Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1908—2009) French anthropologist and key proponent of structuralism. He was born in Brussels, but his family moved to France when he was 6. He went to the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, but elected not to take the entrance exam to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure and instead studied law and philosophy at the University of Paris, graduating in 1932. In 1929 he began teacher training at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly, along with Beauvoir, Simone de and Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. On graduation, he taught philosophy without enthusiasm until 1935 when, at the suggestion of Céléstin Bouglé, he relocated to Brazil to take up a position as visiting Professor of Sociology as part of a French cultural mission. Based at the University of São Paulo, Lévi-Strauss used his time in Brazil to do ethnographic fieldwork among the indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin and the Mato Grosso. He lived briefly among the Caduveo, Nambikwara, Tupi-Kawahib, and Bororo peoples, collecting information about their kinship structures, belief systems, and religious symbols. A first-hand account of his experiences in Brazil (including his post-war return visit), which by his own estimation transformed him into an anthropologist, can be found in Tristes Tropiques (1955), translated as Tristes Tropiques (1974), which was an international bestseller. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Lévi-Strauss felt duty-bound to return to France, which he duly did. He was assigned to a liaison position on the Maginot line. When France surrendered he resumed teaching at a Lycée in Montpellier, but because of his Jewish ancestry he was forced to resign because of the race laws imposed by the Nazis. In 1941, he was fortunate enough to be offered a post at the New School for Social Research in New York and gain both an admission to the US and exit from France (others in the same situation, such as Benjamin, Walter, were not so lucky). Lévi-Strauss made several important connections while in New York, which were to prove highly influential on his research. Perhaps most important of all, he met the similarly exiled Russian linguist Jakobson, Roman, considered by many to be (along with Lévi-Strauss himself) one of the founding figures of structuralism. He also met the great American anthropologist Franz Boas who, in a strange twist of fate, died in Lévi-Strauss’s arms after suffering a heart attack during a dinner at the Faculty House at Columbia University. From 1946—7 Lévi-Strauss worked as a cultural attaché at the French Embassy in Washington DC. He at last returned to Paris in 1948, initially to a job as associate director of the Musée de l’Homme. In the same year, he submitted his minor and major theses, respectively: ‘La Vie familiale et sociale des indiens Nambikwara’ (‘The Family and Social Life of the Nambikwara Indians’) and ‘Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté’ (‘The Elementary Structures of Kinship’). The latter was published in 1949, it was translated into English in 1967, but the translation was so controversial it was retranslated in 1990. Simone de Beauvoir famously read a draft copy of it and pronounced it a ‘brilliant awakening’ of sociology in a long review in Sartre, Jean-Paul’s journal Les Temps modernes. She even claimed to perceive in it a profound compatibility with the existentialism project, a claim Lévi-Strauss himself laid to rest in La Pensée sauvage (1962), translated as The Savage Mind (1966). In 1950 Lévi-Strauss was appointed to a professorship at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, a position he retained until his elevation to the Collège de France in 1959. It was, however, the publication in 1955 of the short essay ‘The Structural Study of Myth’ which transformed Lévi-Strauss from obscure anthropologist to paradigm-changing intellectual. Republished in the first volume of Anthropologie Structurale (1958), translated as Structural Anthropology (1963), this essay was one of the inaugural works of the analytic method that would come to be known as structuralism. Utilizing the insights of his friend Jakobson, as well as the work of Nikolai Troubetzkoy, Lévi-Strauss reasoned that myth could be treated ‘like a language’, i.e. as a complex system of relations between a variety of different types of elements. Languages may vary widely in terms of grammar and vocabulary, but they have in common the fact of grammar and vocabulary. Understanding this is the basic point of structuralism. From this point of view, which departs radically from the accepted anthropological practice of only going with what can be empirically shown, it isn’t the specific content of a myth that is important, but the set of relations it contains between myth elements, which for Lévi-Strauss are recurrent across time and space. Using this method, Lévi-Strauss is able to show that versions of the Oedipal myth can be found in practically every culture. His question, then, is why do cultures need myths? His answer, simplified a great deal, is that myths provide symbolic solutions to real problems; myths are a culture’s way of resolving the contradictions inherent in its own rules. This thesis has been adopted by Jameson, Fredric in Signatures of the Visible (1992) to analyse contemporary culture. At the peak of his fame in 1966, Lévi-Strauss was invited to a conference at Johns Hopkins University, to which was also invited the relatively unknown young philosopher Derrida, Jacques, who offered a devastating critique of Lévi-Strauss and it is now legend that on that day post-structuralism was born. Devastating though the critique was, Lévi-Strauss’s career did not come to an end, though his influence did decline. He nevertheless continued to publish prolifically for the next three decades, putting out several more books enlarging upon the ideas laid down in Structural Anthropology. Further Reading: E. Leach Claude Lévi-Strauss (rev. ed. 1989). J. Sturrock Structuralism (1986).