A short life of the author
Claude Lévi-Strauss (28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist who was the founder of structural anthropology and one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. His application of structural linguistics to the study of kinship, myth, and culture revolutionised the human sciences and made “structuralism” one of the dominant intellectual movements of the postwar era. His masterwork, the four-volume Mythologiques (1964–1971), is one of the most ambitious intellectual projects ever undertaken — an attempt to demonstrate that the myths of the indigenous peoples of the Americas constitute a single, vast, logically coherent system of thought. And Tristes Tropiques (1955), ostensibly a memoir of his fieldwork in Brazil, is one of the finest works of literary non-fiction in the French language — a book that transcends anthropology to become a meditation on civilisation, nature, and the meaning of human difference.
Life
Lévi-Strauss was born in Brussels to a French Jewish family of Alsatian origin. He studied law and philosophy at the Sorbonne and was drawn to anthropology through reading Robert Lowie’s Primitive Society. In 1935, he accepted a position teaching sociology at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, which gave him access to the indigenous peoples of the Mato Grosso and Amazonia. His fieldwork among the Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib peoples — though relatively brief — provided the ethnographic material for much of his subsequent theoretical work.
He fled France during the German occupation and spent the war years in New York, where he taught at the New School for Social Research and met the Russian-American linguist Roman Jakobson — the encounter that would transform his intellectual life. Jakobson introduced him to structural linguistics, the method developed by Ferdinand de Saussure that analyses language as a system of oppositions (phonemes defined not by their positive content but by their differences from other phonemes). Lévi-Strauss’s great insight was that this method could be applied to culture: kinship systems, myths, food preparation, classification systems — all could be analysed as structures of binary oppositions.
The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949)
Lévi-Strauss’s first major work argues that the incest taboo — universal in all human societies — is the foundational act of culture: the rule that forces men to exchange women with other groups rather than keeping them within the family, thus creating the networks of alliance and reciprocity that constitute human society. The book is a tour de force of comparative analysis, drawing on ethnographic data from societies across the world to demonstrate that kinship systems, despite their apparent diversity, are variations on a limited number of underlying structural principles.
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
Tristes Tropiques is Lévi-Strauss’s most widely read book and one of the great works of twentieth-century prose. It is nominally a travel memoir — an account of his journeys in Brazil in the 1930s — but it is also a philosophical meditation on the encounter between Western civilisation and the peoples it has destroyed, on the nature of anthropological knowledge, and on the limitations of both “primitive” and “civilised” ways of life.
The book’s famous opening line — “I hate travelling and explorers” — sets the tone: ironic, self-aware, and profoundly melancholy. Lévi-Strauss writes about the Nambikwara, the Bororo, and the Caduveo with a combination of scientific precision and literary beauty that is unique in anthropological writing. The book was rejected by the Gallimard reading committee (which included Raymond Queneau and Albert Camus) for the Prix Goncourt on the grounds that it was not a novel — which is true, though it reads better than most novels.
Mythologiques (1964–1971)
The four volumes — The Raw and the Cooked (1964), From Honey to Ashes (1966), The Origin of Table Manners (1968), and The Naked Man (1971) — analyse hundreds of myths from the indigenous peoples of North and South America, demonstrating that they constitute a single system of logical transformations. Beginning with a single Bororo myth about the origin of cooking, Lévi-Strauss traces a chain of mythological transformations across the Americas, showing how myths about cooking, honey, tobacco, eclipses, and the origin of death are structurally related.
The scope of the project is staggering. Whether it succeeds on its own terms — whether myths really do form the kind of logical system Lévi-Strauss claims — remains debated.
The Savage Mind and the Critique of Sartre
La Pensée sauvage (The Savage Mind, 1962) — whose title puns on the wild pansy (pensée sauvage) — is Lévi-Strauss’s most theoretically concentrated work. Its central argument is that the “savage mind” and the “civilised mind” are not different in kind but in application: both operate by classification, both impose logical order on experience, and the difference is merely that “primitive” thought works with concrete, sensory categories (what Lévi-Strauss calls bricolage — the intellectual assembling of whatever materials are at hand) while modern science works with abstract concepts.
The book’s final chapter is a devastating attack on Sartre’s existentialism, which Lévi-Strauss accused of being a provincial Western philosophy masquerading as universal truth. The quarrel between structuralism and existentialism — between Lévi-Strauss’s insistence that the structures of the human mind are universal and Sartre’s insistence on radical individual freedom — was the defining intellectual debate of 1960s France.
Legacy and the Decline of Structuralism
Lévi-Strauss lived to the age of one hundred, outliving the intellectual movement he founded. Structuralism was attacked from the 1970s onward by post-structuralists — Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze — who argued that the binary oppositions Lévi-Strauss took as universal were themselves cultural constructions. Anthropologists critiqued his reliance on published ethnographies rather than extensive fieldwork and questioned whether his analyses revealed the structures of myth or merely the structures of his own mind. Yet even his critics acknowledged that he permanently changed how scholars think about myth, kinship, and the relationship between nature and culture.
Collecting Lévi-Strauss
French first editions of the major works are collected by specialists. English translations include Tristes Tropiques (1961, Criterion, translated by John Russell; 1973, Cape, translated by John and Doreen Weightman) at $50–$200; The Savage Mind (1966, University of Chicago Press) at $40–$100; The Raw and the Cooked (1969, Harper & Row) at $30–$80. Signed copies are scarce and valuable.