Claude Levi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss (/klɔːd ˈleɪvi ˈstraʊs/ klawd LAY-vee STROWSS, French: [klod levi stʁos]; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology. He held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France between 1959 and 1982, was elected a member of the Académie française in 1973 and was a member of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He received numerous honors from universities and institutions throughout the world.

Lévi-Strauss 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 (1955) that established his position as one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought. As well as sociology, his ideas reached into many fields in the humanities, including philosophy. Structuralism has been defined as "the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity." He won the 1986 International Nonino Prize in Italy.

Biography

Early life and education

Gustave Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in 1908 to French-Jewish (turned agnostic) parents who were living in Brussels at the time, where his father was working as a portrait painter. He grew up in Paris, living on a street of the upscale 16th arrondissement named after the artist Claude Lorrain, whose work he admired and later wrote about. During the First World War, from age 6 to 10, he lived with his maternal grandfather, who was the Rabbi of Versailles. Despite his religious environment early on, Claude Lévi-Strauss was an atheist or agnostic, at least in his adult life.

From 1918 to 1925 he studied at Lycée Janson de Sailly high school, receiving a baccalaureate in June 1925 (age of 16). In his last year (1924), he was introduced to philosophy, including the works of Marx and Kant, and began shifting to the political left (however, unlike many other socialists, he never became communist). From 1925, he spent the next two years at the prestigious Lycée Condorcet preparing for the entrance exam to the highly selective École normale supérieure. However, for reasons that are not entirely clear, he decided not to take the exam. In 1926, he went to Sorbonne in Paris, studying law and philosophy, as well as engaging in socialist politics and activism. In 1929, he opted for philosophy over law (which he found boring), and from 1930 to 1931, put politics aside to focus on preparing for the agrégation in philosophy, in order to qualify as a professor. In 1931, he passed the agrégation, coming in 3rd place, and youngest in his class at age 22. By this time, the Great Depression had hit France, and Lévi-Strauss found himself needing to provide not only for himself, but his parents as well.

Early career

In 1935, after a few years of secondary-school teaching, he took up a last-minute offer to be part of a French cultural mission to Brazil in which he would serve as a visiting professor of sociology at the University of São Paulo while his then wife, Dina, served as a visiting professor of ethnology.

The couple lived and did their anthropological work in Brazil from 1935 to 1939. During this time, while he was a visiting professor of sociology, Claude undertook his only ethnographic fieldwork. He accompanied Dina, a trained ethnographer in her own right, who was also a visiting professor at the University of São Paulo, where they conducted research forays into the Mato Grosso and the Amazon Rainforest. 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 half-year-long expedition to study the Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib societies. At this time, his wife had an eye infection that prevented her from completing the study, which he concluded. This experience cemented Lévi-Strauss's professional identity as an anthropologist. Edmund Leach suggests, from Lévi-Strauss's own accounts in Tristes Tropiques, that he could not have spent more than a few weeks in any one place and was never able to converse easily with any of his native informants in their native language, which is uncharacteristic of anthropological research methods of participatory interaction with subjects to gain a full understanding of a culture.

In the 1980s, he discussed why he became vegetarian in pieces published in Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica and other publications anthologized in the posthumous book Nous sommes tous des cannibales (2013):

A day will come when the thought that to feed themselves, men of the past raised and massacred living beings and complacently exposed their shredded flesh in displays shall no doubt inspire the same repulsion as that of the travelers of the 16th and 17th century facing cannibal meals of savage American primitives in America, Oceania, Asia or Africa.

Expatriation

Lévi-Strauss returned to France in 1939 to take part in the war effort and was assigned as a liaison agent to the Maginot Line. After the French capitulation in 1940, he was employed at a lycée in Montpellier, but then was dismissed under the Vichy racial laws (Lévi-Strauss's family, originally from Alsace, was of Jewish ancestry). By the same laws, he was denaturalized, of his French citizenship and forced to escape persecution.

Around that time, he and his first wife separated. She stayed behind and worked in the French resistance, while he managed to escape Vichy France by boat to Martinique, from where he was finally able to continue traveling. (Victor Serge describes conversations with Lévi-Strauss aboard the freighter Capitaine Paul-Lemerle from Marseilles to Martinique in his Notebooks.).

In 1941, he was offered a position at the New School for Social Research in New York City and granted admission to the United States. A series of voyages brought him, via South America, to Puerto Rico, where he was investigated by the FBI after German letters in his luggage aroused the suspicions of customs agents. Lévi-Strauss spent most of the war in New York City. Along with Jacques Maritain, Henri Focillon, and Roman Jakobson, he was a founding member of the École Libre des Hautes Études, a sort of university-in-exile for French academics.

The war years in New York were formative for Lévi-Strauss in several ways. His relationship with Jakobson helped shape his theoretical outlook (Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss are considered to be two of the central figures on which structuralist thought is based). In addition, Lévi-Strauss was also exposed to the American anthropology espoused by Franz Boas, who taught at Columbia University. In 1942, while having dinner at the Faculty House at Columbia, Boas died in Lévi-Strauss's arms. This intimate association with Boas gave his early work a distinctive American inclination that helped facilitate its acceptance in the U.S.

After a brief stint from 1946 to 1947 as a cultural attaché to the French embassy in Washington, DC, Lévi-Strauss returned to Paris in 1948. At this time, he received his state doctorate from the Sorbonne by submitting, in the French tradition, both a "major" and a "minor" doctoral thesis. These were La vie familiale et sociale des indiens Nambikwara (The Family and Social Life of the Nambikwara Indians) and Les structures élémentaires de la parenté (The Elementary Structures of Kinship).

Later life and death

In 2008, he became the first member of the Académie française to reach the age of 100 and one of the few living authors to have his works published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. On the death of Maurice Druon on 14 April 2009, he became the Dean of the Académie, its longest-serving member.

He died on 30 October 2009, a few weeks before his 101st birthday. The death was announced four days later.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy described him as "one of the greatest ethnologists of all time". Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister, said Lévi-Strauss "broke with an ethnocentric vision of history and humanity ... At a time when we are trying to give meaning to globalization, to build a fairer and more humane world, I would like Claude Lévi-Strauss's universal echo to resonate more strongly". In a similar vein, a statement by Lévi-Strauss was broadcast on National Public Radio in the remembrance produced by All Things Considered on 3 November 2009: "There is today a frightful disappearance of living species, be they plants or animals. And it's clear that the density of human beings has become so great, if I can say so, that they have begun to poison themselves. And the world which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world that I like." The Daily Telegraph said in its obituary that Lévi-Strauss was "one of the dominating postwar influences in French intellectual life and the leading exponent of Structuralism in the social sciences". Permanent secretary of the Académie française Hélène Carrère d'Encausse said: "He was a thinker, a philosopher.... We will not find another like him".

Personal life

He married Dina Dreyfus in 1932. They later divorced.

He was then to married Rose Marie Ullmo from 1946 to 1954. They had one son, Laurent.

His third and last wife was Monique Roman; they were married in 1954. They had one son, Matthieu.

Works

• 1926. Gracchus Babeuf et le communisme. L'églantine.
• 1948. La Vie familiale et sociale des Indiens Nambikwara. Paris: Société des Américanistes.
• 1949. Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté
  • The Elementary Structures of Kinship, translated by J. H. Bell, J. R. von Sturmer, and R. Needham. 1969.
• 1952. Race et histoire, (as part of the series The Race Question in Modern Science). UNESCO.
• 1955. "The Structural Study of Myth." Journal of American Folklore 68(270):428–44.
• 1955. Tristes Tropiques ['Sad Tropics'],
  • A World on the Wane, translated by J. Weightman and D. Weightman. 1973.
• 1958. Anthropologie structurale
  • Structural Anthropology, translated by C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf. 1963.
• 1962. Le Totemisme aujourdhui
  • Totemism, translated by R. Needham. 1963.
• 1962. La Pensée sauvage
  • The Savage Mind. 1966.
• 1964–1971. Mythologiques I–IV, translated by J. Weightman and D. Weightman.
  • 1964. Le Cru et le cuit (The Raw and the Cooked, 1969)
  • 1966. Du miel aux cendres (From Honey to Ashes, 1973)
  • 1968. L'Origine des manières de table (The Origin of Table Manners, 1978)
  • 1971. L'Homme nu (The Naked Man, 1981)
• 1973. Anthropologie structurale deux
  • Structural Anthropology, Vol. II, translated by M. Layton. 1976
• 1972. La Voie des masques
  • The Way of the Masks, translated by S. Modelski, 1982.
• Lévi-Strauss, Claude (2005), Myth and Meaning, First published 1978 by Routledge & Kegan Paul, U.K, Taylor & Francis Group, ISBN 0-415-25548-1, retrieved 5 November 2010
• 1978. Myth and Meaning. UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• 1983. Le Regard éloigné
  • The View from Afar, translated by J. Neugroschel and P. Hoss. 1985.
• 1984. Paroles donnés
  • Anthropology and Myth: Lectures, 1951–1982, translated by R. Willis. 1987.
• 1985. La Potière jalouse
  • The Jealous Potter, translated by B. Chorier. 1988.
• 1991. Histoire de Lynx
  • The Story of Lynx, translated by C. Tihanyi. 1996.
• 1993. Regarder, écouter, lire
  • Look, Listen, Read, translated by B. Singer. 1997.
• 1994. Saudades do Brasil. Paris: Plon.
• 1994. Le Père Noël supplicié. Pin-Balma: Sables Éditions.
• 2011. L'Anthropologie face aux problèmes du monde moderne. Paris: Seuil.
• 2011. L'Autre face de la lune, Paris: Seuil.

• 1978. "Comment travaillent les écrivains," interviewed by Jean-Louis de Rambures. Paris.
• 1988. "De près et de loin," interviewed by Didier Eribon (Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, trans. Paula Wissing, 1991)
• 2005. "Loin du Brésil," interviewed by Véronique Mortaigne, Paris, Chandeigne.