Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss, born in 1908, Belgian-born French anthropologist and leading proponent of the structural approach to social anthropology. His work supports the theory that the various human cultures and their language patterns, myths, and behaviors are part of a common framework (or structure) underlying all human life.

Claude Gustave Lévi-Strauss was born in Brussels, Belgium, and raised in France. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris in the late 1920s and early 1930s. From 1935 to 1939, while working as a professor of sociology at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, Lévi-Strauss studied that country’s native tribes. He taught at the New School for Social Research in New York City from 1942 to 1945.

Lévi-Strauss was named associate director of the Musée de l'Homme in Paris in 1949, and then director of studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études a year later. In 1959 he became a professor of social anthropology at the Collège de France.

Lévi-Strauss’s major works include his intellectual autobiography, Tristes tropiques (1955); Anthropologie structurale (1958; translated as Structural Anthropology, 1963); La Pensée sauvage (1962; The Savage Mind, 1966); Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (Elementary Structures of Kinship, 1969); his master work, a four-volume study of cultural beliefs titled Mythologiques (Mythologies) that was published between 1964 and 1971 (translated, 1969 to 1981); and La Potière jalouse (1985; The Jealous Potter, 1988).