R.I.P. Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss died on November 1, 2009, a few weeks before his 101st birthday. The death was announced today. The Daily Telegraph said in its obituary that Lévi-Strauss was “one of the dominating postwar influences in French intellectual life and the leading exponent of Structuralism in the social sciences”.

Lévi-Strauss sought to apply the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure to anthropology. At the time, the family was traditionally considered the fundamental object of analysis, but was seen primarily as a self-contained unit consisting of a husband, a wife, and their children. Nephews, cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents were all treated as secondary. But Lévi-Strauss argued that, akin to Saussure’s notion of linguistic value, families acquire determinate identities only through relations with one another. Thus he inverted the classical view of anthropology, putting the secondary family members first and insisting on analyzing the relations between units instead of the units themselves