Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS - Ancient sites and Korean shamanism

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908.2009)

Autograph letter signed to his ethnologist friend Isac Chiva.

One ¼ large octavo page on Academy of Korean Studies letterhead.

[South Korea]. Saturday 17 [1981, inscribed in another hand]

“The day after tomorrow, shamanism session in the countryside, I don’t really know where. »

The anthropologist cynically describes the Korean way of life and organization before diving into the discovery of ancient sites and Asian shamanism.

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“My dear friend, This first week of stay ends in a sort of intellectual concentration camp, 30 km from Seoul, in the middle of a very beautiful Cevennes-style landscape, but where the lifestyle combines a pomp ostentatious and Spartan morals : we stay in a room luxuriously furnished in Korean style, but we have hot water every other day (energy savings) which does not prevent us from serving rather crude meals, but so incredibly plentiful that half the food in the cafeteria is thrown away every day. All this gives a bit of an impression of incoherence, and that we are a hundred leagues from Japanese refinement .

The seminars end today. There were about forty Koreans there, plus David Eyle from El Paso, David Wu from Honolulu, Harry Lewis from Edmonton and Bob Scholte from Amsterdam, who vehemently attacked me in yesterday's session, Jaulin style, in front of Koreans all the more disconcerted as the organizers are clearly semi-official and unwilling to introduce subversion. People are terribly aware here that the border with the communist world is 50 km away . We have vacation, today and tomorrow, to visit Seoul, barely glimpsed until now. The day after tomorrow, shamanism session in the countryside I don't know where , and Tuesday departure in a caravan to visit the ancient sites and old villages of the south-east region for a week. This still promises surprises, because the Koreans are clearly not organizers.

Please be kind enough to share this news with the lab where everything is going well, I hope, tell Françoise H. that my heart and thoughts are with her and share with your wife our most affectionate memories. Claude Lévi-Strauss. »

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Isac CHIVA (1925-2012), ethnologist of Romanian origin, arrived in 1948 in France where he studied, worked at the Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions, and became project manager at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (director, from 1994), and deputy director of the Social Anthropology Laboratory alongside Lévi-Strauss. Indeed, in 1960, the latter, elected to the Collège de France, asked him to assist him in the direction of the Laboratory of Social Anthropology (LAS).