La Voie des masques
Presentation copy inscribed by Claude Lévi-Strauss to Monsieur and Madame Maurice Genevoix: “À Monsieur et Madame Maurice Genevoix, avec les sentiments d'admiration, de reconnaissance et de respect de Claude Lévi-Strauss.”
Claude Lévi-Strauss examines masks, “mechanisms both naïve and vehement. A system of cords, pulleys and hinges allows mouths to awaken the novice’s terrors, eyes to weep for his death, beaks to devour him. Unique of its kind, this art brings together in its figures the contemplative serenity of the statues of Chartres or Egyptian tombs and the artifices of carnival.”
A major anthropological text, in which Lévi-Strauss continues, after Le Totémisme aujourd’hui and La Pensée sauvage, his exploration of the symbolic systems of so-called “primitive” societies. The book, centered on the masks of the Indians of the Pacific Northwest (notably the Kwakiutl, Tsimshian and Haida), shows how imagination and myth are structured into networks, following a transformational logic, organized around the iconography of traditional masks.
Numerous color reproductions illustrate a superb layout. This is one of only three titles in the series published in a double volume.