Continental · 1908–2009
Claude Lévi-Strauss
French anthropologist who founded structural anthropology
Lévi-Strauss argued that kinship systems, myths and classifications in all societies follow the same underlying logic of binary oppositions, so “primitive” thought is as rigorous as science.
Life and thought
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) was born in Brussels to French parents, studied law and philosophy in Paris, and in 1935 went to teach at the University of São Paulo, from where he made expeditions to Indigenous peoples of the Brazilian interior. Escaping Vichy France in 1941, he reached New York, where the linguist Roman Jakobson introduced him to structural linguistics. He later held the chair of social anthropology at the Collège de France and lived to be 100.
Lévi-Strauss applied Saussure’s insight, that meaning lies in differences within a system, to culture. In The Elementary Structures of Kinship he argued that marriage rules are systems of exchange between groups, organised around the incest prohibition. In his studies of myth he showed that stories across the Americas recombine the same oppositions, such as raw and cooked or nature and culture, to work through contradictions. The Savage Mind argued that so-called primitive thought is as logical as science, only applied to concrete things.