Claude Lévi-Strauss

born Nov.
28, 1908, Brussels, Belg.
died Oct. 30, 2009, Paris, France
French social anthropologist and leading
exponent of structuralism, a name applied to
the analysis of cultural systems (e.g.,
kinship and mythical systems) in terms of
the structural relations among their
elements. Structuralism has influenced not
only 20th-century social science but also
the study of philosophy, comparative
religion, literature, and film.
After
studying philosophy and law at the
University of Paris (1927–32), Lévi-Strauss
taught in a secondary school and was
associated with Jean-Paul Sartre’s
intellectual circle. He served as professor
of sociology at the University of São Paulo,
Brazil (1934–37), and did field research on
the Indians of Brazil. He was 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 to the
chair of social anthropology at the Collège
de France.
In 1949
Lévi-Strauss published his first major work,
Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté
(rev. ed., 1967; The Elementary Structures
of Kinship). He attained popular recognition
with Tristes tropiques (1955; A World on the
Wane), a literary intellectual
autobiography. Other publications include
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.