Two previously unpublished lectures charting the renowned anthropologist's intellectual engagement with the sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne

In January 1937, between the two ethnographic trips he would describe in Tristes Tropiques, Claude L vi-Strauss gave a talk to the Conf d ration g n rale du travail in Paris. Only recently discovered in the archives of the Biblioth que national de France, this lecture, "Ethnography: The Revolutionary Science," discussed the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, to whom L vi-Strauss would return in remarks delivered more than a half-century later, in the spring of 1992. Bracketing the career of one of the most celebrated anthropologists of the twentieth century, these two talks reveal how L vi-Strauss's ethnography begins and ends with Montaigne--and how his reading of his intellectual forebear and his understanding of anthropology evolve along the way.

Published here for the first time, these lectures offer new insight into the development of ethnography and the thinking of one of its most important practitioners. Essays by Emmanuel D sveaux, who edited the original French volume De Montaigne Montaigne, and Peter Skafish expand the context of L vi-Strauss's talks with contemporary perspectives and commentary.