Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908 – 2009) was a French social anthropologist who pioneered the analysis of cultural systems in terms of the structural relationships among their elements. Structuralism has had a significant impact on social science, philosophy, comparative religion, literature, and film studies.
Gustave Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in 1908 in Brussels, Belgium. His parents were French-Jewish (turned agnostic) and they were living there at the time. His father was a portrait painter. He was born and raised in Paris, on a street named after an artist who he admired. During the First World War, 6 to 10-year-old Strauss lived with his maternal grandfather, the rabbi of Versailles’ synagogue.
In 1918, he started attending the Lycée Janson de Sailly middle school. By 1925, he had graduated with a baccalaureate. In his last year of high school, he began reading philosophy, including the works of Marx and Kant. He began to shift his political views to the left, but unlike many other socialists, he never became a communist.
In 1925, Jean attended the prestigious Lycée Condorcet, where he studied for the entrance exam to the École normale supérieure, one of France’s most prestigious schools. The boy didn’t take the exam, and we don’t know why. In the 1920s, a man went to the Sorbonne in Paris to study law and philosophy. He also became involved in leftist political activism.
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 was a professor of sociology at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and did field research on the Indians of Brazil.
He was a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where he was influenced by the work of linguist Roman Jakobson. From 1950 to 1974, he was a 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, French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss published his first major work, “Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté.” This book is a comprehensive study of the structures of kinship. This work is an important contribution to the study of kinship. He attained widespread recognition with his literary intellectual autobiography, “Tristes tropiques.”
Other sources include the structural anthropology book, “Anthropologie structurale”, “La Pensée sauvage”, and “Totemism” were all published in 1961. His Mythologiques appeared in four volumes: Le Cru et le cuit (1964), Du miel aux cendres (1966), L’Origine des manières de table (1968), and L’Homme nu (1971).
In 1973, a second volume of Anthropologie structurale was published. La Voie des masques, 2 volumes. (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 identify the essential structural relationships among cultural elements. He viewed cultures as systems of communication, and he used models based on structural linguistics, information theory, and cybernetics to understand them.
After years of work, PhDs, and publications, Strauss became the oldest member of the Académie française and one of the few living authors whose works are still being published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. He died on October 30, 2009, a few weeks before his 101st birthday.
