Claude Lévi-Strauss

Lore & Background

Claude Lévi-Strauss grew up in Paris, and during the First World War, from age six to ten, he lived with his maternal grandfather, who served as the Rabbi of Versailles. This early period, despite its religious environment, did not lead to a lasting faith; in his adult life, he was an atheist or agnostic. His only ethnographic fieldwork occurred in Brazil from 1935 to 1939, where he accompanied his then-wife, a trained ethnographer, on research expeditions into the Mato Grosso and the Amazon rainforest. They first studied the Guaycuru and Bororó tribes for a few days, and later undertook a more than half-year-long expedition to study the Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib societies. When his wife developed an eye infection that prevented her from completing the study, he concluded it himself. This experience cemented his professional identity as an anthropologist. According to one scholar, from Lévi-Strauss’s own accounts, he likely spent no more than a few weeks in any single location and was never able to converse easily with native informants in their own language, which is atypical of standard anthropological methods requiring deep participatory interaction.

Reader's Guide

His ideas reached into many fields in the humanities, including philosophy. Lévi-Strauss’s central argument held that the so-called “savage” mind operates with the same underlying structures as the “civilized” mind, meaning that fundamental human characteristics are universal. This perspective culminated in his influential work *Tristes Tropiques*, which established him as a key figure in structuralism—defined as the search for underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity. His only ethnographic fieldwork occurred in Brazil, where he studied the Guaycuru, Bororó, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib societies. However, his methods were atypical, as he spent only brief periods in any one location and could not converse fluently with informants in their native languages. Beyond anthropology, his work shaped sociology and philosophy. He was a founding member of the École Libre des Hautes Études in New York during World War II, and his collaboration with Roman Jakobson there was formative. He later held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France, was elected to the Académie française, and received numerous international honors, including the International Nonino Prize. His vegetarianism, discussed in later publications, reflected his broader ethical views.

Did You Know?

• He was born in Brussels to French-Jewish parents and grew up in Paris.
• He spent most of World War II in New York City and was a founding member of the École Libre des Hautes Études.