Claude Lévi-Strauss: biography of this French anthropologist

Claude Lévi-Strauss He was a French anthropologist and one of the most prominent social scientists of the 20th century.

He is best known for being the founder of structural anthropology and for his theory of structuralism. Furthermore, he was a key figure in the development of modern social and cultural anthropology, and had a great influence outside his discipline.

In this article we present the figure of Claude Lévi-Strauss, his life and career, as well as his main theoretical and philosophical contributions.

Claude Lévi-Strauss: life and career

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908 - 2009) was born into a French Jewish family in Brussels and later raised in Paris. He studied philosophy at the historic Sorbonne University. Several years after his graduation, the French Ministry of Culture invited him to teach as a visiting professor at sociology at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, a position he held as a teacher, after moving to this country, until 1939.

In 1939, Lévi-Strauss resigned to undertake anthropological fieldwork in indigenous communities in the regions of Mato Grosso and the Brazilian Amazon, initiating the beginning of his research on indigenous groups of the Americas. The experience would have a profound effect on his future, paving the way for an innovative career as a researcher and intellectual. He achieved literary fame for his 1955 book "Tristes Tópicos," in which he recounted part of his time in Brazil.

Lévi-Strauss's academic career began to take off when World War II occurred and he was fortunate enough to escape from France to the United States, thanks to a teaching position at the New Research School in 1941. While in New York he joined a community of French intellectuals who successfully found refuge in the United States, amid the fall of his home country and the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Europe.

Lévi-Strauss remained in the United States until 1948, joining a community of scholars and artists. Jews who escaped persecution which included the linguist Roman Jakobson and the surrealist painter André Breton. In addition, he helped found the Escuela Libre de Altos Estudios (French School of Free Studies) with other refugees, and later worked as a cultural attaché at the French embassy in Washington D.C.

Lévi-Strauss returned to France in 1948, where he received his doctorate from the Sorbonne. He quickly established himself within the ranks of French intellectuals and was director of studies at the School of Free Studies at the University of Paris from 1950 to 1974. He became president of Social Anthropology at the famous Collège de France in 1959 and held the position until 1982.

Structuralism

Claude Lévi-Strauss formulated his famous concept of structural anthropology during his stay in the United States. In fact, this theory is unusual in anthropology as it is inextricably linked to the writing and thinking of a scholar. Structuralism offered a distinctive new way of approaching the study of culture, and it was based on the academic and methodological approaches of cultural anthropology and linguistics structural.

Lévi-Strauss argued that the human brain is wired to organize the world in terms of key organizational structures, allowing people to order and interpret experience. Because these structures are universal, all cultural systems are inherently logical. Different systems of understanding are simply used to explain the world around them, resulting in the surprising diversity of myths, beliefs, and practices. According to Lévi-Strauss, the task of the anthropologist is to explore and explain the logic within a particular cultural system.

Structuralism used the analysis of cultural practices and beliefs, as well as the fundamental structures of the language and linguistic classification, to identify the universal building blocks of thought and culture humans. This philosophical current offered a fundamentally unifying and egalitarian interpretation of people from all over the world and from all cultural backgrounds. Lévi-Strauss argued that all people use the same basic categories and organizational systems to make sense of the human experience.

Lévi-Strauss's concept of structural anthropology aimed to unify, at the level of thought and interpretation, the experiences of the groups cultures that live in highly variable contexts and systems, from the indigenous community that he studied in Brazil to the French intellectuals of the Second War World. The egalitarian principles of structuralism were an important intervention because they recognized all people as fundamentally equal, regardless of culture, ethnicity, or other socially categories built.

The theory of myth

Lévi-Strauss developed a deep interest in Native American oral beliefs and traditions during his stay in the United States. Anthropologist Franz Boas and his students pioneered the ethnographic studies of indigenous groups in North America, compiling vast collections of myths. Lévi-Strauss, in turn, sought to synthesize them in a study that spans myths from the Arctic to the tip of South America..

These investigations culminated in his work "Mythological", a four-volume study in which Lévi-Strauss argued that myths could be studied to reveal universal oppositions (such as death against life or nature against culture) that organized human interpretations and beliefs about the world.

Lévi-Strauss presented structuralism as an innovative approach to the study of myths. One of his key concepts in this regard was "bricolage", a concept he borrowed from the French to refer to a creation that is based on a diverse variety of parts. The "bricoleur", or the individual involved in this creative act, makes use of what is available. For structuralism, both concepts are used to show the parallelism between Western scientific thought and indigenous approaches; both are fundamentally strategic and logical, and they simply make use of different parts.

The kinship theory

Claude Lévi-Strauss's earlier work focused on kinship and social organization, as described in his 1949 book, "The elementary structures of kinship." In this sense, Lévi-Strauss tried to understand how the categories of social organization, such as kinship and class, were formed. He understood these concepts as social and cultural phenomena, not as natural (or preconceived) categories; however, the question he asked himself was: what caused them?

Lévi-Strauss's writings focused on the role of exchange and reciprocity in human relationships. He also became interested in the power of the incest taboo to push people to marry outside their family, and the subsequent alliances that emerge from these situations.

Rather than addressing the incest taboo as a biologically based product or assuming bloodlines must be traced Through family descent, Lévi-Strauss focused on the power of marriage to create powerful and lasting alliances between families

Criticisms of Lévi-Strauss's structuralism

Like any other social theory, structuralism was not without criticism. Later researchers broke away from the rigidity of Lévi-Strauss's universal structures to adopt a more interpretive (or hermeneutical) approach to cultural analysis.

Similarly, the focus on underlying structures potentially obscured the nuances and complexity of lived experience and everyday life. Marxist thinkers also criticized the lack of attention to material conditions, such as economic resources, property, and class.

Another criticism of Lévi-Strauss's structuralism came from Clifford Geertz, one of the greatest exponents of symbolic anthropology. Geertz criticized that his doctrine did not take into account historical factors and that it underestimated the emotional dimension of the human being, and he questioned the very possibility of subjecting to a closed systematic analysis and according to rules, the patterns of conduct and human beliefs of a polymorphous character.

In short, Geertz's proposal consisted of deepening local knowledge, which, according to him, helps us to get in touch with the other. According to him, the important thing was not to study whether or not culture has a grammatical meaning or a structure where man can act, but to know its semiotic meaning.

For Geertz, the human being is an animal inserted in webs of meaning and that is why the question does not make sense to know if culture is structured behavior or a structure of the mind, or even both together mixed.

Bibliographic references:

• Alexander, J. C. (2008). Clifford Geertz and the strong program: The human sciences and cultural sociology. Cultural Sociology, 2 (2), 157-168.

• Lévi-Strauss, C. (1984a): Structural Anthropology. Editorial Eudeba. Buenos Aires.

• Lévi-Strauss, C. (1984b): Wild Thought. Fund of Economic Culture. Mexico.

• Lévi-Strauss, C. (1991a): The elementary structures of kinship. Paidos. Barcelona.