Louis Dumont

Louis Dumont was a French anthropologist, born in Thessaloniki in 1911 and educated at the University of Paris. Citing Claude Levi-Strauss as his central inspiration, he became one of the first anthropologists to make an extended study of the caste system and kinship in South India, publishing the results in his best known book, Homo Hierarchicus: Essai sur le systeme des castes (1966). He later turned to the comparative study of Western social philosophy, contrasting holistic and individualist ideologies in From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology (1977) and Essais sur l'individualisme (1983). He taught at Oxford in the 1950s and later directed the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He died in Paris in 1998. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/