Claude Levi-Strauss is a French anthropologist who is well-known for his development of structural anthropology. He was born on November 28, 1908 in Belgium as the son of an artist, and a member of an intellectual French Jewish family. Levi-Strauss studied at the University of Paris. From 1935-9 he was Professor at the University of Sao Paulo making several expeditions to central Brazil. Between 1942-1945 he was Professor at the New School for Social Research. In 1950 he became Director of Studies at the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes. In 1959 Levi-Strauss assumed the Chair of Social Anthroplogy at the College de France. His books include The Raw and the Cooked, The Savage Mind, Structural Anthropology and Totemism (Encyclopedia of World Biography).
Some of the reasons for his popularity are in his rejection of history and humanism, in his refusal to see Western civilization as privileged and unique, in his emphasis on form over content and in his insistence that the savage mind is equal to the civilized mind.
Levi-Strauss did many things in his life including studying Law and Philosophy. He also did considerable reading among literary masterpieces, and was deeply immersed in classical and contemporary music.
His three "mistresses" in life were said to be Marxism, psychoanalysis and geology, but anthropology gave the scholar the opportunity to come into contact with the lives of men of different cultures, rather than just Western cultures. His belief that the characteristics of man are everywhere identical was found after countless travels to Brazil and visits to North and South American Indian tribes. In fact, Levi-Strauss spent more than half his 59 years studying the behavior of the North and South American Indian tribes. The method he used to study the social organization of these tribes is called structuralism. "Structuralism," says Levi-Strauss, "is the search for unsuspected harmonies..." (www.fl.fju.edu.tw/LitCrit2006S/Class_1.ppt).
Levi-Strauss derived structuralism from a school of linguistics whose focus was not on the meaning of the word, but the patterns that the words form. Levi-Strauss's contribution gave us a theory of how the human mind works. Man passes from a natural to a cultural state as he uses language, learns to cook, etc... Structuralism considers that in the passage from natural to cultural, man obeys laws he does not invent it's a mechanism of the human brain. Levi-Strauss views man not as a privileged inhabitant of the universe, but as a passing species which will leave only a few faint traces of its passage when it becomes extinct.
Levi-Strauss also came up with the theory of binary opposites which is: " a pair of opposiites, thought by the Structuralists to powerfully form and organize human thought and culture. Some are commonsense, such as raw vs cooked; however, many such oppositions imply or are used in such a way that privileges one of the terms of the opposition, creating a hierarchy. This can be seen in English with white and black, where black is used as a sign of darkness, danger, evil, etc., and white as purity, goodness, and so on. Another example of a contested binary opposition is rational vs emotional, in which the rational term is usually privileged and associated with men, while emotional is inferior and associated with women. The list goes on. Deconstruction sometimes involves identifying the oppositions working in a text and then demonstrating how the text itself undermines the hierarchy implied or asserted by the opposition" (Direct quote from http://www-as.phy.ohiou.edu/~rouzie/307j/binary.html).
Levi-Strauss has been awarded the Wenner-Gren Foundation's Viking Fund Medal for 1966 and the Erasmus Prize in 1975. He has also been awarded four honorary degrees from Oxford, Yale, Havard and Columbia. Strauss has also held several memberships in institutions including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society (Encyclopedia of World Biography).
http://www.bookrags.com/biography/claude-gustave-levi-strauss/, Encyclopedia of World Biography.
http://www-as.phy.ohiou.edu/~rouzie/307j/binary.html
www.fl.fju.edu.tw/LitCrit2006S/Class_1.ppt
Written by: Sarah Schmitt, 1999
Edited by: David Gardner, 2007