Lévi-Strauss, father of modern anthropology, dies at 100
Charlot Zahra
The renowned French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, best known as the father of the Structuralist School of Anthropology, died yesterday at the venerable age of 100.
His death was announced in Paris by his publisher, Plon.
Lévi-Strauss, born in Brussels, grew up in Paris, living in a street of the 16th arrondissement named after the artist Claude Lorrain, whose work he later admired and wrote about.
Lévi-Strauss’s father was also a painter, and Claude was born in Brussels because his father had taken a contract to paint there.
At the Sorbonne in Paris, Lévi-Strauss studied law and philosophy. He did not pursue his study of law but graduated in philosophy in 1931.
In 1935, after a few years of secondary-school teaching, he took up a last-minute offer to be part of a French cultural mission to Brazil in which he would serve as a visiting professor at the University of São Paulo.
Lévi-Strauss lived in Brazil from 1935 to 1939. It was during this time that he undertook his first ethnographic fieldwork, conducting periodic research forays into the Mato Grosso and the Amazon Rainforest.
He studied first the Guaycuru and Bororo Indian tribes, living among them for a while.
In 1938 he returned for a second, year-long expedition to study the Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib societies. It was this experience that cemented Lévi-Strauss’s professional identity as an anthropologist.
Lévi-Strauss spent most of the war in New York City. Together with other intellectual emigrés, he taught at the New School for Social Research.
After a brief stint from 1946 to 1947 as a cultural attaché to the French embassy in Washington, DC, Lévi-Strauss returned to Paris in 1948.
It was at this time that he received his doctorate from the Sorbonne by submitting, in the French tradition, both a “major” and a “minor” thesis. These were “The Family and Social Life of the Nambikwara Indians” and “The Elementary Structures of Kinship”.
The Elementary Structures of Kinship was published the next year and quickly came to be regarded as one of the most important anthropological works on kinship.
A play on the title of Durkheim’s famous Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Elementary Structures re-examined how people organized their families by examining the logical structures that underlay relationships rather than their contents.
While Lévi-Strauss was well known in academic circles, it was in 1955 that he became one of France’s best known intellectuals by publishing Tristes Tropiques.
This book was essentially a memoir detailing his time as a French expatriate throughout the 1930s.
Lévi-Strauss combined exquisitely beautiful prose, dazzling philosophical meditation, and ethnographic analysis of the Amazonian peoples to produce a masterpiece.
Lévi-Strauss was named to a chair in Social Anthropology at the Collège de France in 1959.
At roughly the same time he published Structural Anthropology, a collection of his essays which provided both examples and programmatic statements about structuralism.
In 1962, Lévi-Strauss published what is for many people his most important work, La Pensée Sauvage. The title is a pun untranslatable in English — in English the book is known as The Savage Mind, but this title fails to capture the other possible French meaning of ‘Wild Pansies’. The book concerns primitive thought, forms of thought we all use.
The first half of the book lays out Lévi-Strauss’s theory of culture and mind, while the second half expands this account into a theory of history and social change.
Lévi-Strauss presented his structuralist notion of agency in opposition to Jean-Paul Sartre. Echoes of this debate between structuralism and existentialism would eventually inspire the work of younger authors such as Pierre Bourdieu.
Now a worldwide celebrity, Lévi-Strauss spent the second half of the 1960s working on his master project, a four-volume study called Mythologiques.
In it, he took a single myth from the tip of South America and followed all of its variations from group to group up through Central America and eventually into the Arctic Circle, thus tracing the myth’s spread from one end of the American continent to the other.
Lévi-Strauss completed the final volume of Mythologiques in 1971 and in 1973 he was elected to the Académie Française, France’s highest honour for an intellectual.
He was also a member of other notable academies worldwide, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He also received the Erasmus Prize in 1973. In 2003 he received the Meister-Eckhart-Prize for philosophy.
He had received several honorary doctorates from universities such as Oxford, Harvard, and Columbia. He was also a recipient of the Grand-croix de la Légion d’Honneur, and is a Commandeur de l’Ordre National du Mérite and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres.
After his retirement, he continued to publish occasional meditations on art, music and poetry.
In 2008 he became the first member of the Académie Française to reach the age of 100.
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