Claude Lévi-Strauss, widely considered the father of modern anthropology for work that included theories about commonalities between tribal and industrial societies, died on October 30. He was 100.
The French intellectual was regarded as having reshaped the field of anthropology, introducing structuralism — concepts about common patterns of behaviour and thought, especially myths, in a wide range of human societies. Defined as the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity, structuralism compared the formal relationships among elements in any given system.
During his six-decade career, Lévi-Strauss authored literary and anthropological classics including Tristes Tropiques (1955), The Savage Mind (1963) and The Raw and the Cooked (1964).
France reacted emotionally to Lévi-Strauss’s weekend death, with French President Nicolas Sarkozy joining government officials, politicians and ordinary citizens populating blogs with heartfelt tributes.
Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner praised his emphasis on a dialogue between cultures and said that France had lost a ”visionary”. Sarkozy honoured the ”indefatigable humanist”.
Born on November 28 1908 in Brussels, Belgium, Lévi-Strauss was the son of French parents of Jewish origin. He studied in Paris and went on to teach in São Paulo, Brazil, and conduct much of the research that led to his breakthrough books in the South American giant.
Beatriz Perrone Moises, an anthropology professor at the University of São Paulo, said ”given his age, we were almost expecting this, but still I feel a kind of emptiness”.
”The Brazil he described in Tristes Tropiques is a very particular world of the senses and as he himself said there, it was a bit like rediscovering Americans, like the explorers of the 17th century. He often spoke about this emotion, this feeling. [For him], Brazil was less about the county itself than about the Brazil of the Indians and the feeling of walking in the footsteps of the 17th-century explorers,” Perrone Moises told the Associated Press in a telephone interview from São Paulo.
Lévi-Strauss left France during as a result of the anti-Jewish laws of the collaborationist Vichy regime, and during World War II joined the Free French Forces.
Lévi-Strauss also won worldwide acclaim and was awarded honorary doctorates at universities, including Harvard, Yale and Oxford, as well as universities in Sweden, Mexico and Canada.
A skilled handyman who believed in the virtues of manual labour and outdoor life, Lévi-Strauss was also an ardent music-lover who once said he would have liked to have been a composer had he not become an ethnologist.
He was married three times and had two sons, Matthieu and Laurent. — Sapa-AP