Lévi-Strauss, Claude

Biographical and Intellectual Itinerary

Lévi-Strauss was born in Brussels, Belgium, to a French Jewish family as a son of an artist and intellectual. At the age of six he moved with his family to France, where he studied law and philosophy from 1927 to 1931 and frequented the philosophical circle of Jean-Paul Sartre and developed a strong sympathy for Marxism. He had also an extensive exposure to literature and music, both classic and contemporary. After receiving his “aggregation” (a predoctoral degree) in philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1931, he taught philosophy for two years in Secondary Schools [Page 444](Lyceums). In 1934, he went to teach sociology at the University of Saõ Pablo in Brazil, where he became interested in anthropology and made several expeditions among the tribal societies of Central Brazil. Military service took him back to France in 1939, and in 1941 he immigrated to the United States to teach as a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City until 1945; the influence of the structural linguist Roman Jakobson during this period marked a turning point in Lévi-Strauss's intellectual itinerary. After the war, Lévi-Strauss returned to France and become an associate director of the Anthropological Museum (Muse'e de l'Homme) in 1947 and the founder of the influential anthropological journal, L'Homme. In 1948, he published La Vie Familiale et Sociale des Indiens Nambikwara (The Social Life of Nambikwara Indians) and received a doctorate from the University of Paris. In 1949, he published the seminal work Les Structures E'le'mentaires de la Parente' that was republished in revised form in 1967. The work was eventually translated in English in 1969/1990 as The Elementary Structures of Kinship by J. H. Bell, J. R. Von Sturmer, and R. Needham, the latter a professor of anthropology at Oxford University and a frequent critic of Lévi-Strauss; the controversies that surrounded the translation of the work is an indication of the technical complexity of the work as well as the difficulty of accurately rendering the “structuralist” nuances of the French text, especially by scholars of different orientation.

In 1950, Lévi-Strauss became director of studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (until 1974), and in 1952 his Race et Histoire was published by the UNESCO (the English translation Race and History was published in 1958). He founded the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale du Centre national de la Recherche Scientifique, de l'École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales et du Collège de France, which he directed for 25 years. In 1955, he gained wide recognition with his biographical account, the Tristes Tropiques (reissued in new French editions in 1973 and in 1984); in this work he explained the origins of his intellectual itinerary and shared his reflections on the humane qualities of aboriginal cultures, which are very tangible at a stage of rudimentary cultural development. The wide appeal of the book produced various English translations as A Word on the Wane, as Tristes Tropiques, as Tristes Tropiques: Life in the Brazilian Jungles, and as Tristes Tropiques: An Anthropological Study of Primitive Societies in Brazil; the book saw various reprints. In 1955, he puzzled anthropologists and folklorists with his essay, “The Structural Study of Myth” (see below), where he offered a novel explanation of the Oedipus myth based on his own interpretation and application of the structural linguistic approach of Jacobson and Troubetzkoy. In 1958, he published a collection of essays that was translated in 1963 as Structural Anthropology, where he explains his own brand of structuralism, and especially his notion of structure and structural methodology. In 1959, he was appointed to the prestigious chair of social anthropology at the College de France, where he taught until 1982. In 1962m he continued to revolutionize the field of anthropology with La Pensée Sauvage (translated as The Savage Mind in 1966 and revised in the French edition in 1968) and Totémisme Aujourd'hui (Totemism) showing among other things the rigorous and classificatory nature of the concrete logic of aboriginal people. Lévi-Strauss forays into the concrete logic of aboriginal mind culminated in the four volumes of Mythologiques (Introduction to a Science of Mythology): Le Cru et le Cuit (1964, translated as The Raw and the Cooked), Du Miel aux Cendres (1967, translated as From Honey to Ashes), L'Origine des Manières de Table (1968, translated as The Origin of Table Manners), and L'Homme Nu (1971, translated as The Naked Man). In this impressive corpus, Lévi-Strauss shows that underlying a great variety of mythological narratives one can identify recurring logical structures that deal with existential issues common to Northern and Southern American Aborigines. In 1973, a second volume of Anthropologie Structurale (Structural Anthropology) appeared in French containing theoretical and methodological essays as well as essays on mythology, ritual, and humanities; in the same year he was elected to the Academie Francaise. In the two volumes of La Voie des Masques (1975, reissued in a revised French edition in 1979 and translated as The Way of the Masks), Lévi-Strauss dealt with the art, mythology, and religion of the Northwest Coast Indians. In 1983, he published a collection of essays, Le Regard E'loigné (translated as The View from Afar), and in 1985 La Potière Jalousie (translated as “The Jealous Potter, University of Chicago 1988); in the latter book, Lévi-Strauss shows similarities and equivalences in Northern and Southern American Indian myths that deal with themes of marital jealousy, pottery, and origin stories. Histoire de Lynx (published in 1991 and translated as Story of Lynx) shows how stories of the conflict between the Coyote and Lynx elucidate the role of twins in Amerindian mythology; oppositional dualities of social life are resolved through dualistic processes that underlie origin myths. Regarder Ecouter Lire (published in 1993 and translated as Look, Listen, Read) is a set of essays on French art, music, and literature and deals with the role of art in Western society. Lévi-Strauss has also published various lectures, interviews (one in 2000), and essays, some of which in cooperation with others. His continuing intellectual vitality is demonstrated by the recently translated essay, “Hourglass Configurations,” where he shows that hourglass configurations in shrines and roof frames represent forms of the universe (earth and heaven) that are similar in details in the Far East as well as in America; hence, symbolic transformations are at work not only in mythology but also in architecture. He is currently listed in the Laboratoire de Anthropologie Sociale as honorary professor at the Collège de France, as [Page 445]honorary director at l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and l'École Pratique des Hautes Études, as well as a member of the French Academy.

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