Like the Archaeobotanist, I too was astonished by the news that Claude Levi-Strauss had died today because I was not aware that he hadn’t died many years ago. Rather than explain why a blog about agrobiodiversity should mark the passing of a centenarian and seminal anthropologist, let me just urge you to visit Dorian Fuller’s blog and read his appreciation and the sample myth on the origins of agriculture that Levi-Strauss collected.
It shows that almost all of us are ignorant of the origins of our foods and food-processing technologies. Bonus points if you spot the other ways in which the Munduruku explanation of the origins of their agriculture might be not the whole “truth”.
I red an interview with him in a French magazine a couple of years ago. He was asked to comment on current situations in the world. He said something like: You know my thinking and work refers to a world with some 4 billion people. There are almost twice as much now and I am 94 years old. It is beyond my capacity, this is not the world I lived in. His work is rlevant to so many areas, including agriculture.
That’s an interesting way of looking at it. In 1962, when Savage Minds was published, world population was a little over 3 billion.