Lévi-strauss 39; Structuralism Pdf

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LviStrauss argued that the "savage" mind had the same structures as the "civilized" mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere.[7][8] These observations culminated in his famous book Tristes Tropiques (1955) which established his position as one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought. As well as sociology, his ideas reached into many fields in the humanities, including philosophy. Structuralism has been defined as "the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity."[4] He won the 1986 International Nonino Prize in Italy.

Gustave Claude Lvi-Strauss was born in 1908 to French-Jewish (turned agnostic) parents who were living in Brussels, where his father was working as a portrait painter at the time.[9][10][11] He grew up in Paris, living on a street of the upscale 16th arrondissement named after the artist Claude Lorrain, whose work he admired and later wrote about.[12] During the First World War, from age 6 to 10, he lived with his maternal grandfather, who was the Rabbi of Versailles.[9][13][14] Despite his religious environment early on, Claude Lvi-Strauss was an atheist or agnostic, at least in his adult life.[15][16]

From 1918 to 1925 he studied at Lyce Janson de Sailly high school, receiving a baccalaureate in June 1925 (age of 16).[9] In his last year (1924), he was introduced to philosophy, including the works of Marx and Kant, and began shifting to the political left (however, unlike many other socialists, he never became communist).[17] From 1925, he spent the next two years at the prestigious Lyce Condorcet preparing for the entrance exam to the highly selective cole normale suprieure. However, for reasons that are not entirely clear, he decided not to take the exam. In 1926, he went to Sorbonne in Paris, studying law and philosophy, as well as engaging in socialist politics and activism. In 1929, he opted for philosophy over law (which he found boring), and from 1930 to 1931, put politics aside to focus on preparing for the agrgation in philosophy, in order to qualify as a professor. In 1931, he passed the agrgation, coming in 3rd place, and youngest in his class at age 22. By this time, the Great Depression had hit France, and Lvi-Strauss found himself needing to provide not only for himself but his parents as well.[17]

In 1935, after a few years of secondary school teaching, he took up a last-minute offer to be part of a French cultural mission to Brazil in which he would serve as a visiting professor of sociology at the University of So Paulo while his then-wife, Dina, served as a visiting professor of ethnology.

The couple lived and did their anthropological work in Brazil from 1935 to 1939. During this time, while he was a visiting professor of sociology, Claude undertook his only ethnographic fieldwork. He accompanied Dina, a trained ethnographer in her own right, who was also a visiting professor at the University of So Paulo, where they conducted research forays into the Mato Grosso and the Amazon Rainforest. They first studied the Guaycuru and Boror Indian tribes, staying among them for a few days. In 1938, they returned for a second, more than half-year-long expedition to study the Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib societies. At this time, his wife had an eye infection that prevented her from completing the study, which he concluded. This experience cemented Lvi-Strauss's professional identity as an anthropologist. Edmund Leach suggests, from Lvi-Strauss's own accounts in Tristes Tropiques, that he could not have spent more than a few weeks in any one place and was never able to converse easily with any of his native informants in their native language, which is uncharacteristic of anthropological research methods of participatory interaction with subjects to gain a full understanding of a culture.

A day will come when the thought that to feed themselves, men of the past raised and massacred living beings and complacently exposed their shredded flesh in displays shall no doubt inspire the same repulsion as that of the travellers of the 16th and 17th century facing cannibal meals of savage American primitives in America, Oceania, Asia or Africa.

Lvi-Strauss returned to France in 1939 to take part in the war effort and was assigned as a liaison agent to the Maginot Line. After the French capitulation in 1940, he was employed at a lyce in Montpellier, but then was dismissed under the Vichy racial laws (Lvi-Strauss's family, originally from Alsace, was of Jewish ancestry).[18][19]

Around that time, he and his first wife separated. She stayed behind and worked in the French resistance, while he managed to escape Vichy France by boat to Martinique,[20] from where he was finally able to continue travelling. (Victor Serge describes conversations with Lvi-Strauss aboard the freighter Capitaine Paul-Lemerle from Marseilles to Martinique in his Notebooks.).[21]

In 1941, he was offered a position at the New School for Social Research in New York City and granted admission to the United States. A series of voyages brought him, via South America, to Puerto Rico, where he was investigated by the FBI after German letters in his luggage aroused the suspicions of customs agents. Lvi-Strauss spent most of the war in New York City. Along with Jacques Maritain, Henri Focillon, and Roman Jakobson, he was a founding member of the cole Libre des Hautes tudes, a sort of university-in-exile for French academics.

The war years in New York were formative for Lvi-Strauss in several ways. His relationship with Jakobson helped shape his theoretical outlook (Jakobson and Lvi-Strauss are considered to be two of the central figures on which structuralist thought is based).[22] In addition, Lvi-Strauss was also exposed to the American anthropology espoused by Franz Boas, who taught at Columbia University. In 1942, while having dinner at the Faculty House at Columbia, Boas died in Lvi-Strauss's arms.[23] This intimate association with Boas gave his early work a distinctive American inclination that helped facilitate its acceptance in the U.S.

In 2008, he became the first member of the Acadmie franaise to reach the age of 100 and one of the few living authors to have his works published in the Bibliothque de la Pliade. On the death of Maurice Druon on 14 April 2009, he became the dean of the Acadmie, its longest-serving member.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy described him as "one of the greatest ethnologists of all time".[25] Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister, said Lvi-Strauss "broke with an ethnocentric vision of history and humanity ... At a time when we are trying to give meaning to globalization, to build a fairer and more humane world, I would like Claude Lvi-Strauss's universal echo to resonate more strongly".[26] In a similar vein, a statement by Lvi-Strauss was broadcast on National Public Radio in the remembrance produced by All Things Considered on 3 November 2009: "There is today a frightful disappearance of living species, be they plants or animals. And it's clear that the density of human beings has become so great, if I can say so, that they have begun to poison themselves. And the world which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world that I like."[citation needed] The Daily Telegraph said in its obituary that Lvi-Strauss was "one of the dominating postwar influences in French intellectual life and the leading exponent of Structuralism in the social sciences".[27] Permanent secretary of the Acadmie franaise Hlne Carrre d'Encausse said: "He was a thinker, a philosopher.... We will not find another like him".[28]

The Elementary Structures of Kinship was published in 1949 and quickly came to be regarded as one of the most important anthropological works on kinship. It was even reviewed favorably by Simone de Beauvoir, who saw it as an important statement of the position of women in non-Western cultures. A play on the title of Durkheim's famous Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Lvi-Strauss' Elementary Structures re-examined how people organized their families by examining the logical structures that underlay relationships rather than their contents. While British anthropologists such as Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown argued that kinship was based on descent from a common ancestor, Lvi-Strauss argued that kinship was based on the alliance between two families that formed when women from one group married men from another.[29]

Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lvi-Strauss continued to publish and experienced considerable professional success. On his return to France, he became involved with the administration of the CNRS and the Muse de l'Homme before finally becoming a professor (directeur d'tudes) of the fifth section of the cole Pratique des Hautes tudes, the 'Religious Sciences' section where Marcel Mauss was previously professor, the title of which chair he renamed "Comparative Religion of Non-Literate Peoples".

While Lvi-Strauss was well known in academic circles, in 1955 he became one of France's best-known intellectuals by publishing Tristes Tropiques in Paris that year by Plon (best-known translated into English in 1973, published by Penguin). Essentially, this book was a memoir detailing his time as a French expatriate throughout the 1930s and his travels. Lvi-Strauss combined exquisitely beautiful prose, dazzling philosophical meditation, and ethnographic analysis of the Amazonian peoples to produce a masterpiece. The organizers of the Prix Goncourt, for instance, lamented that they were not able to award Lvi-Strauss the prize because Tristes Tropiques was nonfiction.[citation needed]

Lvi-Strauss was named to a chair in social anthropology at the Collge de France in 1959. At roughly the same time he published Structural Anthropology, a collection of his essays that provided both examples and programmatic statements about structuralism. At the same time as he was laying the groundwork for an intellectual program, he began a series of institutions to establish anthropology as a discipline in France, including the Laboratory for Social Anthropology where new students could be trained, and a new journal, l'Homme, for publishing the results of their research.

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