Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss dies aged 100

Famous French anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has died aged 100, his publisher announced. He passed away during the night from Saturday to Sunday.

REUTERS - French intellectual Claude Levi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology, died at the age of 100, his publishing house Plon announced.

Levi-Strauss, best known for his 1955 memoir and masterpiece, "Tristes Tropiques", died on Saturday. He would have turned 101 on Nov. 28.

"He was France's greatest scientist," said writer Jean d'Ormesson, fellow member of the Academie Francaise, the venerable institution which brings together France’s intellectual elite.

After completing a brilliant academic curriculum – excelling notably in geology, law and

philosophy -- Levi-Strauss was posted in Brazil as a professor in 1935. It was there that he discovered his vocation for anthropology.

He conducted several expeditions into remote areas of the Amazon rainforest and the Mato Grosso to study the customs of local tribes, and began developing theories and methods that would later have a profound impact on his field.

He returned to France and was drafted in the French army at the start of World War Two. He fled to the United States until 1944 when living in France as a Jew became impossible under the Nazi occupation.

Over the following years, he held a number of prestigious scientific posts in Paris and New York, and began churning out his influential scientific papers.

"I hate travelling"

In particular, he used tribal customs and myths to show that human behaviour is based on logical systems which may vary from society to society, but possess a common sub-structure.

These findings, which challenged the notion that Western European culture was somehow unique or superior, resonated with the ideas of opponents of colonialism.  Levi-Strauss gained a following beyond the circle of professional anthropologists.

He argued that linguistics, communications and mathematical logic could be used to reveal fundamental social systems.

The exceptionally erudite Levi-Strauss was not the most accessible of thinkers and many of his works are impenetrable to laymen, but he managed to transcend the esoteric bounds of science with "Tristes Tropiques".

A detailed account of social behaviour among Brazilian tribes, "Tristes Tropiques" was set apart from the author's other writings by its autobiographical content.

While the work's opening sentence -- "I hate travelling and explorers" -- was hardly designed to win the approval of his scientific peers, literature lovers considered it a triumph.

The academy that awards France's most prestigious literary prize, the Goncourt, announced the night before making public their choice that year that they regretted being unable to choose "Tristes Tropiques" because it was not a novel.

He achieved France's highest recognition for a scientist in 1973, when he was elected to the Academie Francaise. He also received numerous honours from foreign universities and governments, including Brazil.

Date created : 2009-11-03