Claude Lévi-Strauss

About the author

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) was a Belgian-born French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work proved foundational to structuralism and structural anthropology. Holding the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France from 1959 to 1982 and elected to the Académie française in 1973, he argued that the "savage" and "civilized" minds share identical underlying structures — a thesis memorably developed in his 1955 masterwork Tristes Tropiques. His influence extended well beyond anthropology into philosophy and the broader humanities, earning him the 1986 International Nonino Prize among numerous other honors.