Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in 1908 in Brussels, Belgium, and grew up in Paris in a cultured family of Alsatian Jewish descent. He studied law and philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he passed the agrégation in philosophy. Dissatisfied with academic philosophy, he accepted a position teaching sociology at the University of São Paulo in Brazil in 1935, which led to the fieldwork expeditions among indigenous peoples of the Mato Grosso and the Amazon that would transform his intellectual life. He fled France during World War II and spent the war years in New York, where his encounters with Roman Jakobson and structural linguistics proved decisive for his intellectual development. After the war, he returned to Paris and produced the works that established structural anthropology as a major intellectual movement, including The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Structural Anthropology, The Savage Mind, and the four-volume Mythologiques. This author hub collects 1 work in the Canon Compass ranking, led by Tristes Tropiques.