Posted on 11/03/2009 9:34:00 AM PST by Borges
PARIS – Claude Levi-Strauss, widely considered the father of modern anthropology for work that included theories about commonalities between tribal and industrial societies, has died. He was 100.
The French intellectual was regarded as having reshaped the field of anthropology, introducing the concept of structuralism — concepts about common patterns of behavior 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, Levi-Strauss authored literary and anthropological classics including "Tristes Tropiques" (1955), "The Savage Mind" (1963) and "The Raw and the Cooked" (1964).
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Wait, Gold Rush of 49 now that’s better, my mind
is slipping.
<Come on people where are the comments on Structural Anthropology!
LOL! Really, the guy was a major deal in anthro. I’m sorry to read of his passing; tho I admit to thinking he must have died years ago.
Everyone should take a class or two in cultural anthropology. Maybe some FReepers wouldn’t issue some of the idiotic statements that they do if they understood people and culture better.
There must be something to those de Havilland jeans !
(Claude LEVI-STRAUSS thread :)
RIP.
Dang it! This guy owed me $20!
His work on basic patterns in myths was very good, in the sense that you’d read three or four paragraphs and love the insights, but then none of it added up to anything.
Myths comparisons also brought up surprising corrrespondences, and opposites, reverses. just like fairy tales around the world have correspondences and then also strange reversals.
But somehow there was no there there.
Still, ‘From Honey To Ashes’ was absorbing. Also ‘the Raw And The Cooked’.
He did field world among South American tribes, when he was young, but after his initial field work the rest of his life he used myths recorded by others.
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I used one of his ideas in a paper on lithic technology. My archaeology professor thought it was interesting as Structural Anth is strongly tied to the Cultural Anth part of the subject.
I must admit I didn’t think he was still alive. As others have said, I might have to dust off one of his books and re-read it.
People, he was not the Levi Strauss who emigrated from Germany and created blue jeans, who died in 1902. He was Claude Levi-Strauss, the famed anthropologist from France!!!
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