,' 'moist' and 'parched,' and others — can serve a people as conceptual tools for the formation of abstract notions and for combining these into propositions." Beginning with a Bororo myth, Lévi-Strauss analyses 187 myths, reconstructing sociocultural formations using binary oppositions based on sensory qualities.
Famous quotes containing the word raw:
“It began with begging.
In the beginning it was all God’s icebox
and everyone ate raw fish or animals
and there was no fire at night to dance to,
no fire at day to cook by.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)