R.I.P. Claude Levi-Strauss

[Sonic Youth]

The last truly great thinker of the previous millennium has died. I don't think there's anyone of his stature who's still with us.

Claude Levi-Strauss, French anthropologist, dies at 100

By Alexander F. Remington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 3, 2009 12:15 PM

Claude Lévi-Strauss, 100, one of the preeminent social anthropologists of the 20th century, whose erudite, often mind-bendingly labored studies of indigenous Brazilian tribes led to influential theories examining human behavior and culture, died over the weekend in Paris. No cause of death was reported.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss was often paired with writers Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux as the towering French intellectuals of the past century. He said his life's work was "an attempt to show that there are laws of mythical thinking as strict and rigorous as you would find in the natural sciences."

He was best-known for popularizing a social science theory known as "structuralism," a philosophical method of approaching anthropology that identified behavioral codes that were crucial to the functioning of any society and that are inherent in the human mind.

In his best-known books -- "Tristes Tropiques" (1955), sometimes translated as "A World on the Wane," and "La Pensée Sauvage" (1962), translated as "The Savage Mind" -- he set out to show that there was little distinction between so-called civilized and primitive societies. He preferred to call the latter, often dismissed as savages, "societies without writing."

His mid-1960s essay "Le Triangle Culinaire" (The Culinary Triangle) viewed cultural development through the lens of food. He examined, for example, how natives of the Amazon instinctively make culinary distinctions between roasting and boiling.

"Boiling provides a means of complete conservation of the meat and its juices, whereas roasting is accompanied by destruction and loss," he wrote. "Thus one denotes economy; the other prodigality; the latter is aristocratic, the former plebian."

Impossibly precious to some, Mr. Lévi-Strauss's method of thinking intruded into many branches of academia, notably philosophy, comparative religion and comparative literature. In a long career, his reputation as a theorist constantly bounced in and out of favor.

"Hardly a month passes in France," essayist Susan Sontag wrote in 1963, "without a major article in some serious literary journal, or an important public lecture, extolling or attacking the ideas and influence of Lévi-Strauss."

Cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder of the University of Chicago said Mr. Lévi-Strauss's theories comes down to this: Logically deduce all the possible ways in which people can behave. Then, observe which behaviors are actually exhibited in the real world.

Finally, try to explain the reason why some behaviors exist and why other logically possible behaviors are never seen. These reasons form a grammar, a structure, upon which all cultures were based, both primitive and civilized.

Mingling sociological findings with memoir and travelogue, "Tristes Tropiques" follows Mr. Lévi-Strauss's travels through Brazil in the 1930s and was praised by the eminent American anthropologist Clifford Geertz as "surely one of the finest books ever written by an anthropologist."

American anthropologists sometimes questioned Mr. Lévi-Strauss's analytic thoroughness, even while they acknowledged the importance of his work with Brazilian tribes in attempting to classify their mores and myths according to a more rigorous framework. He wrote four volumes about mythology.

"I feel like a very humble craftsman," Mr. Lévi-Strauss told The Washington Post in 1978. "I'm just working in my workshop on very particular questions which can hopefully make a little more rigorous some of the human sciences. Nothing I'm doing is going to particularly ease mankind's problems. I'm a theoretician."

Claude Gustave Lévi-Strauss was born in Brussels on Nov. 28, 1908, to a French Jewish family. His father was a painter, and his great-grandfather was the composer Isaac Strauss.

After attending the Sorbonne, he taught at a French high school in the provinces until a chance conversation with a former professor in the fall of 1934 led to his journey to Brazil.

For much of World War II, he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York and became acquainted with the linguist Roman Jakobson, whose theories on the structure of language were to influence Mr. Lévi-Strauss's structuralist principles.

After the war, he was cultural counselor at the French Embassy in Washington and then returned to a long teaching career, first at the Sorbonne and later the Collège de France. He was elected to several prestigious academic memberships, including the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1973, he became a member of the French Academy, his country's elite society of literary and scientific figures.

Philippe Descola, chairman of anthropology at the Collège de France, told the New York Times that his former colleague was "one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century. . . . He gave a proper object to anthropology: not simply as a study of human nature, but a systematic study of how cultural practices vary, how cultural differences are systematically organized."

Descola added that rather than search for commonalities, a trend in 19th-century anthropology, Mr. Lévi-Strauss did not think all cultures had to been seen through the lens of Westerners. His life's work inspired the opening in 2006 of Le Musée du Quai Branly, a Paris museum featuring the art of indigenous peoples of the world.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss wrote that his view of mankind was ultimately of a race destined for extinction. "The world began without the human race and will certainly end without it," he wrote in "Tristes Tropiques." "What else has man done except blithely break down billions of structures and reduce them to a state in which they are no longer capable of integration?"