FRANCE WAS paying tribute last night to one of its greatest intellectuals, the social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who has died aged 100.
The structuralist thinker, who devoted his five-decade career to the study of the human species around the world, is credited with having revolutionised the study of anthropology for the 20th century.
A statement from Paris’s School for the Advanced Studies of Social Sciences said he died at the weekend, less than a month before his 101st birthday.
The foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said Lévi-Strauss’s career had stood out not only for its scholarly accomplishments but also for its moral convictions. “[He] broke with an ethnocentric vision of history and humanity,” he said. “At a time when we are trying to give meaning to globalisation, to build a fairer and more humane world, I would like Claude Lévi-Strauss’s universal echo to resonate more strongly.”
Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, perpetual secretary of the French Academy, of which Lévi-Strauss was a member, praised his “extraordinary openness of spirit”, adding: “He was a thinker, a philosopher . . . We will not find another like him.”
Born into a wealthy French-Jewish family in Brussels in 1908, Lévi-Strauss went on to become one of the most influential thinkers of his generation in Europe. His structuralist method, in which he searched for the underlying patterns in outwardly diverse social rituals and mythology, led him to study the differences – and similarities – between western countries and Native American and Amazonian tribes.
His career blossomed with the publication in 1955 of Tristes Tropiques, a book hailed by many as one of the greatest works of the century. In it he predicted the eventual demise of the human race. His theories, espoused in a series of acclaimed publications, including The Savage Mindand the four-part Mythologiques, led to his taking his place in the pantheon of France's great 20th century thinkers.
He was cited by fellow thinkers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, locked horns with Jean-Paul Sartre over the existentialist’s notion of personal freedom, and was praised by Simone de Beauvoir for his then radical interpretation of women’s role in human kinship.
In 1970, the Cambridge University anthropologist Edmund Leach described Lévi-Strauss as “the most distinguished exponent of this particular academic trade to be found anywhere outside the English-speaking world”.
Old age led him to regard humanity with the "serene pessimism" which he characterised as his attitude to life. Asked by French radio on his 100th birthday last year, he said he would have preferred to let the occasion pass unmarked. "Birthdays at this age no longer have any raison d'êtrebecause there is no reason to celebrate a further step into physical and intellectual degeneration," he said.
Perhaps in a reflection of this desire for a lack of show, Philippe Descola, who succeeds Lévi-Strauss at the head of the social anthropology laboratory at the prestigious Collège de France, said last night his funeral had already taken place in Burgundy, before his death had been made public. – ( Guardianservice)