Culture & Religion — November 4, 2009

Levi Strauss

French anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss, the founder of structuralist anthropology, has died aged 100.

“Renowned French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss has died, aged 100. One of the most influential French intellectuals of the 20th Century, he founded the structuralist school of anthropology in the 1950s,” reports the BBC. “Levi-Strauss’s books include Tristes Tropiques – a 1955 biographical book regarded as a classic – as well as The Savage Mind and The Raw and the Cooked. In a tribute, French President Nicolas Sarkozy called Levi-Strauss ‘one of the greatest ethnologists of all time’. Levi-Strauss applied the structural approach pioneered by linguistics to anthropology, arguing that family relations and belief systems are best analysed as complex sets of interrelated parts.”

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with

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