Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist who founded structural anthropology, the approach that treats culture as a system of underlying, often unconscious mental structures rather than a collection of isolated customs. Trained in philosophy and law in Paris, he was drawn to anthropology through the French sociological tradition of Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, and he conducted formative fieldwork among Indigenous peoples of Brazil, notably the Bororo and Nambikwara, while teaching in São Paulo in the 1930s. Applying methods borrowed from structural linguistics, he argued that kinship systems, myths, and symbolic classifications across all cultures are generated by the same universal, largely unconscious operations of the human mind, most famously organized around binary oppositions. He held the chair of social anthropology at the Collège de France from 1959 and is widely regarded as one of the most influential anthropologists of the twentieth century, living to age 100.