Ten fun facts about Claude Levi-Strauss

Fact 1
He has been called, along with James George Frazer and Franz Boas, the “father of modern anthropology”.

Fact 2
The work of Lévi-Strauss was also key in the development of the theory of structuralism and structural anthropology.

Fact 3
Along with Jacques Maritain, Henri Focillon, and Roman Jakobson, he was a founding member of the École Libre des Hautes Études, a sort of university-in-exile for French academics.

Fact 4
While Lévi-Strauss was well known in academic circles, in 1955 he became one of France's best known intellectuals by publishing Tristes Tropiques.

Fact 5
Lévi-Strauss was named to a chair in Social Anthropology at the Collège de France in 1959. At roughly the same time he published Structural Anthropology, a collection of his essays which provided both examples and programmatic statements about structuralism.

Fact 6
In 1962, Lévi-Strauss published what is for many people his most important work, La Pensée Sauvage, translated into English as The Savage Mind.

Fact 7
He was honored by universities throughout the world and held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France (1959–1982), and was elected a member of the Académie française in 1973.

Fact 8
According to Lévi-Strauss, the “savage” mind had the same structures as the “civilized” mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere.

Fact 9
Lévi-Strauss and his wife, Dina,a trained ethnographer did their anthropological work in Brazil from 1935 to 1939. They first studied the Guaycuru and Bororo Indian tribes, staying among them for a couple of days.

Fact 10
In 1938 they returned for a second, more than half-year-long expedition to study the Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib societies.