Claude Lévi-Strauss:THE FAME of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who has died aged 100, extended well beyond his own subject of anthropology. He was without doubt the anthropologist best known to non-specialists. This is mainly because he is usually considered to be the founder of the intellectual movement known as structuralism, which was to have such influence, especially in the 1970s.
He was one of those French intellectuals – like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur – whose influence spread to many other disciplines because they were philosophers in a much broader sense of the word than the academic philosophers of the British and American tradition.
Lévi-Strauss was born in Brussels into a family of French artists, and followed a fairly typical career for a successful French humanities student.
He attended the Lycée Janson de Sailly in Paris, and then the Sorbonne, where in 1928, at an exceptionally early age and with great success, he passed the formidable philosophy agrégationexamination. He consequently became a kind of high-level school teacher in Laon, in Picardy, a type of post that was often a first step towards becoming a university teacher.
He soon became disillusioned with philosophy, however, and for a while became active in the French socialist movement. But he later lost interest in politics and was surprisingly uncommitted during the dramatic events of postwar France.
Instead he became interested in anthropology, after reading the American anthropologist Robert Lowie, partly because he realised that the richness of the cultures then labelled as primitive gave the lie to the optimistic evolutionism of writers such as Auguste Comte.
He accepted a professorship in 1935 at the French-sponsored University in São Paulo, largely in the mistaken belief that he would be able to study the Amerindians. This proved difficult, and in 1939 he resigned to do more systematic fieldwork among the Nambikwara and other indigenous peoples of the Mato Grosso and Brazilian Amazon. The experience confirmed his sympathy and respect for the culture of the indigenous peoples of South America and also in his growing scepticism towards the philosophical and artistic achievements of the literate civilisations of the Old World.
His attitude must have been confirmed by the events of the second World War. Lévi-Strauss was called up for a very short time and experienced the humiliation of the fall of France and the armistice. Then he was faced by the growing discrimination and persecution against Jews in Vichy France. In 1941, he managed to escape and ultimately made his way to New York where, the next year, together with other French intellectuals, he was given a post at the New School for Social Research.
On his return to France, he held a number of increasingly important posts at institutions, including the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, where he served as assistant director (1949-50); and the École Pratique des Hautes Études, where he was director of studies in anthropology (1950-74). In 1959 he was elected to a chair of social anthropology at the Collège de France. Among many other honours he was, in 1973, awarded the Erasmus prize and elected to the French Academy.
It was during Lévi-Strauss’ period in the US that “structural anthropology” became constructed. This led to what has become known as “structuralism” – a term used for a variety of theories in anthropology and beyond, which, although they claim to be derived from his ideas, do not always bear much relation to his work.
It is striking how, in spite of the immense respect with which he is treated, especially in France, he has no direct followers or students. Many have claimed to be structuralists but it usually turns out that only a limited aspect of his thought has an influence on them, and at worst the adoption of the label “structuralist” was merely a matter of passing fashion. He is a lonely, if imposing, figure in the history of thought.
The basis of his structural anthropology is the idea that the human brain systematically processes organised, ie structured, units of information that combine and recombine to create models that sometimes explain the world we live in, sometimes suggest imaginary alternatives, and sometimes give tools with which to operate in it. The task of the anthropologist, for Lévi-Strauss, is not to account for why a culture takes a particular form, but to understand and illustrate the principles of organisation that underlie the onward process of transformation that occurs as carriers of the culture solve problems that are either practical or purely intellectual.
For him anthropology was scientific and naturalistic, that is scientific in the way that structural linguistics had become scientific. By looking at the transformations of language that occur as new utterances are generated, by using the tools that a particular language makes available, structural linguistics was able, so Lévi-Strauss believed, to understand not only the irreducible specificities of a particular language, but also the principles that made their production possible. In this way, linguistics, as he understood it, was a branch of the humanities and a natural science that is able to connect directly with psychology and neurology.
By studying the richness of cultural forms and their continued transformations, much the same was to be achieved by anthropology, which was to be both a cognitive and a historical science. Thus, the meaning of symbols and concepts had to be studied both within the context of the working of the brain and the specificity of the historical flow of a particular culture.
Anthropology was for Lévi-Strauss one of the cognitive sciences. It was to be compatible with recent discoveries concerning the working of the brain, although as time went on he seems to have given up keeping up with developments in this field. He was, however, insistent that although the cognitive could explain structure, it could not explain content.
In contrast to most professional anthropologists, whose work often seems contained within the controversies of their time and which lacks a general theory of human nature, Lévi-Strauss writes as though he were a naturalist from far away, observing our planet and the ecology of its different species, including the human species, with an Olympian lack of involvement.
He was interested in the human species in general terms but, because he knew that for 99 per cent of its existence, humankind has consisted of small groups with low population densities living in close interaction with a multitude of other species, he considered the study of peoples such as the pre-contact Amazonian Indians to be far more important and relevant than the details of the short-lived modern industrialised world.
This approach led him to pay particular attention to Amerindian myths, the study of which was the subject of most of his writing since the 1960s. In particular, it is the subject of the four-volume Mythologiques(1964-71). For Lévi-Strauss, Amerindian myths are the Indian's speculation on the condition of interdependence of living things. Thus a myth about the origins of wild pigs is related to marriage rules and to another myth about the benefits of cooking.
Myths have no authors. Their creation occurs imperceptibly in the process of transmission or transformation over hundreds of years and across hundreds of miles. The individual subject, the self-obsessed innovator or artist so dear to much western philosophy, had, therefore, no place for Lévi-Strauss, and indeed repelled him.
He saw the glorification of individual creativity as an illusion. As he wrote in Tristes Tropiques:"the I is hateful".
The philosophical implications of this not only underlay so much of his thought, but were made explicit in the polemic against Sartre's glorification of individual choice, which forms part of Lévi-Strauss' most adventurous book, The Savage Mind (1962).
He hated public occasions and was a private person. He loved to be out of step with the received “correct” view of the moment. He was uncomfortable with disciples and fled from adulation.
He married Dina Dreyfus in 1932, Rose Marie Ullmo in 1946, and Monique Roman in 1954, and had a son by each of his second and third wives – Laurent and Matthieu. Monique and his sons survive him.
Claude Lévi-Strauss: born November 28th, 1908; died November 1st, 2009