Claude Levi-Strauss Biography Quotes 9 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Claude Levi-Strauss was born on 28 November 1908 in Brussels to French parents and grew up in Paris in a family attentive to the arts and letters. His father, Raymond Levi-Strauss, was a portrait painter, and the household nurtured an early sensitivity to images, music, and craftsmanship that later shaped his anthropology. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, passing the agregation in 1931. As a student he read Emile Durkheim and, above all, Marcel Mauss, whose essay on the gift suggested the deep structures of exchange that would become Levi-Strauss's lifelong concern. By the early 1930s he was teaching philosophy in French lycees while searching for a way to combine speculative thought with empirical inquiry.

Brazil and First Fieldwork
In 1935 Levi-Strauss accepted an appointment in sociology at the newly founded University of Sao Paulo. He traveled to Brazil with his first wife, the ethnologist Dina Dreyfus, who collaborated in fieldwork and museum collecting. Over several expeditions between 1935 and 1938, they worked among Indigenous groups in Mato Grosso and the Amazon, including the Caduveo (Kadiweu), Bororo, and Nambikwara, as well as Tupi-Kawahib speakers. These encounters supplied the empirical material for his early analyses of kinship, social classification, and art. In Sao Paulo he interacted with French colleagues such as Roger Bastide and the historian Fernand Braudel, gaining an appreciation for long-term social structures that resonated with his own comparative ambitions.

War, Exile, and New York
Returning to France in 1939, Levi-Strauss was mobilized and then demobilized after the armistice. The anti-Jewish laws of Vichy made his academic future impossible. With assistance coordinated by Varian Fry's Emergency Rescue Committee, he reached New York in 1941. There he taught at the New School for Social Research and at the Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes, an institution-in-exile for French scholars. New York's intellectual milieu transformed his thinking. He met the linguist Roman Jakobson, whose structural phonology provided the model for Levi-Strauss's analysis of kinship and myth. He also came to know Franz Boas and was present when Boas collapsed and died in 1942, an event he later recalled with reverence. In dialogue with Jakobson, and inspired by Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between system and event, Levi-Strauss began to formulate anthropology as a science of relations rather than of isolated customs.

Return to France and Institutional Leadership
Levi-Strauss returned to France in 1948. He defended his doctorat d'Etat with a major thesis, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), which argued that the incest prohibition is a universal rule that inaugurates social life by compelling exchange between groups. He also submitted a complementary thesis on the Nambikwara. He worked with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and the Musee de l Homme, and soon became directeur d'etudes at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. In 1959 he was elected to the newly created Chair of Social Anthropology at the College de France. The following year he founded the Laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale with the support of the College de France, the CNRS, and the EPHE. Around this institution gathered colleagues and younger scholars such as Germaine Dieterlen, Maurice Godelier, Pierre Clastres, Francoise Heritier, and Philippe Descola, who together made Paris a world center of anthropological theory.

Major Works and Ideas
Tristes Tropiques (1955) wove travel narrative with philosophy and ethnography, making him widely known beyond anthropology. Structural Anthropology (1958) consolidated his methodological essays. La Pensee sauvage (The Savage Mind, 1962) contrasted the bricoleur's combinatory intelligence with the engineer's planned design, arguing that classificatory thought is universal. His studies of totemism reframed it as a logic of difference rather than a primitive belief. The four-volume Mythologiques (1964, 1971) pursued hundreds of American Indian myths, showing how themes transform as they travel across regions, often through binary contrasts like raw/cooked, nature/culture, and fresh/rotten. He proposed a canonical formula to express transformations among mythic elements and acknowledged conversations with the mathematician Andre Weil that sharpened his formal reasoning.

Levi-Strauss engaged other currents in French thought. He debated Jean-Paul Sartre over the place of history and freedom, insisting that underlying structures constrain human action even as they enable meaning. His work influenced and was read alongside that of Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault, though he maintained a distinctive anthropological agenda founded on kinship, classification, and myth. For UNESCO he wrote Race and History (1952), a lucid critique of racist ideologies that defended cultural diversity and warned against teleological rankings of civilizations.

Personal Life and Collaborations
Dina Dreyfus was an essential partner during his formative Brazilian years, contributing to fieldwork techniques and curation. Later he married the art historian Monique Levi-Strauss, whose research on printed textiles echoed his fascination with pattern and variation. Among professional friendships, Roman Jakobson remained central; their New York discussions shaped the program of structural analysis. He also worked in proximity to anthropologists Alfred Metraux and Michel Leiris in postwar Paris, sharing interests in museum practice, documentation, and the ethics of representation.

Honors and Recognition
Levi-Strauss was elected to the Academie francaise in 1973. That same year he received the Erasmus Prize, and in 1986 he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy. France honored him with high ranks in the Legion d'honneur and the Ordre national du Merite. Translated widely, he became one of the most cited human scientists of the twentieth century, even as he preferred the quiet of archives and textual analysis to public controversy.

Later Years and Legacy
In later decades he reduced travel and public speaking but continued to publish essays and to revise earlier work. He encouraged successors such as Francoise Heritier and Philippe Descola, who extended and critiqued his program in new ethnographic settings. By emphasizing relations over substances, rules over events, and transformation over origin, Levi-Strauss reshaped anthropology and the humanities. His centenary in 2008 was marked across France. He died in Paris on 30 October 2009, aged 100. His legacy endures in the analytic tools he fashioned for understanding kinship, myth, and classification, and in the networks of scholars and institutions he helped to build.

Our collection contains 9 quotes who is written by Claude, under the main topics: Wisdom - Justice - Deep - Science - Knowledge.

Other people realated to Claude: Ashley Montagu (Scientist), Jacques Derrida (Philosopher), Paul Ricoeur (Philosopher)