Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss (born November 28, 1908, Brussels, Belgium—died October 30, 2009, Paris, France) was a French social anthropologist and ethnologist best known for developing structuralism, the idea that all cultures are shaped by deep, universal patterns in human thinking and that these hidden structures influence the way people form traditions, myths, and social systems. Lévi-Strauss’s work transformed the study of anthropology and had a significant influence on such disciplines as linguistics, philosophy, and literary studies.

Education and career

After studying philosophy and law at the University of Paris (1927–32), where he was introduced to the French School of Sociology through the works of Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Lévi-Strauss taught in a secondary school. He served as a professor of sociology at the University of São Paulo, Brazil (1934–37), and did field research on Brazilian Indigenous tribes, particularly focusing on the Bororo and Nambikwara peoples. He was a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City (1941–45), where he was influenced by the work of linguist Roman Jakobson. From 1950 to 1974 he was director of studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études at the University of Paris, and in 1959 he was appointed as the chair of social anthropology at the Collège de France.

Major works

In 1949 Lévi-Strauss published his first major work, Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (rev. ed., 1967; The Elementary Structures of Kinship), in which he introduced the alliance theory. This theory explains how kinship systems are built not just through blood relations, but also through marriages among different groups of people, creating social bonds between groups. Incest, considered a taboo, is forbidden, compelling the groups toward exogamy (the custom of marrying outside one’s social group).

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Totemism: Lévi-Strauss

Lévi-Strauss gained popular recognition with Tristes tropiques (1955; A World on the Wane), a literary intellectual autobiography. In it, he critiques Western colonialism, pointing out that it erodes unique Indigenous cultures because of the homogenization and uniformity it brings. He questions the exploitative role of travelers and contrasts modern, industrialized societies with the ways of life of “primitive” societies.

Other publications included Anthropologie structurale (rev. ed., 1961; Structural Anthropology), La Pensée sauvage (1962; The Savage Mind), and Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (1962; Totemism). His massive Mythologiques appeared in four volumes: Le Cru et le cuit (1964; The Raw and the Cooked), Du miel aux cendres (1966; From Honey to Ashes), L’Origine des manières de table (1968; The Origin of Table Manners), and L’Homme nu (1971; The Naked Man). In 1973 a second volume of Anthropologie structurale appeared. La Voie des masques, 2 vol. (1975; The Way of the Masks), analyzed the art, religion, and mythology of Native American Northwest Coast Indians. In 1983 he published a collection of essays, Le Regard éloigné (The View from Afar).

Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism was an effort to reduce the enormous amount of information about cultural systems to what he believed were the essentials—the formal relationships among their elements. He viewed cultures as systems of communication, and he constructed models based on structural linguistics, information theory, and cybernetics to interpret them.

Awards and honors

In recognition of his contributions to anthropology and structuralist thought, Lévi-Strauss was awarded the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) gold medal in 1967. He was elected to the Académie Française in 1973 and received the Erasmus Prize the same year for his contributions to the study of European culture.

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