Claude Lévi-Strauss: Difference between revisions

From Citizendium
Jump to navigation Jump to search
imported>John Stephenson
 
mNo edit summary
 
(14 intermediate revisions by 8 users not shown)
Line 1: Line 1:
:''This article is about the [[anthropologist]]. For the clothing manufacturer, see [[Levi Strauss]].''
{{subpages}}
[[Image:ClaudeLévi-Strauss.JPG|thumb|220px|Claude Lévi Strauss]]
'''Claude Lévi-Strauss''' (b. 28th November 1908, in Brussels, Belgium - d. 30th October 2009, in Paris, France) was a [[France|French]] [[anthropology|anthropologist]] from an established Jewish-French family<ref>His grandfather was a [[Rabbi]], at [[Versailles]], but his father, a portrait painter was ruined, it is said, by photography</ref>, who applied [[Structuralism|structuralist]] [[linguistics]] to [[anthropology|the study of human]] [[culture]] and [[society]] and called this new method ''[[structural anthropology]]''<ref>See his important essay ''L'analyse structurale en linguistique et en anthropologie''. In: ''Word; Journal of the Linguistic Circle of New York'', Vol. 1, No. 2, 1945.</ref> 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).
'''Claude Lévi-Strauss''' ([[International Phonetic Alphabet|IPA pronunciation]] {{IPA|[klod levi stʁos]}}) born [[November 28]], [[1908]], is a [[France|French]] [[anthropologist]] who developed [[structuralism]] as a method of understanding human [[society]] and [[culture]]. His works have largely crossed through his anthropologist field, with structuralism becoming one of the main intellectual French movements from the late 1950s until the early 1980s. Lévi-Strauss is discussed by authors as different as [[Michel Foucault]], [[Gilles Deleuze]], [[Jacques Derrida]], [[Jacques Lacan]], [[Judith Butler]], etc.


==Biography==
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 1955 he published a popular book, ''Tristes Tropiques'', about his expeditions in Central Brazil at the time. Back in France he was mobilized as a soldier (1939/'40). After French defeat and German victory, he had to move to the South of France. In 1941 Lévy-Strauss was able to leave France for New York, where he taught at the [[New School for Social Research]] from 1942 to 1945. In 1946 and 1947 he was the cultural attaché at the French embassy in Washington, DC. He returned to France in 1948 and in 1949 obtained his doctorate in philosophy from the Sorbonne with two theses on kinship, ''La vie familiale et sociale des Indiens Nambikwara'' (1948) and ''Les structures élémentaires de la parenté'' (1949)He was made sous-directeur at the Musée de l'Homme. From 1950 until 1974 he was at section five of the [[Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes]], where he eventually succeeded [[Marcel Mauss]] as head of ''Religious Sciences''. Lévi-Strauss called his chair ''Comparative Religion of Non-Literate Peoples''. From 1959 to 1982 he also was the chair of [[social anthropology]] at the [[Collège de France]]. In 1973 he was appointed to the [[Acádemie française]], the official authority on the [[French language]].
Claude Lévi-Strauss is an anthropologist best known for his development of [[structural anthropology]]. He was born in [[Brussels]] and studied [[law]] and [[philosophy]] at the [[University of Paris|Sorbonne]] in [[Paris]]. He did not pursue his study of law, but [[agrégation|agrégated]] in philosophy in 1931After a few years of teaching secondary school, in 1935 he took up a last-minute offer to be part of a French cultural mission to [[Brazil]] in which he would serve as a visiting professor at the [[University of São Paulo]].  


Lévi-Strauss lived in Brazil from [[1935]] to [[1939]].  It was during this time that he held out his first ethnographic fieldwork, conducting periodic research forays into [[Mato Grosso]] and the [[Amazon Rainforest]].  He studied first the [[Guaycuru]] and [[Bororo people|Bororo]] [[Indigenous people of Brazil|Indian tribes]], actually living among them for a while. Several years later, he came back again in a second, year-long expedition to study the [[Nambikwara]] and [[Tupi-Kawahib]] societies. It was this experience that cemented Lévi-Strauss's professional identity as an anthropologist.
==Footnotes==
 
{{reflist|2}}[[Category:Suggestion Bot Tag]]
He returned to France in [[1939]] to take part in the war effort, but after French capitulation to the Germans, Lévi-Strauss, a Jew, fled Paris.  While there, Lévi-Strauss was offered a position in New York and granted admission to the United States, but still had to find a way to flee the increasingly precarious situation in France.  After a series of attempts to obtain passage, Lévi-Strauss found a captain he had known on previous voyages and secured a space on a ship voyaging to South America.  A series of voyages eventually brought Lévi-Strauss to Puerto Rico where he had to undergo one final investigation by the FBI after customs agents grew suspicious of German letters in his luggage.  After satisfying suspicious government agents, Lévi Strauss spent most of the war in [[New York City]].  Like many other intellectual emigrés, he taught at the [[New School for Social Research]].  Along with [[Jacques Maritain]], [[Henri Focillon]] and [[Roman Jakobson]], he was a founding member of the [[École Libre des Hautes Études]], a sort of university-in-exile for French academics.
 
The war years in New York were formative for Lévi Strauss in several ways.  His relationship with Jakobson helped shape his theoretical outlook (Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss are considered to be two of the central figures on which [[structuralism| structuralist]] thought is based).  In addition, Lévi-Strauss was also exposed to the American [[anthropology]] espoused by [[Franz Boas]], who taught at [[Columbia University]] on New York's [[Upper West Side]].  This gave his early work a distinctive American tilt that helped facilitate its acceptance in the U.S.  After a brief stint from [[1946]] to [[1947]] as a cultural attaché to the French embassy in [[Washington, DC]], Lévi Strauss returned to Paris in [[1948]].  It was at this time that he received his [[doctorate]] from the [[Collège de Sorbonne|Sorbonne]] by submitting, in the French tradition, both a "major" and a "minor" thesis. These were ''The Family and Social Life of the Nambikwara Indians'' and ''The Elementary Structures of Kinship''.
 
''The Elementary Structures of Kinship'' was published the next year and instantly came to be regarded as one of the most important works of anthropological [[kinship]] to be published and was even reviewed favorably by [[Simone de Beauvoir]], who viewed it as an important statement of the position of women in non-western cultures.  A play on the title of [[Émile Durkheim]]'s famous ''Elementary Forms of the Religious Life'', ''Elementary Structures'' re-examined how people organized their families by examining the logical structures that underlay relationships rather than their contents.  While British anthropologists such as [[Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown]] argued that kinship was based on ''descent'' from a common ancestor, Lévi Strauss argued that kinship was based on the ''alliance'' between two families that formed when women from one group married men from the other.
 
Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lévi Strauss continued to publish and experienced considerable professional success.  On his return to France, he became involved with the administration of the [[CNRS]] and the [[Musée de l'Homme]] before finally becoming chair of fifth section of the [[École Pratique des Hautes Études]], the 'Religious Sciences' section previously chaired by [[Marcel Mauss]], which he renamed "Comparative Religion of Non-Literate Peoples".
 
While Lévi Strauss was well-known in academic circles, it was in 1955 that he became one of France's best known intellectuals by publishing ''Tristes Tropiques''.  This book was essentially a travel novel detailing his time as a French expatriate throughout the 1930s.  But Lévi Strauss combined exquisitely beautiful prose, dazzling philosophical meditation, and ethnographic analysis of Amazonian peoples to produce a masterpiece.  The organizers of the [[Prix Goncourt]], for instance, lamented that they were not able to award Lévi Strauss the prize because ''Tristes Tropiques'' was technically non-fiction.
 
Lévi Strauss was named to a chair in Social Anthropology at the [[Collège de France]] in 1959.  At roughly the same time he published ''Structural Anthropology'', a collection of his essays which provided both examples and programmatic statements about [[structuralism]].  At the same time as he was laying the groundwork for an intellectual program, he began a series of institutions for establishing anthropology as a discipline in France, including the Laboratory for Social Anthropology where new students could be trained, and a new journal, ''l'Homme'', for publishing the results of their research.
 
In 1962 Lévi Strauss published what is for many people his most important work, ''La Pensée Sauvage''. The title is a pun untranslatable in English &mdash; in English the book is known as ''The Savage Mind'', but this title fails to capture the other possible French meaning of 'Wild [[Pansy| Pansies]]'. In French pensée means both 'thought' and 'pansy,' the flower, while sauvage means 'wild' as well as 'savage' or 'primitive'. The book concerns primitive thought, forms of thought we all use. (Lévi Strauss suggested the English title be ''Pansies for Thought'', riffing off of a speech by [[Ophelia (character)|Ophelia]] in [[Hamlet]].)  The French edition to this day retains a flower on the cover.
 
The first half of the book lays out Lévi Strauss's [[culture theory|theory of culture]] and mind, while the second half expands this account into a theory of history and social change.  This part of the book engaged Lévi Strauss in a heated debate with [[Jean-Paul Sartre]] over the nature of human freedom.  On the one hand, Sartre's [[existentialism| existentialist]] philosophy committed him to a position that human beings were fundamentally free to act as they pleased.  On the other hand, Sartre was also a leftist who was committed to the idea that, for instance, individuals were constrained by the ideologies imposed on them by the powerful.  Lévi Strauss presented his structuralist notion of agency in opposition to Sartre.  Echoes of this debate between [[structuralism]] and [[existentialism]] would eventually inspire the work of younger authors such as [[Pierre Bourdieu]].
 
Now a world-wide celebrity, Lévi Strauss spent the second half of the 1960s working on his master project, a four-volume study called ''Mythologiques''.  In it, Lévi Strauss took a single myth from the tip of [[South America]] and followed all of its variations from group to group up through [[Central America]] and eventually into the [[Arctic circle]], thus tracing the myth's spread from one end of the American continent to the other.  He accomplished this in a typically structuralist way, examining the underlying structure of relationships between the elements of the story rather than by focusing on the content of the story itself.  While ''Pensée Sauvage'' was a statement of Lévi Strauss's big-picture theory, ''Mythologiques'' was an extended, four-volume example of analysis.  Richly detailed and extremely long, it is less widely read than the much shorter and more accessible ''Pensée Sauvage'' despite its position as Lévi Strauss's master work.
 
After completing the final volume of ''Mythologique'' in 1971 Lévi Strauss was elected to the [[Académie Française]] in 1973, France's highest honor for an intellectual.  He is also a member of other notable [[Academy|Academies]] worldwide, including the [[American Academy of Arts and Letters]].  He also received the [[Erasmus Prize]] in 1973.  In 2003 he received the [[Meister-Eckhart-Prize]] for Philosophy.  He has received several honorary doctorates from universities such as [[University_of_Oxford|Oxford]], [[Harvard]], and [[Columbia_University|Columbia]].  He is also a recipient of the [[Grand-croix de la Légion d'honneur]], and is a [[Commandeur de l'ordre national du Mérite]] and [[Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres]].  Although retired, he continues to publish occasional meditations on art, music and poetry.
 
==Anthropological theories==
Lévi Strauss' theories are set forth in ''Structural Anthropology'' ([[1958]]). Briefly, he considers culture a system of symbolic communication, to be investigated with methods that others have used more narrowly in the discussion of novels, political speeches, sports, and movies.
 
His reasoning makes best sense against the background of an earlier generation's social theory. He wrote about this relationship for decades.
 
A preference for "functionalist" explanations dominated the social sciences from the turn of the century through the [[1950s]], which is to say that anthropologists and sociologists tried to state what a social act or institution was for. The existence of a thing was explained if it fulfilled a function. The only strong alternative to that kind of analysis was historical explanation, accounting for the existence of a social fact by saying how it came to be.
 
However, the idea of social function developed in two different ways. The English anthropologist [[Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown]], who had read and admired the work of the French sociologist [[Émile Durkheim]], argued that the goal of anthropological research was to find the collective function, what a religious creed or a set of rules about marriage did for the social order as a whole. At back of this approach was an old idea, the view that civilization developed through a series of phases from the primitive to the modern, everywhere the same. All of the activities in a given kind of society would partake of the same character; some sort of internal logic would cause one level of culture to evolve into the next. On this view, a society can easily be thought of as an organism, the parts functioning together like parts of a body.
 
The more influential functionalism of [[Bronislaw Malinowski]] described the satisfaction of individual needs, what a person got out of participating in a custom.
 
In the United States, where the shape of anthropology was set by the German-educated [[Franz Boas]], the preference was for historical accounts. This approach had obvious problems, which Lévi Strauss praises Boas for facing squarely.
 
Historical information is seldom available for non-literate cultures. The anthropologist fills in with comparisons to other cultures and is forced to rely on theories that have no evidential basis whatever, the old notion of universal stages of development or the claim that cultural resemblances are based on some untraced past contact between groups. Boas came to believe that no overall pattern in social development could be proven; for him, there was no history, only histories.
 
There are three broad choices involved in the divergence of these schools &ndash; each had to decide what kind of evidence to use; whether to emphasize the particulars of a single culture or look for patterns underlying all societies; and what the source of any underlying patterns might be, the definition of a common humanity.
 
Social scientists in all traditions relied on cross-cultural studies. It was always necessary to supplement information about a society with information about others. So some idea of a common human nature was implicit in each approach.
 
The critical distinction, then, remained: does a social fact exist because it is functional for the social order or because it is functional for the person? Do uniformities across cultures occur because of organizational needs that must be met everywhere or because of the uniform needs of human personality?
 
For Lévi Strauss, the choice was for the demands of the social order. He had no difficulty bringing out the inconsistencies and triviality of individualistic accounts. Malinowski said, for example, that magic beliefs come into being when people need to feel a sense of control over events where the outcome was uncertain. In the [[Trobriand Islands]], he found the proof of this claim in the rites surrounding abortions and weaving skirts. But in the same tribes, there is no magic attached to making clay pots even though it is no more certain a business than weaving. So the explanation is not consistent. Furthermore, these explanations tend to be used in an ad hoc, superficial way &ndash; you just postulate a trait of personality when you need it.
 
But the accepted way of discussing organizational function didn't work either. Different societies might have institutions that were similar in many obvious ways and yet served different functions. Many tribal cultures divide the tribe into two groups and have elaborate rules about how the two groups can interact. But exactly what they can do &ndash; trade, intermarry &ndash; is different in different tribes; for that matter, so are the criteria for distinguishing the groups.
 
Nor will it do to say that dividing-in-two is a universal need of organizations, because there are a lot of tribes that thrive without it.
 
For Lévi Strauss, the methods of [[linguistics]] became a model for all his earlier examinations of society. His analogies are usually from [[phonology]] (though also later from music, mathematics, [[chaos theory]], [[cybernetics]] and so on).
 
"A truly scientific analysis must be real, simplifying, and explanatory," he says (in ''Structural Anthropology''). Phonemic analysis reveals features that are real, in the sense that users of the language can recognize and respond to them. At the same time, a phoneme is an abstraction from language &ndash; not a sound, but a category of sound defined by the way it is distinguished from other categories through rules unique to the language. The entire sound-structure of a language can be generated from a relatively small number of rules.
 
In the study of the kinship systems that first concerned him, this ideal of explanation allowed a comprehensive organization of data that had been partly ordered by other researchers. The overall goal was to find out why family relations differed in different South American cultures. The father might have great authority over the son in one group, for example, with the relationship rigidly restricted by taboos. In another group, the mother's brother would have that kind of relationship with the son, while the father's relationship was relaxed and playful.
 
A number of partial patterns had been noted. Relations between the mother and father, for example, had some sort of reciprocity with those of father and son &ndash; if the mother had a dominant social status and was formal with the father, for example, then the father usually had close relations with the son. But these smaller patterns joined together in inconsistent ways.
 
One possible way of finding a master order was to rate all the positions in a kinship system along several dimensions. For example, the father was older than the son, the father produced the son, the father had the same sex as the son, and so on; the matrilineal uncle was older and of the same sex but did not produce the son, and so on. An exhaustive collection of such observations might cause an overall pattern to emerge.
 
But for Lévi Strauss, this kind of work was "analytical in appearance only." It results in a chart that is far harder to understand than the original data and is based on arbitrary abstractions (empirically, fathers are older than sons, but it is only the researcher who declares that this feature explains their relations). Furthermore, it doesn't explain anything. The explanation it offers is tautological &ndash; if age is crucial, then age explains a relationship. And it does not offer the possibility of inferring the origins of the structure.
 
A proper solution to the puzzle is to find a basic unit of kinship which can explain all the variations. It is a cluster of four roles--brother, sister, father, son. These are the roles that must be involved in any society that has an incest taboo requiring a man to obtain a wife from some man outside his own hereditary line. A brother can give away his sister, for example, whose son might reciprocate in the next generation by allowing his own sister to marry exogenously. The underlying demand is a continued circulation of women to keep various clans peacefully related.
 
Right or wrong, this solution displays the qualities of structural thinking. Even though Lévi Strauss frequently speaks of treating culture as the product of the axioms and corollaries that underlie it, or the phonemic differences that constitute it, he is concerned with the objective data of field research. He notes that it is logically possible for a different atom of kinship structure to exist &ndash; sister, sister's brother, brother's wife, daughter &ndash; but there are no real-world examples of relationships that can be derived from that grouping.
 
The purpose of structuralist explanation is to organize real data in the simplest effective way. All science, he says, is either structuralist or reductionist. In confronting such matters as the incest taboo, one is facing an objective limit of what the human mind has so far accepted. One could hypothesize some biological imperative underlying it, but so far as social order is concerned, the taboo has the effect of an irreducible fact. The social scientist can only work with the structures of human thought that arise from it.
 
And structural explanations can be tested and refuted. A mere analytic scheme that wishes causal relations into existence is not structuralist in this sense.
 
Lévi Strauss' later works are more controversial, in part because they impinge on the subject matter of other scholars. He believed that modern life and all history was founded on the same categories and transformations that he had discovered in the Brazilian back country &ndash; ''[[The Raw and the Cooked]], [[From Honey to Ashes]], [[The Naked Man]]'' (to borrow some titles from the ''Mythologies''). For instance he compares anthropology to musical [[serialism]] and defends his "philosophical" approach. He also pointed out that the modern view of primitive cultures was simplistic in denying them a history. The categories of myth did not persist among them because nothing had happened &ndash; it was easy to find the evidence of defeat, [[Migration (human)|migration]], exile, repeated displacements of all the kinds known to recorded history. Instead, the mythic categories had encompassed these changes.
 
He argued for a view of human life as existing in two timelines simultaneously, the eventful one of history and the long cycles in which one set of fundamental mythic patterns dominates and then perhaps another. In this respect, his work resembles that of [[Fernand Braudel]], the [[historian]] of the Mediterranean and 'la longue durée,' the cultural outlook and forms of social organization that persisted for centuries around that sea.
 
== Selected bibliography ==
*''Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté'' (1949, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, ed. *Rodney Needham, trans. J. H. Bell, J. R. von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham, 1969)
*''Race et histoire'' (1952, [[UNESCO]]; Race and History)
*''Tristes tropiques'' (1955, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman, 1973) - also translated as ''A World on the Wane''
*''Anthropologie structurale'' (1958, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, 1963)
*''Le Totemisme aujourdhui'' (1962, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham, 1963)
*''La Pensée sauvage'' (1962, The Savage Mind, 1966)
*''Mythologiques I-IV'' (trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman
**''Le Cru et le cuit'' (1964, The Raw and the Cooked, 1969)
**''Du miel aux cendres'' (1966, From Honey to Ashes, 1973)
**''L'Origine des manières de table'', 1968, The Origin of Table Manners, 1978
**''L'Homme nu'' (1971, The Naked Man, 1981)
*''Anthropologie structurale deux'' (1973, Structural Anthropology, Vol. II, trans. M. Layton, 1976)
*''La Voie des masques'' (1972, The Way of the Masks, trans. Sylvia Modelski, 1982)
*''Paroles donnés'' (1984, Anthropology and Myth: Lectures, 1951-1982, trans. Roy Willis, 1987)
*''Le Regard éloigne'' (1983, The View from Afar, trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss, 1985)
*''La Potière jalouse'' (1985, The Jealous Potter, trans. Bénédicte Chorier, 1988)
*''Histoire de lynx'' (1991)
*''Regarder, écouter, lire'' (1993, Look, Listen, Read trans. Brian Singer, 1997)
 
==See also ==
*[[Evolutionary Principle]]
*[[structural anthropology]]
*[[structuralism]]
* [[Alliance theory]]
*[[Comparative Mythology]]
*[[Mythography]]
 
== External links ==
{{wikiquote}}
*[http://varenne.tc.columbia.edu/bib/auth/levstcld0.html List of works by Claude Lévi-Strauss]
*[http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/VideoTest/levi.ram Lecture: The Birth of Historical Societies (Hitchcock Lectures), October 3 and 4, 1984, UC Berkeley (online audio file)]
*[http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/claude_levi Strauss.html Overview, in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory (subscriber access only)]
*{{fr icon}}[http://www.academie-francaise.fr/immortels/base/academiciens/fiche.asp?param=647 Claude Lévi Strauss' profile on the Académie française site]
*[http://www.egwald.com/ubcstudent/aboriginal/exchanges.php Linguistic and Commodity Exchanges] by Elmer G. Wiens.  Examines the structural differences between barter and monetary commodity exchanges and oral and written linguistic exchanges.
*{{es icon}}[http://www.psikeba.com.ar/recursos/entrevistas/LeviStrauss.htm Lévi Strauss Interview | In Psikeba]
 
==Video==
*[http://www.documen.tv/asset/About_Tristes_Tropiques.html Documentaire 52': About "Tristes Tropiques"] 1991 - Film Super 16
 
 
{{start box}}
{{succession box | title=[[List of members of the Académie française#Seat 29|Seat 29]]<br>[[Académie française]]<br>[[1973]]-  | before=[[Henry de Montherlant]]  | after=''Incumbent''
| years=}}
{{end box}}
 
[[Category:1908 births|Levi Strauss, Claude]]
[[Category:20th century philosophers|Levi Strauss, Claude]]
[[Category:Continental philosophers|Levi Strauss, Claude]]
[[Category:Erasmus Prize winners|Levi Strauss, Claude]]
[[Category:Anthropologists|Levi Strauss, Claude]]
[[Category:French anthropologists|Levi Strauss, Claude]]
[[Category:French ethnologists|Lévi Strauss, Claude]]
[[Category:French philosophers|Levi Strauss, Claude]]
[[Category:Living people|Levi Strauss, Claude]]
[[Category:Members and associates of the US National Academy of Sciences|Levi Strauss, Claude]]
[[Category:Members of the Académie française|Levi Strauss, Claude]]
[[Category:Social philosophy|Levi Strauss, Claude]]
[[Category:Structuralism|Levi Strauss, Claude]]
[[Category:University of São Paulo|Levi Strauss, Claude]]
[[Category:Inductees of the Brazilian Order of Scientific Merit|Levi Strauss]]
 
[[ar:كلود ليفي ستروس]]
[[bs:Claude Lévi-Strauss]]
[[bg:Клод Леви Строс]]
[[ca:Claude Lévi-Strauss]]
[[de:Claude Lévi-Strauss]]
[[el:Κλοντ Λεβί-Στρος]]
[[es:Claude Lévi-Strauss]]
[[eo:Claude Lévi-Strauss]]
[[eu:Claude Levi-Strauss]]
[[fr:Claude Lévi-Strauss]]
[[ko:클로드 레비스트로스]]
[[it:Claude Lévi-Strauss]]
[[he:קלוד לוי-שטראוס]]
[[lt:Claude Levi-Strauss]]
[[hu:Claude Lévi-Strauss]]
[[nl:Claude Lévi-Strauss]]
[[ja:クロード・レヴィ=ストロース]]
[[pl:Claude Lévi-Strauss]]
[[pt:Claude Lévi-Strauss]]
[[sk:Claude Lévi-Strauss]]
[[fi:Claude Lévi-Strauss]]
[[sv:Claude Lévi-Strauss]]
[[tr:Claude Lévi-Strauss]]
[[zh:克勞德·李維-史陀]]
[[Category:Linguistics Workgroup]]

Latest revision as of 12:01, 29 July 2024

This article is a stub and thus not approved.
Main Article
Discussion
Related Articles  [?]
Bibliography  [?]
External Links  [?]
Citable Version  [?]
 
This editable Main Article is under development and subject to a disclaimer.

Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 28th November 1908, in Brussels, Belgium - d. 30th October 2009, in Paris, France) was a French anthropologist from an established Jewish-French family[1], who applied structuralist linguistics to the study of human culture and society and called this new method structural anthropology[2] 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 1955 he published a popular book, Tristes Tropiques, about his expeditions in Central Brazil at the time. Back in France he was mobilized as a soldier (1939/'40). After French defeat and German victory, he had to move to the South of France. In 1941 Lévy-Strauss was able to leave France for New York, where he taught at the New School for Social Research from 1942 to 1945. In 1946 and 1947 he was the cultural attaché at the French embassy in Washington, DC. He returned to France in 1948 and in 1949 obtained his doctorate in philosophy from the Sorbonne with two theses on kinship, La vie familiale et sociale des Indiens Nambikwara (1948) and Les structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949). He was made sous-directeur at the Musée de l'Homme. From 1950 until 1974 he was at section five of the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes, where he eventually succeeded Marcel Mauss as head of Religious Sciences. Lévi-Strauss called his chair Comparative Religion of Non-Literate Peoples. From 1959 to 1982 he also was the chair of social anthropology at the Collège de France. In 1973 he was appointed to the Acádemie française, the official authority on the French language.

Footnotes

  1. His grandfather was a Rabbi, at Versailles, but his father, a portrait painter was ruined, it is said, by photography
  2. See his important essay L'analyse structurale en linguistique et en anthropologie. In: Word; Journal of the Linguistic Circle of New York, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1945.