Claude Levi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss , 1908-, French anthropologist, b. Brussels, Belgium. He carried out research in Brazil from 1935 to 1939. From 1942 to 1945 he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In 1948 he was appointed professor at the Institut d'Ethnologie, Univ. of Paris, and research associate at the National Science Research Fund, Paris. After 1959 he was professor of anthropology at the Collège de France. He is best known as the founder of structural anthropology, a theory heavily influenced by linguistics that tends to view culture as a communication system, and which proceeds by reducing cultural institutions and products into their relevent constituent units, thereby allowing one to discover the principles of their operation. He was elected to the French Academy in 1973. A memoir, Tristes Tropiques (1955, tr. 1961), was both a critical and popular success. His other works include The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949, tr. 1969), Race and History (1952), The Savage Mind (1962, tr. 1966), Totemism (1962, tr. 1964), Structural Anthropology, (2 vol., 1958-73, tr. 1963-76), The View from Afar (1983, tr. 1985), The Jealous Potter (1985, tr. 1988), and The Story of Lynx (1991, tr. 1995). Mythologiques is a structural analysis of Native American myths and consists of The Raw and the Cooked (1964, tr. 1969), From Honey to Ashes (1967, tr. 1973), The Origin of Table Manners (1968, tr. 1978), and The Naked Man (1971, tr. 1981).

Bibliography: See studies by E. N. Hayes, ed. (1970), E. R. Leach (1970), O. Paz (tr. 1970), H. Gardner (1972), and C. Geertz (1988).

Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1908–90) French anthropologist. In The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) and Structural Anthropology (1958), Lévi-Strauss outlined the science of structuralism. In 1959, he became professor of anthropology at the College of France. In 1973, he was elected to the Académie Française.