Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss, born in Brussels to French-Jewish parents who later became agnostic, grew up in Paris and spent part of his childhood with his grandfather, the Rabbi of Versailles. Though raised in a religious setting, he was atheist or agnostic as an adult. After high school at Lycée Janson de Sailly, he studied at Lycée Condorcet for the École normale supérieure entrance exam but chose not to take it. He then attended the Sorbonne, studying law and philosophy, and engaged in socialist politics without becoming communist. He found law boring, focused on philosophy, and passed the agrégation in 1931 at age 22, placing third. The Great Depression had hit, and he needed to support himself and his parents.

After a few years teaching secondary school, he accepted a last-minute post as a visiting professor of sociology at the University of São Paulo in 1935, while his wife Dina served as a visiting professor of ethnology. They lived in Brazil until 1939, where Claude conducted his only ethnographic fieldwork, accompanying Dina on research trips to the Mato Grosso and Amazon. They studied the Guaycuru and Bororó tribes briefly, then returned in 1938 for a longer expedition to study the Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib. Dina’s eye infection prevented her from completing the study, so Claude finished it, cementing his identity as an anthropologist. Edmund Leach noted, based on Lévi-Strauss’s own accounts, that he spent only a few weeks in any one place and could not easily converse with informants in their native languages.

Returning to France in 1939, he served as a liaison agent on the Maginot Line. After the French capitulation, he taught at a lycée in Montpellier but was dismissed under Vichy racial laws due to his Jewish ancestry. He and his first wife separated; she stayed in the French resistance while he escaped by boat to Martinique, then to New York City in 1941, where he was offered a position at the New School for Social Research. On the way, German letters in his luggage led to an FBI investigation in Puerto Rico. In New York, he co-founded the École Libre des Hautes Études, a university-in-exile for French academics. His wartime relationship with Roman Jakobson helped shape his thinking.

Lévi-Strauss argued that the “savage” mind and the “civilized” mind share the same structures, and that human characteristics are universal. His book *Tristes Tropiques* (1955) established him as a central figure in structuralism, defined as the search for underlying patterns of thought in all human activity. He held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France from 1959 to 1982, was elected to the Académie française in 1973, and was a member of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He received many honors from universities and institutions worldwide, and won the 1986 International Nonino Prize in Italy. In the 1980s, he wrote about why he became vegetarian in Italian newspaper *La Repubblica* and other publications, later collected in the posthumous book *Nous sommes tous des cannibales* (2013). He died on 30 October 2009.