Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1908–2009)

Claude Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist and ethnologist, was one of the most important social scientists of the 20th century. His concept of structuralism continues to exert a widespread influence not only in anthropology but also in fields as diverse as philosophy, history, sociology, and literary theory.

Lévi-Strauss studied law and philosophy at the Paris-Sorbonne University. He accepted a position as a professor of anthropology at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, for 5 years (1934–1939). During his stay in this South American country, he conducted fieldwork in the Amazonian region, where he studied the native tribes: the Bororo, Guaycuru, Tupi-Kawahib, and Nambikwara. At the New School for Social Research (United States), he became interested in structural linguistics—a field he was introduced to by the phonologist Roman Jakobson. The influence of American anthropologists was also important to his work. In 1950, he was named chair of comparative religions at the École Practique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. He held the chair of social anthropology at the Collège de France from 1959 to 1982.

His book The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1947) introduced the concept of “structure” in ethnology. He understood kinship as systems whose nomenclature allows determining a circle of relatives. These structures are systems that prescribe marriage with a certain type of relative: those of the social groups who are possible spouses and those who are taboo. Lévi-Strauss described the distinction between nature and culture in relation to the taboo of incest. The prohibition of marriage to certain types of relatives—the problem of incest—is the foundation of human society, indeed, constitutive of society itself. He considered the prohibition of incest as universal: All human societies have a certain type of this proscription. In Structural Anthropology (1958), he established that the object of social anthropology has a symbolic nature. He considered that its field belonged to the study of the life of signs in the bosom of society: mythical languages, oral and gestural signs that are part of ritual, marriage rules, kinship systems, consuetudinary law, and certain types of economic interchange.