France - Levi-Strauss
Levi-Strauss dies at 100
Article published on the 2009-11-03 Latest update 2009-11-03 19:15 TU
Claude Levi-Strauss
(Photo: AFP)
Levi-Strauss influenced generations of intellectuals with his methods of structuralism and studies on mythology and ritual. He shot to fame after the publication of the 1955 book Tristes Tropiques, known in English as A World on the Wane, which charted his travels and studies in the Amazon basin.
He described structuralism as “the search for unsuspected harmonies,” and spent more than three decades studying the Amazonian Indians. He drew comparisons with their myths and fairy stories from Europe, looking for opposing concepts that underpinned all ideas in society.
Levi Strauss wrote more than 20 books over 50 years. Cambridge University anthropologist Edmund Leach described him in 1970 as “the most distinguished exponent of this particular academic trade to be found anywhere outside the English-speaking world.”
Levi Strauss was born in Paris, where he studied law and philosophy at the Sorbonne. He was passionate about classical music and described Marxism; geology and psychoanalysis as his “three mistresses”. In 1939, he served as a liaison agent to the Maginot Line, before fleeing to America where he spent the rest of the war before returning to Paris.
In 1959 Levi Strauss became a professor of social anthropology at the College de France, staying there until his retirement in 1982. He was awarded the Erasmus prize in 1973 and the Meister-Eckhart Prize for philosophy in 2003. He was married twice and has three sons.
In a 2005 television interview, Levi Strauss said he was worried about leaving a world that he did not love.
"Because of its current density, the human species is living in a type of internally poisonous regime and I think of the present, of the world in which I am ending my days, as this world that I do not love," he said.
Claude Levi-Strauss died at home over the weekend.
In a statement, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said that "France has lost one of its most remarkable and renowned intellectuals whose major work will continue to expand the thoughts of those who seek to better understand human societies."
