Happy 100th Birthday Claude Lévi-Strauss!

Posted by Tel Asiado Nov 28, 2008

This day, November 28 (1908), is 100th birthday of Claude Lévi-Strauss. He is a social anthropologist, educator and diplomat, a leading exponent of structuralism, and influential in social sciences and related disciplines.

Lévi-Strauss was born in Brussels, Belgium, but grew up in Paris. He studied philosophy and law. He taught at a college in Sao Paulo, Brazil. While in Brazil, he became interested with the Amazon rainforest, encountered indigenous people, and started his research on them. He realized he wanted to be an anthropologist.

He learmed to learn everything about various indigenous groups especially about their culture. He primarily wrote about them in his books:

• A World on the Wane (1961)
• The Savage Mind (1966).

Lévi-Strauss's way of thinking is referred to as structuralism in which he claims that everyone has the same capacity for intellectual thought with similar mental structures, and that basically, all people want to structure an orderly world. He also said that ritual, mythology and magic, are as important as science and literature, in terms of mental structures development.

He wrote many books, including Mythologiques, his epic four-volume study. He took one myth, followed it from from the southern tip of South America up through Central America, North America, and into the Arctic Circle. The books are published in English as follows:

• The Raw and the Cooked, 1969
• From Honey to Ashes, 1973
• The Origin of Table Manners, 1978
• The Naked Man, 1981

He still publishes occasional articles.