Claude Lévi-Strauss

French anthropologist and ethnologist (1908–2009)

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Lived 1908–2009, aged 101France

France AcademicsAcademic

Wikipedia
75 languages
Cross-language footprint
Era
1908–2009
Aged 101
Known for
Somewhere, Someone
1972

Summary

Updated 2026-06-21

He dismantled the idea that so-called primitive societies think differently than we do. His argument — that human minds share the same deep structures everywhere, whether in a Paris salon or an Amazonian village — reordered anthropology and sent structuralism rippling through philosophy, linguistics, and literary theory for decades.

Biography

About

Born in Belgium in 1908, Lévi-Strauss came to anthropology through fieldwork that led him away from European certainties. His 1955 book Tristes Tropiques made the case plainly: the "savage" mind and the "civilized" mind operate on identical principles, hunting for pattern and order in myth, kinship, and symbol. That insight became the backbone of structural anthropology. He held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France from 1959 to 1982, entered the Académie française in 1973, and collected honors across continents. He died in Paris in 2009, a month shy of 101, having spent a…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss

said4 Nov 2009

The idea behind structuralism is that there are things we may not know but we can learn how they are related to each other.

— As quoted in his obituary, Daily Telegraph (4 November 2009)

Claude Lévi-Strauss

said1975

The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.

— The Raw and the Cooked : Introduction to a Science of Mythology (1975) Vol. I, [Le Cru et le Cuit, as translated by Doreen and John

Claude Lévi-Strauss

said1964

These facts make the creator of music a being like the gods, and make music itself the supreme mystery of human knowledge.

— Mythologiques I: Le cru et le cuit (1964)

Claude Lévi-Strauss

said1955

I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions. But how long it has taken me to make up my mind to do so!

— Ch. 1 : Setting Out, p. 17

Claude Lévi-Strauss

said1955

Teaching and research are not to be confused with training for a profession. Their greatness and their misfortune is that they are a refuge or a mission.

— Chapter 6 : The Making of an Anthropologist, p. 55

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

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