Levi Strauss Day 2025 is on Wednesday, February 26, 2025: who iswas Levi Strauss?

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You mean Leo Strauss right? He was one of the influential leaders of modern Neo -conservatism

Considered as a group, the neocons have a fairly concrete identity -- they are intensely hawkish Democrats (or the offspring of intensely hawkish Democrats) who bolted the party in the late '60s/early '70s after it turned against the Vietnam War. They tend to be Jewish, urban and intellectual. Many of them worked for Scoop Jackson (the hawkish Democratic Senator from Washington State.) Some of them started out on the far left fringe of American politics (Trotskyists, etc.) then moved right and kept going. Some are admirers of the late University of Chicago professor and philospher Leo Strauss.

These are all generalizations, but there are enough people who fit enough of the points to make the profile valid.

Ideologically, though, neocon is a much more nebulous term. It's not like there's some kind of neocon Politburo that lays down a rigid party line on any and all points -- although the Project for a New American Century probably comes closest to filling that function.

It's easy enough to point to some common themes that are generally identified with the neocons: contempt for international organizations and the concept of multilateralism; impatience with traditional balance-of-power diplomacy; a cultish devotion to the use of military power; an outspoken belief in the superiority of Western culture and political institutions; a messianic vision of America's mission to "civilize" the world, which at times (Max Boot) makes them sound like caricatures of old-fashioned European imperialists. And of course: an intense identification with the state of Israel, and a willingness, even eagerness, to use American power to protect and further Israeli security interests.

But there are nuances on all these points. Some neocons support the maximum Likud position -- one state (Jewish) between the Jordan and the sea. Some don't. Some are more willing to use multilateral institutions to pursue American interests. Some aren't. Some are more cynical about the "spreading democracy" meme than others.

Personally, I would not describe Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld as neocons. Certainly not on the first count (personal biography). And not on the second (ideological affinity), either. At the end of the day, Cheney and Rumsfeld are politicians and bureaucrats. They are not intellectuals -- not by a long shot. They are consumers of ideology, not producers.

To me, the neocons and the realists are rival schools of foreign policy intellectuals, competing for the patronage of political leaders such as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Delay, etc. With a few exceptions, they are servants of power -- not holders of power.

Since most American politicians (like most American voters) know very little about the rest of the world, they usually don't have detailed positions on the kinds of foreign policy issues the neocons and the realists spend their professional lives debating. Instead, politicians have belief systems, typically reflecting some fairly basic value judgments: America must always be the strongest nation on earth, or America should try to cooperate with its allies, or whatever.

Could Claude Levi-Strauss's structural method of myth analysis be applyed to modern myths(urban legends)?

This site is for those who do not know about or understand this type of analysis:

I did not actually read the Four Myths of Winnebago but am curious if he used the writings of Paul Radin about the epic cycles in myth of the Winnebago.

One of the statements made by Radin is "There is no school from within to draw lines, saying, 'This is science, that is religion!' Tribal societies have terms for the sacred, but not for religion. They have terms for special powers, but no demarcation between the natural and the supernatural. Our difficulty in defining religion for tribal societies is that we have an oppositional vocabulary to separate religious from nonreligious, natural from supernatural; they do not."

Levi-Strauss's method appears to understand/conceptualize that constraint. Many of the past day American myths/legends seem to embody that aspect also. However, I have difficulty with today's "urban legends". They seem to have something missing at their core. Anyway most of them that I have read. The legends that are in the movies have been rewritten by the screenwriters for continuity so I don't know how valid they would actually be.

In the end, it does sound like a valid endeaver. You may be able to pick-up on the modern-day urban psyche. Good luck and go for it!

Could Claude Levi-Strauss's structural method of myth analysis be applyed to modern myths(urban legends)?

It sounds like an interesting connection, but you will need more than just Claude Levi-Strauss to compare. There are many other anthropological structuralists -- in my master's program, I read some Edmund Leach, Rodney Needham and Durkheim. There is also some work in Linguistics on binary opposition in Jakobson and de Saussure (very structural!). Be warned that sometimes they can read like stereo instructions! Good luck - it sounds like an interesting project!