Claude Lévi-Strauss Dies at 100
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: November 3, 2009
Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western under
standing of what was once called “primitive man” and who towered over the F
rench intellectual scene in the 1960s and ’70s, has died at 100.
His son Laurent said Mr. Lévi-Strauss died of cardiac arrest Friday at his h
ome in Paris. His death was announced Tuesday, the same day he was buried in
the village of Lignerolles, in the Côte-d’Or region southeast of Paris,
where he had a country home.
“He had expressed the wish to have a discreet and sober funeral, with his fa
mily, in his country house,” his son said. “He was attached to this place;
he liked to take walks in the forest, and the cemetery where he is now buried
is just on the edge of this forest.”
A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of “structuralism,” a s
chool of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie
all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creation
s. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were
many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France. And his writin
g — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions,
intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come
before in anthropology.
“People realize he is one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th centu
ry,” Philippe Descola, the chairman of the anthropology department at the Co
llège de France, said last November in an interview with The New York Times
on the centenary of Mr. Levi-Strauss’s birth. Mr. Lévi-Strauss was so rever
ed that at least 25 countries celebrated his 100th birthday.
A descendant of a distinguished French-Jewish artistic family, Mr. Lévi-Stra
uss was a quintessential French intellectual, as comfortable in the public sp
here as in the academy. He taught at universities in Paris, New York and S
27;o Paulo and also worked for the United Nations and the French government.
His legacy is imposing. “Mythologiques,” his four-volume work about the str
ucture of native mythology in the Americas, attempts nothing less than an int
erpretation of the world of culture and custom, shaped by analysis of several
hundred myths of little-known tribes and traditions. The volumes — “The Ra
w and the Cooked,” “From Honey to Ashes,” “The Origin of Table Manners”
and “The Naked Man,” published from 1964 to 1971 — challenge the reader wi
th their complex interweaving of theme and detail.
In his analysis of myth and culture, Mr. Lévi-Strauss might contrast imagery
of monkeys and jaguars; consider the differences in meaning of roasted and b
oiled food (cannibals, he suggested, tended to boil their friends and roast t
heir enemies); and establish connections between weird mythological tales and
ornate laws of marriage and kinship.
Many of his books include diagrams that look like maps of interstellar geomet
ry, formulas that evoke mathematical techniques, and black-and-white photogra
phs of scarified faces and exotic ritual that he made during his field work.
His interpretations of North and South American myths were pivotal in changin
g Western thinking about so-called primitive societies. He began challenging
the conventional wisdom about them shortly after beginning his anthropologica
l research in the 1930s — an experience that became the basis of an acclaime
d 1955 book, “Tristes Tropiques,” a sort of anthropological meditation base
d on his travels in Brazil and elsewhere.
The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually unimagina
tive and temperamentally irrational, basing their approaches to life and reli
gion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food, clothing and shelter.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss rescued his subjects from this limited perspective. Beginni
ng with the Caduveo and Bororo tribes in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, wh
ere he did his first and primary fieldwork, he found among them a dogged ques
t not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins, a sophis
ticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths, and an implicit sens
e of order and design, even among tribes who practiced ruthless warfare.
His work elevated the status of “the savage mind, ” a phrase that became th
e English title of one of his most forceful surveys, “La Pensée Sauvage” (
1962).
“The thirst for objective knowledge,” he wrote, “is one of the most neglec
ted aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive.’ ”
The world of primitive tribes was fast disappearing, he wrote. From 1900 to 1
950, more than 90 tribes and 15 languages had disappeared in Brazil alone. Th
is was another of his recurring themes. He worried about the growth of a “ma
ss civilization,” of a modern “monoculture.” He sometimes expressed exaspe
rated self-disgust with the West and its “own filth, thrown in the face of m
ankind.”
In this seeming elevation of the savage mind and denigration of Western moder
nity, he was writing within the tradition of French Romanticism, inspired by
the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom Mr. Lévi-Strauss re
vered. It was a view that helped build Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s public reputation
in the era of countercultural romanticism in the 1960s and ’70s.
But such simplified romanticism was also a distortion of his ideas. For Mr. L
évi-Strauss, the savage was not intrinsically noble or in any way “closer t
o nature.” Mr. Lévi-Strauss was withering, for example, when describing the
Caduveo, whom he portrayed as a tribe so in rebellion against nature — and
thus doomed — that it even shunned procreation, choosing to “reproduce” by
abducting children from enemy tribes.
His descriptions of American Indian tribes bear little relation to the sentim
ental and pastoral clichés that have become commonplace. Mr. Lévi-Strauss a
lso made sharp distinctions between the primitive and the modern, focusing on
the development of writing and historical awareness. It was an awareness of
history, in his view, that allowed the development of science and the evoluti
on and expansion of the West. But he worried about the fate of the West. It w
as, he wrote in The New York Review of Books, “allowing itself to forget or
destroy its own heritage.”
With the fading of myth’s power in the modern West, he also suggested that m
usic had taken on myth’s function. Music, he argued, had the ability to sugg
est, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and ideas that lie a
t the foundation of society.
But Mr. Lévi-Strauss rejected Rousseau’s idea that humankind’s problems de
rive from society’s distortions of nature. In Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s view, the
re is no alternative to such distortions. Each society must shape itself out
of nature’s raw material, he believed, with law and reason as the essential
tools.
This application of reason, he argued, created universals that could be found
across all cultures and times. He became known as a structuralist because of
his conviction that a structural unity underlies all of humanity’s mythmaki
ng, and he showed how those universal motifs played out in societies, even in
the ways a village was laid out.
For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, for example, every culture’s mythology was built arou
nd oppositions: hot and cold, raw and cooked, animal and human. And it is thr
ough these opposing “binary” concepts, he said, that humanity makes sense o
f the world.
This was quite different from what most anthropologists had been concerned wi
th. Anthropology had traditionally sought to disclose differences among cultu
res rather than discovering universals. It had been preoccupied not with abst
ract ideas but with the particularities of rituals and customs, collecting an
d cataloguing them.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s “structural” approach, seeking universals about the hu
man mind, cut against that notion of anthropology. He did not try to determin
e the various purposes served by a society’s practices and rituals. He was n
ever interested in the kind of fieldwork that anthropologists of a later gene
ration, like Clifford Geertz, took on, closely observing and analyzing a soci
ety as if from the inside. (He began “Tristes Tropiques” with the statement
“I hate traveling and explorers.”)
To his mind, as he wrote in “The Raw and the Cooked,” translated from “Le
Cru et le Cuit” (1964), he had taken “ethnographic research in the directio
n of psychology, logic, and philosophy.”
In radio talks for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1977 (published a
s “Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture”), Mr. Lévi-Strauss demo
nstrated how a structural examination of myth might proceed. He cited a repor
t that in 17th-century Peru, when the weather became exceedingly cold, a prie
st would summon all those who had been born feet first, or who had a harelip,
or who were twins. They were accused of being responsible for the weather an
d were ordered to repent, to correct the aberrations. But why these groups? W
hy harelips and twins?
Mr. Lévi-Strauss cited a series of North American myths that associate twins
with opposing natural forces: threat and promise, danger and expectation. On
e myth, for example, includes a magical hare, a rabbit, whose nose is split i
n a fight, resulting, literally, in a harelip, suggesting an incipient twinne
ss. With his injunctions, the Peruvian priest seemed aware of associations be
tween cosmic disorder and the latent powers of twins.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s ideas shook his field. But his critics were plentiful. T
hey attacked him for ignoring history and geography, using myths from one pla
ce and time to help illuminate myths from another, without demonstrating any
direct connection or influence.
In an influential critical survey of his work in 1970, the Cambridge Universi
ty anthropologist Edmund Leach wrote of Mr. Lévi-Strauss: “Even now, despit
e his immense prestige, the critics among his professional colleagues greatly
outnumber the disciples.”
Mr. Leach himself doubted whether Mr. Lévi-Strauss, during his fieldwork in
Brazil, could have conversed with “any of his native informants in their nat
ive language” or stayed long enough to confirm his first impressions. Some o
f Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s theoretical arguments, including his explanation of ca
nnibals and their tastes, have been challenged by empirical research.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss conceded that his strength was in his interpretations of wh
at he discovered and thought that his critics did not sufficiently credit the
cumulative impact of those speculations. “Why not admit it?” he once said
to an interviewer, Didier Eribon, in “Conversations with Lévi-Strauss” (19
88). “I was fairly quick to discover that I was more a man for the study tha
n for the field.”
Claude Lévi-Strauss was born on Nov. 28, 1908, in Belgium to Raymond Lévi-S
trauss and the former Emma Levy. He grew up in France, near Versailles, where
his grandfather was a rabbi and his father a portrait painter. His great-gra
ndfather Isaac Strauss was a Strasbourg violinist mentioned by Berlioz in his
memoirs. As a child, he loved to collect disparate objects and juxtapose the
m. “I had a passion for exotic curios,” he says in “Conversations.” “My
small savings all went to the secondhand shops.” A large collection of Jewis
h antiquities from his family’s collection, he said, was displayed in the Mu
sée de Cluny; others were looted after France fell to the Nazis in 1940.
From 1927 to 1932, Claude obtained degrees in law and philosophy at the Unive
rsity of Paris, then taught in a local high school, the Lycée Janson de Sail
ly, where his fellow teachers included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoi
r. He later became a professor of sociology at the French-influenced Universi
ty of São Paulo in Brazil.
Determined to become an anthropologist, he began making trips into the countr
y’s interior, accompanied by his wife, Dina Dreyfus, whom he married in 1932
. “I was envisaging a way of reconciling my professional education with my t
aste for adventure,” he said in “Conversations,” adding: “I felt I was re
living the adventures of the first 16th-century explorers.”
His marriage to Ms. Dreyfus ended in divorce, as did a subsequent marriage, i
n 1946, to Rose-Marie Ullmo, with whom he had a son, Laurent. In 1954 he marr
ied Monique Roman, and they, too, had a son, Matthieu. Besides Laurent, Mr. L
évi-Strauss is survived by his wife and Matthieu as well as Matthieu’s two
sons.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss left teaching in 1937 and devoted himself to fieldwork, ret
urning to France in 1939 for further study. But on the eve of war, he was dra
fted into the French Army to serve as a liaison with British troops. In “Tri
stes Tropiques,” he writes of his “disorderly retreat” from the Maginot Li
ne after Hitler’s invasion of France, fleeing in cattle trucks, sleeping in
“sheep folds.”
In 1941, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was invited to become a visiting professor at the
New School for Social Research in New York, with help from the Rockefeller Fo
undation. He called it “the most fruitful period of my life,” spending time
in the reading room of the New York Public Library and befriending the disti
nguished American anthropologist Franz Boas.
He also became part of a circle of artists and Surrealists, including Max Ern
st, André Breton and Sartre’s future mistress, Dolorès Vanetti. Ms. Vanett
i, who shared his “passion for objects,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss said in “Conver
sations,” regularly visited an antique shop on Third Avenue in Manhattan tha
t sold artifacts from the Pacific Northwest, leaving Mr. Lévi-Strauss with t
he “impression that all the essentials of humanity’s artistic treasures cou
ld be found in New York."
After the war, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was so intent on pursuing his studies in New
York that he was given the position of cultural attaché by the French gover
nment until 1947. On his return to France, he earned a doctorate in letters f
rom the University of Paris in 1948 and was associate curator at the Musée d
e l’Homme in Paris in 1948 and 1949. His first major book, “The Elementary
Structures of Kinship,” was published in 1949. (Several years later, the jur
y of the Prix Goncourt, France’s most famous literary award, said that it wo
uld have given the prize to “Tristes Tropiques,” his hybrid of memoir and a
nthropological travelogue, had it been fiction.)
After the Rockefeller Foundation gave the école Pratique des Hautes études
in Paris a grant to create a department of social and economic sciences, Mr.
Lévi-Strauss became the director of studies at the school, remaining in the
post from 1950 to 1974.
Other positions followed. From 1953 to 1960, he served as secretary general o
f the International Social Science Council at Unesco. In 1959, he was appoint
ed professor at the Collège de France. He was elected to the French Academy
in 1973. By 1960, Mr. Lévi-Strauss had founded L’Homme, a journal modeled o
n The American Anthropologist.
By the 1980s, structuralism as imagined by Mr. Lévi-Strauss had been displac
ed by French thinkers who became known as poststructuralists: writers like Mi
chel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. They rejected the idea of
timeless universals and argued that history and experience were far more impo
rtant in shaping human consciousness than universal laws.
“French society, and especially Parisian, is gluttonous,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss
responded. “Every five years or so, it needs to stuff something new in its
mouth. And so five years ago it was structuralism, and now it is something el
se. I practically don’t dare use the word ‘structuralist’ anymore, since i
t has been so badly deformed. I am certainly not the father of structuralism.
”
But Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s version of structuralism may end up surviving post-s
tructuralism, just as he survived most of its avatars. His monumental four-vo
lume work, “Mythologiques,” may ensure his legacy, as a creator of mytholog
ies if not their explicator.
The final volume ends by suggesting that the logic of mythology is so powerfu
l that myths almost have a life independent from the peoples who tell them. I
n his view, they speak through the medium of humanity and become, in turn, th
e tools with which humanity comes to terms with the world’s greatest mystery
: the possibility of not being, the burden of mortality.
Nadim Audi contributed reporting from Paris.
