Claude Levi-Strauss

"The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he is one who asks the right questions."

Claude Levi-Strauss was an influential anthropologist and ethnologist who played a key role in the development in the theory of structuralism and structural anthropology. Throughout his career, he received numerous honors from universities across the globe. He was also sometimes referred to as "the father of modern anthropology" alongside greats like Franz Boaz and James George Frazer?.

Biography

Claude Levi-Strauss was born in Brussels, Belgium on November 28, 1908. At the University of Paris, he went on to study law and philosophy, graduating in 1932. He began to teach secondary school, then went on to teach sociology at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. While he was there he did research on the Indians of Brazil. He conducted research forays into the Mato Grosso and the Amazon Rainforest. Alongside his then-wife, ethnologist Dina, they first studied the Guaycuru and Bororó Indian tribes, staying among them for a few days. In 1938, they returned for a second, more than a half-year-long expedition to study the Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib societies. From 1941 to 1945 he was a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City. After a 5 year gap, his university presence resumed as the director of studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études at the University of Paris until 1974, and in 1959 he was appointed to the chair of social anthropology at the Collège de France. He later died on October 30, 2009, only a few weeks before his 101st birthday.

Theories

Levi-Strauss's structuralism was an attempt to minimize a large amount of information regarding cultural systems down to what he believed were the essentials. These essentials were the formal relationships among each cultural system's elements. Cultures, in his eyes, were simply systems of communication. Based on this belief, he constructed models that were based around linguistics, information theory, and cybernetics to help interpret these systems.

He sought to apply Ferdinand de Saussure's structural linguistics to anthropology. During that time, the fundamental object of analysis was a self-contained nuclear family unit. Extended family such as uncles, nephews, and grandparents was all viewed as secondary. However, Levi-Strauss argued that families acquire determinate identities only through relations with one another, in which he thus put the secondary family members first. He insisted on analyzing the relations between units instead of within the units themselves.

Levi-Strauss also identified myths as a type of speech through which a language could be discovered. This work is a structuralist theory of mythology. It attempted to explain how such fantastical and arbitrary tales could be so similar across various cultures. He didn't believe in a single authentic version of a myth, he believed they were manifestations of the same language. He sought to simplify the myth into it's most fundamental units, also known as the mytheme. By examining the mythemes in comparison to the myths themselves, he believed he'd discovered that a myth consists of juxtaposed binary oppositions. It was his belief that the human mind thinks fundamentally in these binary oppositions and their unification, and that these are what make meaning possible.

Works

"In 1949 Lévi-Strauss published his first major work, Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (rev. ed., 1967; The Elementary Structures of Kinship). He attained popular recognition with Tristes tropiques (1955; A World on the Wane), a literary intellectual autobiography. Other publications include Anthropologie structurale (rev. ed., 1961; Structural Anthropology), La Pensée sauvage (1962; The Savage Mind), and Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (1962; Totemism). His massive Mythologiques appeared in four volumes: Le Cru et le cuit (1964; The Raw and the Cooked), Du miel aux cendres (1966; From Honey to Ashes), L’Origine des manières de table (1968; The Origin of Table Manners), and L’Homme nu (1971; The Naked Man). In 1973 a second volume of Anthropologie structurale appeared. La Voie des masques, 2 vol. (1975; The Way of the Masks), analyzed the art, religion, and mythology of native American Northwest Coast Indians. In 1983 he published a collection of essays, Le Regard éloigné (The View from Afar)" (Britannica).

In total, Claude Lévi-Strauss published approximately 22 works.

Quotes

"Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing."

"I, therefore, claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact."

"The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him."

"Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe."

Honors

Influences

• Roman Jakobson?

• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel?

• Ferdinand de Saussure?

Learn More

Hénaff, Marcel (1998), Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Making of Structural Anthropology, Originally published 1991 as Claude Lévi-Strauss, translated by Baker), Mary, Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, ISBN 0-8166-2760-6

Pace, David (1983), Claude Levi-Strauss: The Bearer of Ashes, Boston, Massachusetts & London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ISBN 0-7100-9297-0

Taylor, Mark Kline (1986), Beyond Explanation: Religious Dimensions in Cultural Anthropology, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, ISBN 0-86554-165-5

Wilcken, Patrick (2011), Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory, London, UK: Bloomsbury, ISBN 978-0-7475-8362-2

Works Cited

Bloch, Maurice. “Claude Lévi-Strauss Obituary.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 3 Nov. 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/nov/03/claude-levi-strauss-obituary.

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Claude Lévi-Strauss.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., https://www.britannica.com/biography/Claude-Levi-Strauss.

“Claude Levi-Strauss.” Famous Scientists, https://www.famousscientists.org/claude-levi-strauss/.

“Claude Levi-Strauss Quotes.” BrainyQuote, Xplore, https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/claude-levi-strauss-quotes.

“Claude Lévi-Strauss.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 28 Aug. 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Lévi-Strauss.

Lewis, Elizabeth. “Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Influential Theory of Structuralism.” ThoughtCo, ThoughtCo, 10 Nov. 2018, https://www.thoughtco.com/claude-levi-strauss-life-theories-4174954.

Meaney, Thomas. “Library Man: On Claude Lévi-Strauss.” The Nation, 29 June 2015, https://www.thenation.com/article/library-man-claude-levi-strauss/.