Claude Lévi-Strauss

Social Anthropologist, Educator and Diplomat

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), French social anthropologist and author, was a leading exponent of structuralism and influential in social sciences and related disciplines.

He was born on November 28, 1908, 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 learned everything about various indigenous groups especially about their culture and wrote about them in his books:  A World on the Wane (1961) and  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, including:

• The Raw and the Cooked, 1969


• From Honey to Ashes, 1973


• The Origin of Table Manners, 1978


• The Naked Man, 1981

He died October 30, 2009, in Paris, France.