Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude LéviStrauss 28 November 1908 30 October 2009 was a French anthropologist and ethnologist born in Belgium to FrenchJewish parents living in Bruxelles whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology He held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France between 1959 and 1982 was elected a member of the Académie française in 1973 and was a member of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris He received numerous honors from universities and institutions throughout the world LéviStrauss argued that the savage mind had the same structures as the civilized mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere These observations culminated in his famous book Tristes Tropiques 1955 that established his position as one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought As well as sociology his ideas reached into many fields in the humanities including philosophy Structuralism has been defined as the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity He won the 1986 International Nonino Prize in Italy Gustave Claude LéviStrauss was born in 1908 to FrenchJewish turned agnostic parents who were living in Brussels at the time where his father was working as a portrait painter He grew up in Paris living on a street of the upscale 16th arrondissement named after the artist Claude Lorrain whose work he admired and later wrote about During the First World War from age 6 to 10 he lived with his maternal grandfather who was the rabbi of the synagogue of Versailles Despite his religious environment early on Claude LéviStrauss was an atheist or agnostic at least in his adult life From 1918 to 1925 he studied at Lycée Janson de Sailly middle school receiving a baccalaureate in June 1925 age of 16 In his last year 1924 he was introduced to philosophy including the works of Marxcitation needed and Kant and began shifting to the political left however unlike many other socialists he never became communist From 1925 he spent the next two years at the prestigious Lycée Condorcet preparing for the entrance exam to the highly selective École normale supérieure However for reasons that are not entirely clear he decided not to take the exam In 1926 he went to Sorbonne in Paris studying law and philosophy as well as engaging in socialist politics and activism In 1929 he opted for philosophy over law which he found boring and from 1930 to 1931 put politics aside to focus on preparing for the agrégation in philosophy in order to qualify as a professor In 1931 he passed the agrégation coming in 3rd place and youngest in his class at age 22 By this time the Great Depression had hit France and LéviStrauss found himself needing to provide not only for himself but his parents as well In 1935 after a few years of secondaryschool teaching he took up a lastminute offer to be part of a French cultural mission to Brazil in which he would serve as a visiting professor of sociology at the University of São Paulo while his then wife Dina served as a visiting professor of ethnology Source Article Claude LéviStrauss from Wikipedia in English licensed under CCBYSA 30