Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist who did fieldwork among the peoples of the Brazilian interior in the 1930s, spent the war in New York, where he learned structural linguistics from Roman Jakobson, and applied it to kinship, totemism and myth, arguing that the human mind everywhere works by the same binary oppositions. Structural Anthropology of 1958 collects the essays that founded structuralism and made it the method of a generation in France; Tristes Tropiques is the memoir; the four-volume Mythologiques the great work. He lived to a hundred and said he belonged to a century that was over.