Lévi-Strauss, Claude (klōd lā`vē-strous), 1908–, French anthropologist, b. Brussels, Belgium. He carried out research in Brazil from 1935 to 1939. From 1942 to 1945 he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In 1948 he was appointed professor at the Institut d'Ethnologie, Univ. of Paris, and research associate at the National Science Research Fund, Paris. After 1959 he was professor of anthropology at the Collège de France. He is best known as the founder of structural anthropology, a theory heavily influenced by linguistics that tends to view culture as a communication system, and which proceeds by reducing cultural institutions and products into their relevent constituent units, thereby allowing one to discover the principles of their operation. He was elected to the French Academy in 1973. A memoir, Tristes Tropiques (1955, tr. 1961), was both a critical and popular success. His other works include The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949, tr. 1969), Race and History (1952), The Savage Mind (1962, tr. 1966), Totemism (1962, tr. 1964), Structural Anthropology, (2 vol., 1958–73, tr. 1963–76), The View from Afar (1983, tr. 1985), The Jealous Potter (1985, tr. 1988), and The Story of Lynx (1991, tr. 1995). Mythologiques is a structural analysis of Native American myths and consists of The Raw and the Cooked (1964, tr. 1969), From Honey to Ashes (1967, tr. 1973), The Origin of Table Manners (1968, tr. 1978), and The Naked Man (1971, tr. 1981).

Bibliography

See studies by E. N. Hayes, ed. (1970), E. R. Leach (1970), O. Paz (tr. 1970), H. Gardner (1972), and C. Geertz (1988).

Lévi-Strauss, Claude

Claude Lévi-Strauss.

(credit: AP)

(born Nov. 28, 1908, Brussels, Belg.) Belgian-French social anthropologist and leading exponent of structuralism. Lévi-Strauss originally studied philosophy at the University of Paris (1927–32) but went on to teach sociology at the University of São Paulo (1934–37) and to conduct field research on the Indians of Brazil. At the New School for Social Research in New York City (1941–45) he came under the influence of the linguist Roman Jakobson; he came to view culture as a system of communication, analogous to a language, and constructed models based on structural linguistics, information theory, and cybernetics to interpret them. He attempted to identify universal structures of the mind as reflected in myths, cultural symbols, and social organization. From 1950 to 1974 he was director of studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and in 1959 he joined the faculty of the Collège de France. Among his major works are The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), Tristes tropiques (1955), Structural Anthropology (1961, vol. 2, 1973), and the four-volume Mythologiques (1964–71).