Claude Levi-Strauss

Claude Levi-Strauss was born on November 28, 1908, in Brussels, where his French parents were living at the time; his father, Raymond, was a portrait painter whose commissions had taken the family to Belgium ^[1]. The household soon returned to Paris, and Claude grew up in the 16th arrondissement in a cultivated, secular Jewish family with roots in Alsace. His great-grandfather Isaac Strauss had been a conductor associated with the court of Napoleon III, and music, painting, and collecting filled the family apartment ^[2].

As a schoolboy at the Lycee Janson-de-Sailly and later the Lycee Condorcet, he showed an early appetite for geology, Marx, and Freud, three influences he later described as formative for his way of seeing hidden order beneath surface variety ^[1]. He studied law and philosophy at the University of Paris, passing the agregation in philosophy in 1931, the same competitive examination year as Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty ^[3].

A brief stint teaching philosophy in provincial lycees left him restless. Philosophy as then taught struck him as verbal exercise detached from real human diversity, and he began looking for a discipline that would let him study societies directly ^[2].

The turning point came in 1935, when Levi-Strauss accepted a post teaching sociology at the newly founded University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, part of a French academic mission ^[1]. During university vacations between 1935 and 1939 he mounted expeditions into the Brazilian interior, doing fieldwork among the Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib peoples of the Mato Grosso and Amazon regions ^[3]. He traveled with his first wife, Dina Dreyfus, herself a trained ethnographer who shared the early expeditions.

These months in the field were relatively short by the standards of later anthropology, but they supplied the observations, photographs, and questions that fed his work for decades ^[2]. His account of the journeys eventually appeared in 1955 as Tristes Tropiques, a book that mixed memoir, travel narrative, and philosophical reflection. The Goncourt Prize committee reportedly regretted being unable to award it their prize because it was not a novel, and it remains among the most widely read works of anthropology ever published ^[4].

War interrupted everything. Called back to France in 1939, Levi-Strauss served briefly in the army before the German occupation and Vichy's anti-Jewish laws made his position impossible. In 1941 he escaped to New York aboard a crowded ship from Marseille, a voyage he shared with the surrealist Andre Breton ^[3].

New York proved decisive. Teaching at the New School for Social Research alongside other European exiles, Levi-Strauss met the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson, whose structural phonology showed how a small set of underlying contrasts could generate the sound systems of all languages ^[5]. Levi-Strauss saw that the same logic might apply to kinship, myth, and custom: cultures could be analyzed as systems of relations rather than collections of traits.

The first major result was his doctoral thesis, published in 1949 as The Elementary Structures of Kinship. In it he argued that marriage rules across societies function as systems for exchanging women between groups, with the incest taboo serving as the hinge between nature and culture ^[3]. The book established his reputation and announced the method that would be called structuralism.

After the war he served as French cultural attache in the United States before returning to Paris, where he took a post at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in 1950, holding the chair in comparative religions of nonliterate peoples ^[1].

The list of Claude Levi-Strauss achievements centers on a string of books published between 1949 and 1971 that redirected the human sciences. Structural Anthropology (1958) collected the essays that defined his method. The Savage Mind (1962) argued that mythical thought is not a failed version of science but a parallel intellectual system, a science of the concrete built from available materials, which he compared to the work of a bricoleur ^[4]. The book's closing chapter, a sharp critique of Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophy of history, marked structuralism's challenge to existentialism as the dominant force in French thought ^[2].

His largest project was the four-volume Mythologiques (1964 to 1971), which traced transformations of a single body of myth across the Americas, from The Raw and the Cooked through The Naked Man. Analyzing hundreds of myths, he argued that they think themselves through people, recombining oppositions such as raw and cooked, nature and culture, according to logic the tellers need not consciously grasp ^[5].

Institutional recognition followed the intellectual influence. In 1959 he was elected to the chair of social anthropology at the College de France, the country's most prestigious academic body, where he taught until 1982, and in 1960 he founded its Laboratory of Social Anthropology ^[1]. In 1973 he became the first anthropologist elected to the Academie Francaise ^[3]. He received the Erasmus Prize in 1973 and honorary degrees from universities including Oxford, Yale, Harvard, and Columbia ^[6].

Levi-Strauss married three times. His first marriage, to Dina Dreyfus in 1932, ended after their return from Brazil. A second marriage to Rose-Marie Ullmo produced a son, Laurent. In 1954 he married Monique Roman, with whom he had a second son, Matthieu, and who remained his companion for the rest of his life ^[2].

Colleagues and interviewers described a reserved, courteous man who disliked celebrity and preferred the laboratory and his study to public debate. He kept lifelong passions for music, especially Wagner, and for painting; he once wrote that he might have been happiest as a composer ^[4]. Despite the fame Tristes Tropiques brought him, he famously opened that book by declaring his dislike of travel and explorers, a paradox readers have puzzled over ever since ^[4].

His Jewish heritage shaped his life mainly through the persecution that drove him into exile, an experience he recounted with characteristic understatement. He remained an atheist and a pessimist about the modern world, warning late in life about population growth and the destruction of cultural and biological diversity ^[7].

Retirement from the College de France in 1982 did not end his writing. Later books included The View from Afar (1983), The Jealous Potter (1985), and The Story of Lynx (1991), which extended his mythological analyses, along with Look, Listen, Read (1993), a set of essays on art and music ^[6]. He continued attending sessions of the Academie Francaise into advanced old age.

Honors accumulated: in 2008 he became the first living author published in the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, the canon-defining French series usually reserved for the dead ^[7]. That November, France marked his hundredth birthday with tributes including a visit from President Nicolas Sarkozy, and the centenary was observed by academic institutions worldwide ^[7].

Claude Levi-Strauss died on October 30, 2009, at his home in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, a few weeks short of his 101st birthday. He was buried privately in the village of Lignerolles in Burgundy, where he had a country house, before the death was publicly announced ^[7].

Any Claude Levi-Strauss biography must reckon with influence far beyond anthropology. Structuralism became the common language of French thought in the 1960s, shaping Roland Barthes in literary criticism, Jacques Lacan in psychoanalysis, and Michel Foucault's early work, even when those thinkers moved past it ^[5]. The poststructuralist generation, including Jacques Derrida, defined itself largely by arguing with his premises, which is its own measure of his centrality ^[5].

Within anthropology his specific analyses have been revised or contested, and field methods moved far from his own brief expeditions. Yet his core claims endure as reference points: that human minds everywhere work in comparable ways, that myth and ritual have discoverable logic, and that no society is a primitive stage of another ^[3]. His attack on the concept of race in the 1952 UNESCO essay Race and History became a standard text of anti-racist argument ^[6].

Among basic Claude Levi-Strauss facts, the breadth of his readership may be the most telling. Tristes Tropiques still sells to general readers, the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris named its theater after him during his lifetime, and his centenary in 2008 was a national event in France ^[7]. Few scholars in any field have watched their own ideas become part of the culture they set out to study.