Claude Levi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss (French: [klod levi stʁos]; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer and Franz Boas, the "father of modern anthropology". The work of Lévi-Strauss was also key in the development of the theory of structuralism and structural anthropology. He was honored by universities throughout the world and held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France (1959–1982), and was elected a member of the Académie française in 1973. He argued that the "savage" mind had the same structures as the "civilized" mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere. These observations culminated in his famous book Tristes Tropiques, which positioned him as one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought, where his ideas reached into many fields in the humanities, as well as sociology and philosophy. Structuralism has been defined as "the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity." Continue Reading »

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