French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has died at age 100, according to teh news.
Lévi-Strauss remains a towering figure in the history of modern anthropology, having stimulated the application of linguistic principles towards comprehension of individual and group identity. The relationships between people, rather than simply the people themselves, were viewed as the mechanism for understanding social cohesion and cultural change.
Lévi-Strauss is notable for his analyses of myths - their common themes shared across cultures and their theoretically fundamental components, which he described as existing in binary opposition to one another. By this, he suggested that the human mind works by process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis - a continual process of mediating relationships between subjects and functions. Lévi-Strauss was influenced by Hegel, Marx, and others.
This structural view of human interaction trumped in some quarters an earlier functionalist view, in which human behavior and institutions were explained simply by the obvious roles they played in society. The structuralist view considers human culture as an evolving pattern of coded, symbolic communication, a vastly more complex system than one that simply responds to existential demands.
Born in Brussels in 1908, Lévi-Strauss spent formative years in tropical South America before traveling to the United States and France, where he taught and later held a chair at the Académie Française.
There is more information on his life and work here,here, and at your local library.
Reading structural anthropology at a young age opened my eyes to a world larger in construction than I had imagined; the complex realm of human behavior, for me, has not been the same since. Lévi-Strauss' thought has influenced linguistics, economics, applied social theory, and politics. And he wrote a lovely description of a sunset:
When the sky is first lit up by the setting sun (just as, in the theatre, the sudden blaze of the footlights indicates that the play is about to begin) the peasant stops dead in his tracks, the fisherman ties up his boat, and the savage winks an eye as he sits by a fire that grows pale. Remembrance is a source of profound pleasure though not to the extent that it is complete, for few would wish to live over again , literally, sufferings and exhaustions which are, none the less, a pleasure to look back upon. Remembrance is life itself, but it has another quality. And so it is that when the sun lowers itself towards the polished surface of a flat calm at sea, like a coin thrown down by a miser in the heavens, or when its disc outlines the mountain-tops like a metal sheet at once hard and lacy, then Man has a brief vision, a hallucination, one might say of the indecipherable forces, the vapours and fulgurations whose obscure conflicts he has glimpsed vaguely, within the depths of himself, from time to time during the day.