Claude Lévi-Strauss

Lévi-Strauss was born in Brussels to a French Jewish family of artists and grew up in Paris, where his father painted portraits. He studied law and philosophy at the Sorbonne, passed the agrégation in 1931, taught in lycées for two years, tired of philosophy's abstraction, and in 1935 accepted a post in sociology at the University of São Paulo, from which he made several expeditions to Indian peoples of the interior, the Caduveo, Bororo and Nambikwara, experiences that twenty years later became Tristes Tropiques.

He returned to France for military service in 1939, was stripped of his post in 1940 by the Vichy government as a Jew, and in 1941 escaped via Martinique to New York, where he taught at the New School. There he met the linguist Roman Jakobson and found his method in structural linguistics: like phonemes, the elements of culture have no meaning in themselves, only in their oppositions and relations. After the war he served as cultural attaché at the French embassy in Washington, returned to Paris in 1948, and in 1949 published The Elementary Structures of Kinship, arguing that the incest taboo is the passage from nature to culture and that marriage is a rule-system for the exchange of women between groups.

Tristes Tropiques (1955), a masterpiece fusing travel narrative, autobiography, ethnography and philosophy, begins 'I hate travelling and explorers' and ends by mourning the West's destruction of other cultures; the Goncourt jury regretted it was not a novel. In 1959 he became professor of social anthropology at the Collège de France. The Savage Mind (1962) argued that so-called primitive thought is not pre-logical but a 'science of the concrete', classifying with sensory materials as rigorously as any science; its last chapter attacked Sartre's philosophy of history, and that year structuralism displaced existentialism as the reigning current in Paris.

From 1964 to 1971 he wrote the four volumes of Mythologiques, analysing over eight hundred myths of the Americas and showing that myths transform into one another by rules like those of music: 'myths think themselves in men'. Elected to the Académie française in 1973, he resisted in old age the treatment of structuralism as a philosophy, calling it only a method. He lived to a hundred, and at his death the French president called him 'a tireless humanist'. Foucault, Lacan, Barthes and Derrida all began from his structuralism and all turned to criticise it.