Background

Ethnicity: Claude Lévi-Strauss was of French and Jewish ancestry.

Claude Lévi-Strauss was born on November 28, 1908, in Brussels, Belgium, of a cultured Jewish family. his father was Raymond Urbain Elie Lévi-Strauss and mother was Emma Lévi-Strauss.

Education

Claude Lévi-Strauss grew up in France, attended a Lycée Janson de Sailly and the Lycée Condorcet, and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, University of Paris. He earned his habilitation there in 1931.

Career

After holding several provincial teaching posts, Claude Lévi-Strauss became interested in anthropology and accepted an appointment as a professor of sociology at Sao Paulo University, Brazil (1935-1939), which enabled him to do field research among Brazil's Indian tribes. Lévi-Strauss returned to wartime France and served in the army (1939-1941).

After that, he taught in New York City at the New School for Social Research and at the École Libre des Hautes Études (1942-1945). During his stay at the New School for Social Research in the 1940s, the famous Russian formalist Roman Jakobson introduced Claude Levi-Strauss to the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, the legendary Swiss linguist. Strauss foresaw the importance of semiology for cultural analysis and studied the coded relations linked to social interactions.

He was also a cultural attaché in the French embassy (1946-1947). Back in France, Lévi-Strauss was associate director of the Musée de I'Homme, director of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and editor of Man: Review of French Anthropology. From 1960 he was a professor of social anthropology, professor of comparative religions of nonliterate people, and director of the Laboratory of Social Anthropology at the College of France.

He shared his findings in his published works beginning with "The Elementary Structures of Kinship" in 1949, an important anthropological work on kinship. This was followed by his famous autobiographical work "Tristes Tropiques" in 1955, describing his travels, principally in Brazil. He also wrote "Structural Anthropology" (1958), "The Savage Mind" (1962), "Mythologiques" (4 volumes; 1964-1972), and "The Raw and the Cooked" (1970).

Claude Levi-Strauss was appointed as a member of the Académie Française in 2008, and one year later, he became the Dean of the Académie in 2009. He died on October 30, 2009. Levi-Strauss was 100 years old. He was buried in the village of Lignerolles, France.

Achievements

• Claude Gustave Lévi-Strauss became a leading scholar in the structural approach to social anthropology.
  
  Often known as the "father of modern anthropology," he revolutionized the world of social anthropology by implementing the methods of structuralist analysis developed by Saussuro in the field of cultural relations.
  
  Lévi-Strauss was awarded the Wenner-Gren Foundation's Viking Fund Medal for 1966 and the Erasmus Prize in 1975. He has been awarded several honorary doctorate degrees from prestigious institutions such as Oxford, Yale, Harvard, and Columbia.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Other Face of the Moon

    (Gathering for the first time all of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s...)

    2011
  • The Elementary Structures of Kinship

    (Professor Lévi-Strauss’s first major work, Les Structures...)

    1949
  • Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss

    (Claude Levis-Strauss approaches Mauss by combining anthro...)

    1987
  • Myth and Meaning

    (In these five lectures originally prepared for the CBC, C...)

    1978
  • We Are All Cannibals: And Other Essays

    (In these essays, Claude Lévi-Strauss shows us behavior th...)

  • Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World

    (Anthropology Confronts the Problems of the Modern World i...)

    1986
  • Totemism

    ("Levi-Strauss continues his assault on the myth of the pr...)

    1963
  • Tristes Tropiques

    (This watershed work records Claude Lévi-Strauss's search ...)

    1955
  • Structural Anthropology

    (The "structural method," first set forth in this epoch-ma...)

    1973

Religion

Despite his religious Jewish upbringing, Claude Lévi-Strauss was an atheist in his adult life.

Views

Levi-Strauss advocated that language preconditioned human culture, as evidenced in the "symbolic order" of religious and social life and aesthetics. He believed that cultural patterning is influenced by the huge reservoir of unconscious and universal structures of the mind.

The most important contribution made by Levi-Strauss during his anthropological investigations was the difference between "hot" and "cold" societies. Cultures in Western Europe that altered significantly and remained open to greatly divergent influences were termed as "hot," while the cultures that changed marginally over time were "cold." An ideal example of a "cold" society was said to be the Amazonian Indians. He suggested a "savage" mind and a "civilized" mind shared the same structure and that human characteristics are the same in every region of the world.

Quotations: "The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he is one who asks the right questions."

"I, therefore, claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact."

"The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him."

"Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor anyone in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe."

"Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing."

Membership

Strauss held several memberships in institutions including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. In 1956, he became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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  National Academy of Sciences , France

• 

  American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters , United States

• 

  American Academy of Arts and Sciences , United States

• 

  American Philosophical Society , United States

• 

  Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences , Netherlands

  1956

Personality

Lévi-Strauss did many things in his life including studying Law and Philosophy. He also did considerable reading among literary masterpieces and was deeply immersed in classical and contemporary music.

Quotes from others about the person

• "One of the greatest ethnologists of all time." - French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
  
  "He was a thinker, a philosopher. We will not find another like him." - Permanent secretary of the Académie française Hélène Carrère d'Encausse.

Interests

• literature, music, law

• Artists

  Claude Lorrain

• Music & Bands

  classical and contemporary music

Connections

Claude Gustave Lévi-Strauss was three times married. He had two sons Laurent Lévi-Strauss and Matthieu Lévi-Strauss.

Father:

Raymond Urbain Elie Lévi-Strauss

June 18, 1881 - December 2, 1953

Mother:

Emma Lévi-Strauss

January 11, 1886 - September 3, 1984

Spouse:

Monique Louise Roman

March 5, 1926 - 2009

Spouse:

Dina Dreyfus

February 1, 1911 - February 25, 1999

Spouse:

Rose Marie Ullmo

Son:

Laurent Lévi-Strauss

Son:

Matthieu Lévi-Strauss

Friend:

Henri Focillon

Friend:

Roman Jakobson

colleague:

Jacques Maritain

References

• Claude Levi-Strauss: The Anthropologist as Hero
• Claude Levi-Strauss
• Claude Levi-Strauss: An Introduction
• Claude Levi-Strauss: The Father of Modern Anthropology
  2012