Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss (28th November 1908 - 30th October 2009) was a French anthropologist who applied the theory of structuralism (in linguistics) to the study of human culture and society as structural anthropology. This involves study on the relationships between members of a family, rather than those family units themselves, as discussed in his 1968 work Structural Anthropology, volumes 1 and 2.

Lévi-Strauss studied at the University of Paris. He wrote a popular book Tristes Tropiques about the expeditions to central Brazil he made while working at the University of São Paolo in the 1930s. He was in New York in the 1940s. In France he was Director of Studies at the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes from 1950 and the Chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France. He was also made a member of the official authority on the French language, the Académie française.