Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss (28th November 1908 - 30th October 2009) was a French anthropologist who applied the theory of structuralism 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 Les structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949; revised edition 1967), a book on the elementary forms of kinship and in essays later collected in three volumes of Anthropologie structurale (Vol. 1, 1958; translated into English in 1968).

Lévi-Strauss studied law at the Faculté du droit de Paris and then philosophy at the Sorbonne. He received his agrégation in 1931 and taught at the lycées in Mont-de-Marsan and in Laon. From 1935 to 1938 he was professor of sociology at the University of Sāo Paolo in Brazil. In 1958 he published a popular book, Tristes Tropiques, about the expeditions to central Brazil at the time and especially in 1939, after he had left the university. Back in France he was mobilized as a soldier. After the French defeat and German victory, he was able to leave France for New York in 1941, where he taught at the New School for Social Research from 1942 to 1945. From 1945 to 1948 he was the cultural attaché at the French embassy. He returned to France in 1948 and in 1949 obtained his doctorate in philosophy with his work on kinship theory. He then was a sous-directeur at the musée de l'Homme. From 1950 on he was at the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes, teaching comparative religion of people without writing. He is later made Director of Studies. He leaves the ecole in 1974. From 1959 to 1982 he is the Chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France. In 1973 he was made a member of the Acádemie française, the official authority on the French language.