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).