Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss (Brussels, 1908 - Paris, 2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist and one of the central figures of structuralism. He is considered the founder of structural anthropology, a method borrowed from the linguistics of Saussure that changed the way societies are studied. His influence went well beyond his discipline and reached philosophy, sociology and the humanities at large.

He was born to French-Jewish parents of Franco-Alsatian background and grew up in Paris, in the upscale 16th arrondissement. During the First World War he lived with his maternal grandfather, who was the rabbi of Versailles. Despite this religious upbringing, he was an atheist or agnostic in adult life. He studied law and philosophy at the Sorbonne, drifted toward socialism without ever becoming a communist, and passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1931, at the age of twenty-two. After a few years teaching in secondary schools, he accepted a last-minute offer to join a French cultural mission to Brazil, where he taught at the University of São Paulo. There, together with his first wife, Dina, he undertook ethnographic expeditions to Mato Grosso and the Amazon, living among peoples such as the Nambikwara and the Bororo. These experiences shaped his identity as a fieldworker.

The Second World War took him first to Martinique and then to New York, where he taught at the New School for Social Research and helped found the École Libre des Hautes Études, a kind of university in exile for French scholars. In New York he came into contact with the linguist Roman Jakobson, whose work on phonology proved decisive for his ideas, and with the anthropologist Franz Boas. After the war he returned to France, and in 1949 he defended The Elementary Structures of Kinship, the first application of his new method, which brought him international recognition. Tristes Tropiques followed in 1955, a hybrid of autobiography, philosophical reflection and ethnographic testimony that made him known to a wide public.

At the core of his thought is the idea that cultural diversity rests on shared mental structures. He argued that what he called « savage » thought works with the same logical capacities as so-called « civilized » thought, and that each culture is a coherent system that should not be ranked on a ladder of progress, as the evolutionists did. From the early 1960s he devoted himself to myths, mainly those of the Americas, which he analysed as systems of oppositions and transformations, following the model of phonology. This research became the Mythologiques, whose first volume, The Raw and the Cooked, appeared in 1964.

His influence was considerable. He held the chair of social anthropology at the Collège de France from 1959 to 1982 and was elected to the Académie française in 1973. His work helped give rise to French structuralism and reshaped classic debates in anthropology, from kinship to myth. He died in Paris in 2009, at the age of one hundred, having become in 2008 the first member of the Académie to reach that age.