Claude Lévi-Strauss

Published on Wednesday 4 November 2009 20:05

Anthropologist

Born: 28 November, 1908, in Brussels.

Died: 30 October, 2009, in Paris, aged 100.

CLAUDE Lvi-Strauss, a French anthropologist who transformed western understanding of what was once called "primitive man", towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and 1970s.

A powerful thinker, he was a profound influence even on his critics, and there were many. His writing, a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, resembles little that had come before in anthropology.

A descendant of a distinguished French-Jewish artistic family, Lvi-Strauss was a quintessential French intellectual, as comfortable in the public sphere as in the academy. He taught at universities in Paris, New York and So Paulo and worked for the United Nations and the French government.

His legacy is imposing. Mythologiques, his four-volume work about the structure of native mythology in the Americas, attempts nothing less than an interpretation of the world of culture and custom, shaped by analysis of myths of little-known tribes and traditions. The volumes – The Raw and the Cooked, From Honey to Ashes, The Origin of Table Manners and The Naked Man, published between 1964 and 1971, challenge the reader with their interweaving of theme and detail.

He might contrast imagery of monkeys and jaguars; consider the differences in meaning of roasted and boiled food (cannibals, he suggested, tended to boil their friends and roast their enemies); and establish connections between weird mythological tales and ornate laws of marriage and kinship.

Many of his books include diagrams that look like maps of interstellar geometry, formulas that evoke mathematical techniques, and black-and-white photographs of scarified faces and exotic ritual.

His interpretations of North and South American myths were pivotal in changing western thinking about so-called primitive societies. He began challenging conventional wisdom shortly after starting his anthropological research in the 1930s – an experience that became the basis of an acclaimed 1955 book, Tristes Tropiques.

The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and irrational, basing their approaches to life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food, clothing and shelter.

Lvi-Strauss rescued his subjects from this limited perspective. Beginning with the Caduveo and Bororo tribes in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, he found among them a dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins, a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths, and an implicit sense of order and design.

His work elevated the status of "the savage mind", a phrase that became the English title of one of his most forceful surveys, La Pense Sauvage (1962).

He worried about the growth of a "mass civilisation" and of a modern "monoculture" and sometimes expressed exasperated self-disgust with the West. In this seeming elevation of the savage mind and denigration of western modernity, he was writing within the tradition of French Romanticism inspired by the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom Lvi-Strauss revered.

But such simplified romanticism was also a distortion of his ideas. For Lvi-Strauss, the savage was not intrinsically noble or in any way "closer to nature". He was withering, for example, when describing the Caduveo, whom he portrayed as a tribe so in rebellion against nature – and thus doomed – that it even shunned procreation, choosing to "reproduce" by abducting children from enemy tribes.

He rejected Rousseau's idea that humankind's problems derived from society's distortions of nature. In his view, there was no alternative to such distortions. Each society must shape itself out of nature's raw material, he believed, with law and reason as the tools.

This application of reason, he argued, created universals that could be found across all cultures and times. He became known as a structuralist because of his conviction that a structural unity underlay all of humanity's mythmaking, and he showed how those universal motifs played out in societies, even in the ways a village was laid out.

Anthropology had traditionally sought to disclose differences among cultures, preoccupied not with abstract ideas but with the particularities of ritual and custom. His approach cut against that notion. To his mind, as he wrote in The Raw and the Cooked, (1964), he had taken "ethnographic research in the direction of psychology, logic and philosophy".

Lvi-Strauss's ideas shook his field. But his critics were plentiful. They attacked him for ignoring history and geography, using myths from one place and time to help illuminate myths from another, without demonstrating any direct connection or influence.

In an influential critical survey of his work in 1970, the Cambridge University anthropologist Edmund Leach wrote: "Even now, despite his immense prestige, critics among his professional colleagues greatly outnumber disciples."

Lvi-Strauss conceded his strength was in his interpretations of what he discovered, and thought his critics did not sufficiently credit the cumulative impact of those speculations.

Claude Lvi-Strauss grew up near Versailles, where his grandfather was a rabbi and his father a portrait painter. As a child, he loved to collect disparate objects and juxtapose them.

From 1927 to 1932 he obtained degrees in law and philosophy at the University of Paris, then taught in a local high school, the Lyce Janson de Sailly, where his fellow teachers included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He later became a professor of sociology at the French-founded University of So Paulo in Brazil.

Determined to become an anthropologist, he began making trips into the country's interior, accompanied by his wife, Dina Dreyfus, whom he married in 1932.

He left teaching in 1937 and devoted himself to fieldwork, returning to France in 1939 for further study. But on the eve of war, he was drafted into the French army. In Tristes Tropiques he writes of his "disorderly retreat" from the Maginot Line after Hitler's invasion of France.

In 1941, he was invited to become a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research in New York. He called it "the most fruitful period of my life".

He also became part of a circle of artists and Surrealists, including Max Ernst and Andr Breton.

After the war, Lvi-Strauss was given the position of cultural attach by the French government until 1947. On his return to France, he earned a doctorate from the University of Paris in 1948 and was associate curator at the Muse de l'Homme in 1948 and 1949. His first major book, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, was published in 1949.

He became the director of studies at the cole Pratique des Hautes tudes in Paris, remaining in the post from 1950 to 1974.

From 1953 to 1960, he served as secretary general of the International Social Science Council at Unesco. In 1959, he was appointed professor at the Collge de France. He was elected to the French Academy in 1973.

Lvi-Strauss's marriage to Ms Dreyfus ended in divorce, as did a subsequent marriage, in 1946, to Rose-Marie Ullmo, with whom he had a son. In 1954 he married Monique Roman, and they, too, had a son. He is survived by his wife, two sons and two grandchildren.