LéviStrauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist widely regarded as a central figure in the development of structural anthropology. Born in Brussels to French parents and raised in Paris, he studied philosophy, law, and sociology at the University of Paris before turning to ethnology.

Lévi-Strauss conducted fieldwork among indigenous peoples of the Americas, including the Nambikwara and other groups in Brazil. His theoretical work reframed culture as a system of underlying structures—the patterns of human thought that shape kinship, myth, and social organization rather than simply a catalog of customs.

Key ideas include the belief that myths and kinship rules reflect universal cognitive structures organized around binary oppositions, such as raw and cooked or nature and culture. He argued that comparative analysis could reveal these deep structures across cultures, and that social life can be understood as a language of signs.

Major works include The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), Tristes Tropiques (1955), The Savage Mind (La pensée sauvage, 1962), and the four-volume Mythologiques (1964–1971), a comprehensive study of world myths. In these studies he developed methods for structural analysis that influenced anthropology, literary theory, and the humanities.

Lévi-Strauss died in 2009, leaving a lasting legacy as a foundational figure in structuralism. His emphasis on unconscious cognitive structures and cross-cultural comparison shaped debates in anthropology and beyond, though later critics argued that such approaches overlooked context and power relations.