Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss

1908–2009

Before Claude Lévi-Strauss, the study of cultures mainly focused on observing and cataloguing the characteristics that made them unique. Lévi-Strauss, by contrast, became the father of modern anthropology by analyzing what cultures across the world have in common. In arguing that certain “universal attributes” defined all human activity, he helped create the school of thought known as structuralism.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Lévi-Strauss, the son of a painter, was born in Brussels and grew up in Paris, said the London Daily Telegraph. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and taught in secondary schools. But in 1935, disenchanted with the dryness of philosophy, he joined the faculty of São Paulo University, and over the next four years “traveled extensively in the interior of Brazil,” conducting fieldwork among the Caduveo, Bororo, and Nambikwara peoples. Just before World War II, he returned to France and joined the army; following the Nazi conquest, “he escaped to the United States,” where he taught at the New School for Social Research and learned anthropology by studying the subject at the New York Public Library.

Back in France after the war, Lévi-Strauss began producing works that challenged prevailing notions of “so-called primitive societies,” said the Los Angeles Times. “He concluded that primitive peoples were no less intelligent than ‘Western’ civilizations and that their intelligence could be revealed through their myths and other cultural keystones.” Lévi-Strauss found that the taboo against incest, for example, was a defining principle of social constructs around the world. “He was particularly intrigued with opposites, such as black and white, cooked and raw, or rational and emotional, that often serve as organizing elements in societies.”

Lévi-Strauss’ most important books—Tristes Tropiques (1955), The Savage Mind (1962), and his masterwork, the four-volume Mythologiques (1964–1971)—resembled “little that had come before in anthropology,” said The New York Times. With “a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument, and elaborate metaphors,” his writing “shook the field.” His many critics said that he often downplayed the circumstances that give rise to cultural differences and that he didn’t do enough fieldwork to justify his broad conclusions. Nonetheless, his theories found application in disciplines ranging from sociology to literature. Last year, more than 25 nations celebrated his centennial.

In his later years Lévi-Strauss became openly misanthropic. Western civilization, he declared, was mired in its “own filth.” He once said, “I like trees, I like plants, I like animals. But I am not very fond of humans.”