Lévi-Strauss, Claude

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[[Image:Levi-strauss 260.jpg|thumb|Claude Lévi-Strauss in 2005]]
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'''Claude Lévi-Strauss''' ([[International Phonetic Alphabet|IPA]]) pronunciation {{IPA|[klod levi stʁos]}}) (November 28, 1908 - October 30, 2009), was a [[France|French]] [[anthropology|anthropologist]] who became one of the twentieth century's greatest intellectuals by developing [[structural anthropology]] as a method of understanding human society and [[culture]]. He applied his method to numerous cultural systems, notably [[kinship]] structures and [[myth]]ological patterns. A leading proponent of [[structuralism]], Lévi-Strauss' influence has been significant not only throughout the [[social sciences]], but also in [[philosophy]], [[comparative religion]], and the study of [[literature]]. His life-long quest was to show us the deeper unity we share as human beings, in spite of so many outward differences.
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==Life==
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Though thought of as French, '''Claude Lévi-Strauss''' was born in Bruxelles, [[Belgium]] as the son of an [[artist]] and a member of an intellectual, artistic family. When he was six years old, his family began to feel unsafe in the pre-[[World War II]] political and economic milieu and decided to move near Versailles in Paris, [[France]] to be with Claude's grandparents.
  
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'''Claude Lévi Strauss''' ([[International Phonetic Alphabet|IPA pronunciation]] {{IPA|[klod levi stʁos]}}) born [[November 28]], [[1908]], is a [[France|French]] [[anthropologist]] who became one of the twentieth century's greatest intellectuals by developing [[structuralism]] as a method of understanding human [[society]] and [[culture]].
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His grandfather was a [[rabbi]], and this provided the first context for his future work: Claude was an outsider looking in. He could not have been more alien to the French and [[Judaism|Jewish]] cultures. Not only did he feel himself to be an outsider, the Jewish [[faith]] led him to be regarded by others as an outsider as well. This remained a theme in his work throughout his life.
  
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==Biography==
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He began his [[university]] studies in [[law]] and [[philosophy]] and was deeply interested in classic [[literature]] and [[music]]. However, he became bored with legal matters and studied [[psychoanalysis]], [[geology]], and [[political science]] with great interest. At that time in France, [[anthropology]] was not a separate discipline.  
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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 1931.  After 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]].  
 
  
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Lévi Strauss lived in Brazil from [[1935]] to [[1939]].  It was during this time that he carried out his first ethnographic fieldwork, conducting periodic research forays into the [[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.
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He graduated in philosophy from the [[Collège de Sorbonne|Sorbonne]] in 1931, and married Dina Dreyfus in 1932. After 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 until 1939. During this time, Lévi-Strauss became very interested in the [[social anthropology]] introduced by [[Marcel Mauss]].
  
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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.
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He returned to France in 1939 to join the French Army and take part in the war effort, but after French capitulation to the Germans, being a Jew, he fled Paris. After a series of attempts to obtain passage, Lévi-Strauss secured a series of voyages that eventually brought him to [[Puerto Rico]], where he had to undergo final investigation by the [[FBI]] before he could finally gain admission to the [[United States]].  
  
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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''.
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Lévi-Strauss had secured a position in New York teaching at the [[New School for Social Research]] along with [[Jacques Maritain]], [[Henri Focillon]], and Russian semiotician [[Roman Jakobson]]. He divorced Dreyfus and married Rose Marie Ullmo in 1946, and they had one son, Laurent. He was a founding member of the École Libre des Hautes Études, a university-in-exile for French academics.
  
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''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.
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During his time as a cultural attaché to the French [[embassy]] in Washington DC from 1946 to 1947, Lévi-Strauss entertained [[Albert Camus]], who had gained entrance to the United States after a difficult time because of his [[communism|communist]] connections.  
  
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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".
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Lévi-Strauss returned to Paris in 1948, and received his doctorate from the 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.'' He became a professor at the Institut d'Ethnologie, University of Paris, and a research associate at the National Science Research Fund, Paris. Later he served as professor of anthropology at the Collège de France. In 1954, he divorced Ullmo and married Monique Roman and they had one son, Matthieu.  
  
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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.
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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 [[ethnography|ethnographic]] analysis of [[Amazon]]ian peoples to produce a masterpiece. The organizers of the literary prize, Prix Goncourt, for instance, lamented that they were not able to award Lévi-Strauss the prize because ''Tristes Tropiques'' was technically non-fiction. This book served to popularize his other work immensely.
  
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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.
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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 [[structural anthropology|structuralism]]. Laying the groundwork for establishing anthropology to be accepted as a discipline in France, he began a series of institutions, 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.
  
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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 — 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.
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In 1962, Lévi-Strauss published, what is for many people his most important work, ''La Pensée Sauvage,'' which concerns primitive thought, forms of thought we all use. The title is a pun untranslatable in English. In French, ''pensée'' means both "[[thought]]" and "[[pansy]]," the flower, while ''sauvage'' means "wild" as well as "savage" or "primitive." In English the book is known as ''The Savage Mind,'' but this title fails to capture the other possible French meaning of ''Wild Pansies''. (Lévi-Strauss suggested the English title be ''Pansies for Thought'', a reference to the speech by Ophelia in [[Shakespeare]]'s ''[[Hamlet]].'') The French edition to this day retains a [[flower]] on the cover.
  
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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]].  
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As a world-wide celebrity, Lévi-Strauss spent the second half of the 1960s working on his master project, a four-volume study called ''Mythologiques.'' 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' 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' master work.
  
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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.
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In the twenty-first century, he continued to publish occasional meditations on [[art]], [[music]], and [[poetry]], as well as interviews and reminiscences of earlier periods of his life. He died on October 30, 2009, a few weeks before his 101st birthday.
  
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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, as well as interviews and reminiscences of earlier periods of his life.
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==Work==
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Lévi-Strauss lived in [[Brazil]] from 1935 to 1939, and it was during this time that he carried out his first [[ethnography|ethnographic]] fieldwork, conducting periodic research forays into the [[Mato Grosso]] and the [[Amazon Rainforest]]. He studied first the Guaycuru and Bororo [[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 [[anthropology|anthropologist]].
  
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==Anthropological theories==
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Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lévi-Strauss continued to publish and experienced considerable professional success. The war years in New York were formative for Lévi-Strauss in several ways. His relationship with [[Roman 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 [[United States|American]] anthropology, especially as espoused by [[Franz Boas]] and [[Bronisław Malinowski]]. This gave his early work a distinctive American flavor that helped facilitate its acceptance in the U.S.  
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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.
 
  
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His reasoning makes best sense against the background of an earlier generation's social theory. He wrote about this relationship for decades.
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Among his many significant publications, ''[[Claude Lévi-Strauss#The Elementary Structures of Kinship|The Elementary Structures of Kinship]]'' (1949) and ''[[Claude Lévi-Strauss#The Savage Mind|The Savage Mind]]'' (1962) exemplify his contributions to anthropology.
  
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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.
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===''The Elementary Structures of Kinship''===
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''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. It was reviewed favorably by [[Simone de Beauvoir]], a former classmate at the Sorbonne, 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 [[marriage|married]] men from the other.
  
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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.
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===''The Savage Mind''===
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The first half of ''The Savage Mind'' lays out Lévi-Strauss's 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]]. Although echoes of this debate between [[structuralism]] and [[existentialism]] would stimulate many and eventually inspire the work of younger authors such as [[Pierre Bourdieu]], many also believed their debate was a version of the [[Medieval]] [[theology|theological]] discussions of how many [[angel]]s could dance on the head of a pin. Sartre's existentialist philosophy committed him to a position that human beings were fundamentally free to act as they pleased, yet he also maintained they were constrained by the ideologies imposed on them by the powerful, as his hard-core leftist views dictated. Lévi-Strauss presented an alternative notion that underlying unity would be found through the comparison of [[social structure]]s.
  
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The more influential functionalism of [[Bronislaw Malinowski]] described the satisfaction of individual needs, what a person got out of participating in a custom.
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==Critique==
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Lévi-Strauss' theories are set forth in ''Structural Anthropology'' (1958). Briefly, he considered [[culture]] a system of [[symbol]]ic [[communication]], to be investigated with methods that others have used more exclusively in the discussion of [[novel]]s, political speeches, [[sport]]s, [[economics|economic]] journals, and [[movies]]. His reasoning makes best sense against the background of an earlier generation's [[social theory]]. Victor Turner and others have critiqued structuralism, like Marxism and secular existentialism, as reducing general expressions of [[faith]] and community to mere symbolism, leaving them devoid of real meaning.  
  
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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.
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Lévi-Strauss was ever-dedicated to the exhaustive analysis of volumes of data. This often shocked and overwhelmed the academic community. He not only utilized a wide range of subject matter, he also utilized an array of scientific methodologies, including [[mathematics|mathematical]] formulas, complex graphic comparisons, [[cybernetics]], modern [[linguistics|linguistic]] theory, and [[chaos theory]], to mention just a few. He seemed to find patterns where no one else could find them, and his method, though rigorous, was unique in each application making it exceedingly difficult for others to replicate. He was criticized for not being an expert in these diverse fields and for utilizing the work of others, rather than limiting his research to the field of his own experience and with languages he was personally adept in. Yet, his attention to detail and precision in method was remarkable and difficult to defeat intellectually.
  
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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.
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Lévi-Strauss is often cited as the founder of [[structural anthropology]], and as such chose to use data that emphasized the demands of the social order. He had no difficulty bringing out the inconsistencies and triviality of individualistic accounts. Methods of [[linguistics]] became a model for all his earlier examinations of society. "A truly scientific analysis must be real, simplifying, and explanatory," he stated (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—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.
  
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There are three broad choices involved in the divergence of these schools – 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.
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In the study of the [[kinship]] systems that first concerned him, he utilized 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 America]]n cultures. The father might have great authority over the son in one group, for example, with the relationship rigidly restricted by [[taboo]]s. 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.
  
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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.
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A number of partial patterns had been previously noted. Relations between the mother and father, for example, had some sort of reciprocity with those of father and son—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. For Lévi-Strauss, a proper solution to the puzzle was to find a basic unit of kinship which can explain all the variations.  
  
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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?
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He found this unit in the 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 [[exogamy|exogamously]]. The underlying demand is a continued circulation of women to keep various [[clan]]s peacefully related.
  
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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 – you just postulate a trait of personality when you need it.
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Right or wrong, this solution displays essential qualities of the structural position. Even though Lévi-Strauss frequently spoke of treating culture as the product of the axioms and corollaries that underlie it, or the phonemic differences that constitute it, he was concerned with the objective data of field research. He noted that it is logically possible for a different unit of kinship structure to exist—sister, sister's brother, brother's wife, daughter—but there are no real-world examples of relationships that can be derived from that grouping.  
  
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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 – trade, intermarry – is different in different tribes; for that matter, so are the criteria for distinguishing the groups.
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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 [[Brazil]]ian back country—''The Raw and the Cooked, From Honey to Ashes, The Naked Man'' (to borrow some titles from the ''Mythologies''). For instance he compared anthropology to musical [[serialism]].  
  
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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.
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His voluminous data and ability to defend his analyses have had an impact on [[neurology|neurological]] [[brain]] research, especially in connection to his applications of linguisitic phonemes. His work seems to provide preliminary data on underlying connections with universal brain function, and has thus stimulated more research on these topics.
  
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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).
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He has 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.
  
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"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 – 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.
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==Selected Awards==
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*Académie Française, the highest intellectual honor in France
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*American Academy of Arts and Letters
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*Erasmus Prize
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*Meister-Eckhart-Prize for Philosophy
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*Grand-croix de la Légion d'honneur
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*Commandeur de l'ordre national du Mérite
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*Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres
  
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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.
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Honorary Doctorates:
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*[[University of Oxford]]
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*[[Harvard University]]
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*[[Columbia University]]
  
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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 – 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.
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== Selected Publications ==
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*Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1949. ''Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté'' (The Elementary Structures of Kinship).
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*Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1952. ''Race et histoire''. UNESCO; Race and History.
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*Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1955. ''Tristes tropiques''.
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*Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1958. ''Anthropologie structurale'' (Structural Anthropology).
 +
*Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962. ''La Pensée sauvage'' (The Savage Mind).
 +
*Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962. ''Le Totemisme aujourdhui'' (Totemism).
 +
*Lévi-Strauss, Claude. ''Mythologiques I-IV''.
 +
*Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1964. ''I:Le Cru et le cuit'' (The Raw and the Cooked).
 +
*Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. ''II:Du miel aux cendres'' (From Honey to Ashes).
 +
*Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1968. ''III:L'Origine des manières de table'' (The Origin of Table Manners).
 +
*Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1971. ''IV:L'Homme nu'' (The Naked Man).
 +
*Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1972. ''La Voie des masques'' (The Way of the Masks).
 +
*Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1973. ''Anthropologie structurale deux'' (Structural Anthropology, Vol. II).
 +
*Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1983. ''Le Regard éloigne'' (The View from Afar).
 +
*Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1984. ''Paroles donnés'' (Anthropology and Myth: Lectures, 1951-1982).
 +
*Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1985. ''La Potière jalouse'' (The Jealous Potter).
 +
*Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1991. ''Histoire de lynx''.
 +
*Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1993. ''Regarder, écouter, lire'' (Look, Listen, Read).
  
−
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.
+
==References==
 +
*Champagne, Roland A. 1988. ''Claude Levi-Strauss''. Twayne Publishers. ISBN 0805766464
 +
* Hayes, E. Nelson and Tanya Hayes. 1974. ''Claude Levi-Strauss: The anthropologist as Hero''. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ISBN 0262580160
 +
* Leach, Edmund. 1989. ''Claude Levi-Strauss''. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226469689
  
−
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 – if age is crucial, then age explains a relationship. And it does not offer the possibility of inferring the origins of the structure.
+
==External Links==
 +
All links retrieved December 19, 2023.
  
−
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.
+
*[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/science-obituaries/6496558/Claude-Levi-Strauss.html Claude Lévi-Strauss] Obituary, ''The Daily Telegraph'', November 3, 2009.  
  
−
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 – sister, sister's brother, brother's wife, daughter – but there are no real-world examples of relationships that can be derived from that grouping.
+
{{Credits|Claude_Lévi-Strauss|55756959|}}
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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.
 
−
 
 
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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 – ''[[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 – 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.
 
−
 
 
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== 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)
 
−
*''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)
 
−
 
 
−
*[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)]
 
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*[http://www.academie-francaise.fr/immortels/base/academiciens/fiche.asp?param=647 Claude Lévi Strauss' profile on the Académie française site]
 
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*[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.
 
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*[http://www.psikeba.com.ar/recursos/entrevistas/LeviStrauss.htm Lévi Strauss Interview | In Psikeba]
 
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−
 
 
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{{Credit1|Claude_Lévi-Strauss|55756959|}}
 

Latest revision as of 10:55, 19 December 2023


Claude Lévi-Strauss in 2005

Claude Lévi-Strauss (IPA) pronunciation [klod levi stʁos]) (November 28, 1908 - October 30, 2009), was a French anthropologist who became one of the twentieth century's greatest intellectuals by developing structural anthropology as a method of understanding human society and culture. He applied his method to numerous cultural systems, notably kinship structures and mythological patterns. A leading proponent of structuralism, Lévi-Strauss' influence has been significant not only throughout the social sciences, but also in philosophy, comparative religion, and the study of literature. His life-long quest was to show us the deeper unity we share as human beings, in spite of so many outward differences.

Life

Though thought of as French, Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in Bruxelles, Belgium as the son of an artist and a member of an intellectual, artistic family. When he was six years old, his family began to feel unsafe in the pre-World War II political and economic milieu and decided to move near Versailles in Paris, France to be with Claude's grandparents.

His grandfather was a rabbi, and this provided the first context for his future work: Claude was an outsider looking in. He could not have been more alien to the French and Jewish cultures. Not only did he feel himself to be an outsider, the Jewish faith led him to be regarded by others as an outsider as well. This remained a theme in his work throughout his life.

He began his university studies in law and philosophy and was deeply interested in classic literature and music. However, he became bored with legal matters and studied psychoanalysis, geology, and political science with great interest. At that time in France, anthropology was not a separate discipline.

He graduated in philosophy from the Sorbonne in 1931, and married Dina Dreyfus in 1932. After 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 until 1939. During this time, Lévi-Strauss became very interested in the social anthropology introduced by Marcel Mauss.

He returned to France in 1939 to join the French Army and take part in the war effort, but after French capitulation to the Germans, being a Jew, he fled Paris. After a series of attempts to obtain passage, Lévi-Strauss secured a series of voyages that eventually brought him to Puerto Rico, where he had to undergo final investigation by the FBI before he could finally gain admission to the United States.

Lévi-Strauss had secured a position in New York teaching at the New School for Social Research along with Jacques Maritain, Henri Focillon, and Russian semiotician Roman Jakobson. He divorced Dreyfus and married Rose Marie Ullmo in 1946, and they had one son, Laurent. He was a founding member of the École Libre des Hautes Études, a university-in-exile for French academics.

During his time as a cultural attaché to the French embassy in Washington DC from 1946 to 1947, Lévi-Strauss entertained Albert Camus, who had gained entrance to the United States after a difficult time because of his communist connections.

Lévi-Strauss returned to Paris in 1948, and received his doctorate from the 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. He became a professor at the Institut d'Ethnologie, University of Paris, and a research associate at the National Science Research Fund, Paris. Later he served as professor of anthropology at the Collège de France. In 1954, he divorced Ullmo and married Monique Roman and they had one son, Matthieu.

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 literary prize, Prix Goncourt, for instance, lamented that they were not able to award Lévi-Strauss the prize because Tristes Tropiques was technically non-fiction. This book served to popularize his other work immensely.

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. Laying the groundwork for establishing anthropology to be accepted as a discipline in France, he began a series of institutions, 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, which concerns primitive thought, forms of thought we all use. The title is a pun untranslatable in English. In French, pensée means both "thought" and "pansy," the flower, while sauvage means "wild" as well as "savage" or "primitive." In English the book is known as The Savage Mind, but this title fails to capture the other possible French meaning of Wild Pansies. (Lévi-Strauss suggested the English title be Pansies for Thought, a reference to the speech by Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet.) The French edition to this day retains a flower on the cover.

As a world-wide celebrity, Lévi-Strauss spent the second half of the 1960s working on his master project, a four-volume study called Mythologiques. 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' 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' master work.

In the twenty-first century, he continued to publish occasional meditations on art, music, and poetry, as well as interviews and reminiscences of earlier periods of his life. He died on October 30, 2009, a few weeks before his 101st birthday.

Work

Lévi-Strauss lived in Brazil from 1935 to 1939, and it was during this time that he carried out his first ethnographic fieldwork, conducting periodic research forays into the Mato Grosso and the Amazon Rainforest. He studied first the Guaycuru and Bororo 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.

Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lévi-Strauss continued to publish and experienced considerable professional success. The war years in New York were formative for Lévi-Strauss in several ways. His relationship with Roman Jakobson helped shape his theoretical outlook (Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss are considered to be two of the central figures on which structuralist thought is based). In addition, Lévi-Strauss was also exposed to American anthropology, especially as espoused by Franz Boas and Bronisław Malinowski. This gave his early work a distinctive American flavor that helped facilitate its acceptance in the U.S.

Among his many significant publications, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) and The Savage Mind (1962) exemplify his contributions to anthropology.

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. It was reviewed favorably by Simone de Beauvoir, a former classmate at the Sorbonne, 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.

The Savage Mind

The first half of The Savage Mind lays out Lévi-Strauss's 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. Although echoes of this debate between structuralism and existentialism would stimulate many and eventually inspire the work of younger authors such as Pierre Bourdieu, many also believed their debate was a version of the Medieval theological discussions of how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Sartre's existentialist philosophy committed him to a position that human beings were fundamentally free to act as they pleased, yet he also maintained they were constrained by the ideologies imposed on them by the powerful, as his hard-core leftist views dictated. Lévi-Strauss presented an alternative notion that underlying unity would be found through the comparison of social structures.

Critique

Lévi-Strauss' theories are set forth in Structural Anthropology (1958). Briefly, he considered culture a system of symbolic communication, to be investigated with methods that others have used more exclusively in the discussion of novels, political speeches, sports, economic journals, and movies. His reasoning makes best sense against the background of an earlier generation's social theory. Victor Turner and others have critiqued structuralism, like Marxism and secular existentialism, as reducing general expressions of faith and community to mere symbolism, leaving them devoid of real meaning.

Lévi-Strauss was ever-dedicated to the exhaustive analysis of volumes of data. This often shocked and overwhelmed the academic community. He not only utilized a wide range of subject matter, he also utilized an array of scientific methodologies, including mathematical formulas, complex graphic comparisons, cybernetics, modern linguistic theory, and chaos theory, to mention just a few. He seemed to find patterns where no one else could find them, and his method, though rigorous, was unique in each application making it exceedingly difficult for others to replicate. He was criticized for not being an expert in these diverse fields and for utilizing the work of others, rather than limiting his research to the field of his own experience and with languages he was personally adept in. Yet, his attention to detail and precision in method was remarkable and difficult to defeat intellectually.

Lévi-Strauss is often cited as the founder of structural anthropology, and as such chose to use data that emphasized the demands of the social order. He had no difficulty bringing out the inconsistencies and triviality of individualistic accounts. Methods of linguistics became a model for all his earlier examinations of society. "A truly scientific analysis must be real, simplifying, and explanatory," he stated (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—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, he utilized 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 previously noted. Relations between the mother and father, for example, had some sort of reciprocity with those of father and son—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. For Lévi-Strauss, a proper solution to the puzzle was to find a basic unit of kinship which can explain all the variations.

He found this unit in the 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 exogamously. The underlying demand is a continued circulation of women to keep various clans peacefully related.

Right or wrong, this solution displays essential qualities of the structural position. Even though Lévi-Strauss frequently spoke of treating culture as the product of the axioms and corollaries that underlie it, or the phonemic differences that constitute it, he was concerned with the objective data of field research. He noted that it is logically possible for a different unit of kinship structure to exist—sister, sister's brother, brother's wife, daughter—but there are no real-world examples of relationships that can be derived from that grouping.

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—The Raw and the Cooked, From Honey to Ashes, The Naked Man (to borrow some titles from the Mythologies). For instance he compared anthropology to musical serialism.

His voluminous data and ability to defend his analyses have had an impact on neurological brain research, especially in connection to his applications of linguisitic phonemes. His work seems to provide preliminary data on underlying connections with universal brain function, and has thus stimulated more research on these topics.

He has 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 Awards

  • Académie Française, the highest intellectual honor in France
  • American Academy of Arts and Letters
  • Erasmus Prize
  • Meister-Eckhart-Prize for Philosophy
  • Grand-croix de la Légion d'honneur
  • Commandeur de l'ordre national du Mérite
  • Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres

Honorary Doctorates:

Selected Publications

  • Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1949. Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (The Elementary Structures of Kinship).
  • Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1952. Race et histoire. UNESCO; Race and History.
  • Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1955. Tristes tropiques.
  • Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1958. Anthropologie structurale (Structural Anthropology).
  • Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962. La Pensée sauvage (The Savage Mind).
  • Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962. Le Totemisme aujourdhui (Totemism).
  • Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Mythologiques I-IV.
  • Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1964. I:Le Cru et le cuit (The Raw and the Cooked).
  • Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. II:Du miel aux cendres (From Honey to Ashes).
  • Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1968. III:L'Origine des manières de table (The Origin of Table Manners).
  • Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1971. IV:L'Homme nu (The Naked Man).
  • Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1972. La Voie des masques (The Way of the Masks).
  • Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1973. Anthropologie structurale deux (Structural Anthropology, Vol. II).
  • Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1983. Le Regard éloigne (The View from Afar).
  • Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1984. Paroles donnés (Anthropology and Myth: Lectures, 1951-1982).
  • Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1985. La Potière jalouse (The Jealous Potter).
  • Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1991. Histoire de lynx.
  • Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1993. Regarder, écouter, lire (Look, Listen, Read).

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

  • Champagne, Roland A. 1988. Claude Levi-Strauss. Twayne Publishers. ISBN 0805766464
  • Hayes, E. Nelson and Tanya Hayes. 1974. Claude Levi-Strauss: The anthropologist as Hero. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ISBN 0262580160
  • Leach, Edmund. 1989. Claude Levi-Strauss. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226469689

External Links

All links retrieved December 19, 2023.

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