As many of you probably know, this sleepy, slightly shabbily-maintained blog is not my only online presence. I have a twitter handle, of course, and AnthroCyBib, which is a site I co-founded roughly seven years ago with James Bielo. AnthroCyBib is bustling, in part due to a bevy of new blood that was brought in recently, and in part due to the fact that James and I brought in two terrific co-curators a few years ago. Still, my “WordPress name” dates from back when it just James and I making this thing hobble on all by our lonesome, so I like to tell myself I still have a little ownership of it. 

But to get to the point I was working towards, I have very recently started another blog. It’s called touring mythologiques, and its…well, a tour of the four volume Mythologiques series by Claude Lévi-Strauss. By tour, I mean a series of (very) close readings of the book, starting from the very beginning. If you want to know how detailed the readings are, well, let me tell you I spent about two thousand words analyzing the dedication page to the first volume of the series, The Raw and the Cooked. 

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First, a brief introduction. For reasons that have nothing to do with this “blog,” I recently had to write what basically was an intellectual biography. (Please note, and then do not meditate upon, the assumption that something that something that is sometimes only updated once a year can be called a “blog.”) While I can’t imagine that it would be of interest to too many people, if I squinted my eyes hard enough and lied to myself with just enough conviction, I could imagine that the essay might be interesting to one or two people – and if you are one of those people, my condolences on the various life events that have brought you to such as state. If nothing else, this sketch might have the virtue of a ten-thousand-foot-altitude view of how an intellectual project comes together over time, and maybe even let people see how a sack-full of disparate articles, essays, and book-chapters can be pieced together.

Now, I guess, on to the main event…

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