Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in 1908 in Brussels to French Jewish parents and grew up in Paris. He studied law and philosophy at the Sorbonne and taught at a secondary school before going to Brazil in 1935 to teach sociology at the University of São Paulo. There he made field trips among Indigenous peoples of the interior, including the Bororo and Nambikwara. After serving in the French army in 1939–1940, he fled the anti-Jewish laws of Vichy France to New York, where he taught at the New School and met the linguist Roman Jakobson, whose structural linguistics deeply influenced him. Lévi-Strauss argued that myths, kinship systems and customs of all cultures can be understood through underlying patterns of thought, such as pairs of opposites. His books include The Elementary Structures of Kinship, the travel memoir Tristes Tropiques (1955), Structural Anthropology (1958) and the four-volume Mythologiques. He taught at the Collège de France and lived to be a hundred, dying in Paris in 2009.

Claude Lévi-Strauss is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Born to French-Jewish parents who had become agnostic; he was an atheist or agnostic in his adult life. Source: Wikipedia