Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009)

Levi-strauss, Claude

Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theories have been fundamental to the renewal of modern anthropology, in particular the study of kinship systems, totemism, classification, and mythology. Throughout his works, he has sought to understand the functioning of so-called “primitive” modes of thought. In opposition to the theories formulated by influential predecessors such as Lucien LévyBruhl, he has revealed ...

CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS: The Man and His Works

Doja The shoulders of our giants : Claude Levi - Strauss and his legacy in current ́ anthropology

In the course of anti-structuralist criticism, the main thrust of LéviStrauss’s epistemological approach seems to have been lost, to the collective detriment of social sciences and anthropology. By its monumental character, Lévi-Strauss’s work evokes that of the founders of anthropology, whereas, by the way in which it puts in relation the cultural and the mental, it anticipates a theoretical a...

Eighteenth-Century Matrimonial Strategies and Emigration to the Americas The House of Berrio in La Bastide Clairence*

In a 1983 lecture at the Sorbonne entitled “History and Ethnology,” Claude LéviStrauss offered an example of the connection between these two disciplines based on his work on “house-based societies,” in which he compared eleventh-century Japan, the Fiji Islands, and medieval Europe.1 In his earlier work, Lévi-Strauss categorized kinship systems by using combinations of binary opposites, such as...

Review of Bertel Nathhorst, Formal or Structural Studies of Traditional Tales: The Usefulness of Some Methodological Proposals Advanced by Vladimir Propp, Alan Dundes, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Edmund Leach

While formalism and structuralism became key concepts in linguistics, literary criticism, and the social sciences during the first half of the twentieth century, they appeared in folklore research only in the late fifties and early sixties, as a direct result of the publication of Claude Lévi-Strauss' "The Structural Study of Myth" ( Journal of American Folklore, 68 [1955], 428-444) and the 195...