Great scholar

Two French presidents and leading scholars around the world paid their respects to Claude Levi-Strauss Tuesday after news of his death emerged.

President Nicolas Sarkozy paid "homage to a tireless humanist, a curious academic who was always in search of new knowledge … a man free of any sectarianism or indoctrination."

The French leader described Levi-Strauss as a "very great scholar, always open to the world, who created modern anthropology and raised the reputation of French human and social sciences to its highest level."

Sarkozy's predecessor Jacques Chirac, who opened the Paris museum of tribal arts at Levi-Strauss' side in 2006, called him "a thinker who dedicated his life to understanding and explaining cultures, their strengths, their diversity, their greatness and their fragility."

Levi-Strauss died last Friday and was buried at a private service in the Burgundy village of Lignerolles, where he had a house, colleagues said.

"Two years ago he broke his hip and he had been very tired ever since. He died at a grand old age," said Philippe Desacola, his successor as head of the social anthropology laboratory at the College of France research institute.

The deep patterns of culture

The Brussels-born Levi-Strauss was best known as one of the founders of structuralism, and was the first to apply an analytical method, traditionally used for the arts, to the study of anthropology.

In a string of important works published in the 1950's and 1960's, including Structural Anthropology, Tristes Tropiques, The Savage Mind and The Raw and the Cooked, Levi-Strauss revolutionized the study of anthropology by considering culture as a system of symbolic communication.

He believed that culture could, and should, be examined with the analytical methods used in the analysis of novels, political speeches and cinema.

"A really scientific analysis must be real, simplifying, and explanatory," he wrote in Structural Anthropology.

One of the conclusions of this work was that there is no fundamental difference between the belief systems and myths of so-called "primitive" races and those of modern Western societies. His purpose was to uncover the hidden, unconscious patterns of thought which he believed determined the outer reality of human culture and relationships.

A restless century

Levi-Strauss was born in Brussels in 1908, the son of French Jewish parents from the German-speaking region of Alsace. He studied philosophy before travelling to Brazil in 1935, where he became a professor at the University of Sao Paolo.

He studied the tribes of the Mato Grosso and the Amazonian rainforest and returned to France in 1939. He was conscripted, but after the Nazi invasion he was, as a Jew, forced to flee to the United States, where he taught while awaiting his chance to return home and restart his career.

He was given the chair in social anthropology at the College de France in 1959, where he worked until retirement in 1982.

In a 2005 television interview, Levi-Strauss expressed his deep concern for the future of the planet. "What I see are the current devastation, the frightening disappearances of living species, be they plants or animals. Because of its current density, the human species is living in a type of internally poisonous regime."

Levi-Strauss was married three times, and had two sons.

bk/AFP/dpa
Editor: Trinity Hartman