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Claude Levi-Strauss, French Anthropologist and author of Tristes Tropiques, dies at 100

Wed, 11/04/2009

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The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who introduced a structuralist and universalist approach to the study of anthropology has died, a month before he would have turned 101.

Levi-Strauss was born in 1908 in Belgium and grew up in France, in a French-Jewish family long involved in the arts. He began field work and teaching in the 1930s, primarily in Brazil. He was a visiting professor at the New School in New York in the 1940s and then returned to Paris, where he received his doctorate.

In 1955, Levi-Strauss published what many see as his most influential work, Tristes Tropiques. Levi-Strauss began the story of his anthropological work in Brazil and elsewhere by declaring: "I hate traveling and explorers." And indeed, many of his critics' largest problems with his structuralist approach to anthropology, which sought universal ideas in so-called primitive societies to show human commonalities, was that Levi-Strauss was not an explorer. He preferred study to fieldwork. Levi-Strauss searched for an underlying universal structure to humanity and believed that humans relied on opposites, such as cold vs. hot, to understand the world.

Tristes Tropiques was one man's look at humanity, his attempts and work to understand it. Much of anthropology has changed since the book was published 55 years ago and Levi-Strauss himself rejected the idea that he was the "father of structuralism". But regardless of labels, his influence on anthropology is undeniable and his works will continue to be read by those still trying to make sense of how people explain the world around them.

For more information on Claude Levi-Strauss's legacy, we refer you to the New York Times obituary, which has informed this blog post.

Tristes Tropiques