Claude Levi Strauss (Anthropology)

Introduction

Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908–d. 2009) was the preeminent French anthropologist of the 20th century and one of the most influential thinkers on the subjects of myth, culture, religion, and social organization. He is the originator of the best-known version of “structuralism,” a theoretical framework that examines elementary units of cultural systems, such as myth, and the principles by which they are organized at a systemic level. His work has been highly influential within and outside anthropology, especially in fields such as literary studies and philosophy. Indeed, a generation of “post-structuralist” French philosophers, such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean Baudrillard, arose to modify and contest structuralism, and thus to affirm its importance.

General Overviews

Lévi-Strauss cast such a large shadow on the profession of anthropology, as well as the humanities and social sciences more broadly, especially in France and the English-speaking world, that inevitably scholars would examine his legacy, especially toward the end of his life. Izard 2004 examines Lévi-Strauss’s legacy primarily within France itself, and accounts for not merely his scholarship but his central institutional role in the development of anthropology in postwar France. Wiseman 2009 examines his intellectual influence globally, with attention to particular aspects of his thought that have been underrepresented in secondary literature, such as his concept of humanism. Mauzé, et al. 2004 examines his legacy in the study of American Indian culture and literature, from a primarily North American perspective.

Izard, Michel, ed. 2004. Claude Lévi-Strauss. Paris: Éditions de L’Herne.
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An authoritative edited volume on many aspects of Lévi-Strauss’s career, edited by a preeminent French anthropologist. Internationally prominent scholars examine biographical, theoretical, and historical contexts of Lévi-Strauss’s career, both within and outside France.
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Loyer, Emmanuelle. 2015. Claude Lévi-Strauss. Paris: Flammarion.
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The authorized biography of Lévi-Strauss, by a prominent French historian. It adds considerable detail, based on interviews with family members and extensive archival research, to our knowledge of his life, although it does not depart significantly from the accounts by Lévi-Strauss himself in Tristes Tropiques and his several volumes of interviews.
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Mauzé, Marie, Michael E. Harkin, and Sergei Kan, eds. 2004. Coming to shore: Northwest Coast ethnology, traditions, and visions. Papers presented at the Northwest Coast Ethnology Conference, Paris, June 2000. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press.
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An edited volume arising from a conference in honor of Claude Lévi-Strauss held at the Collège de France in 2000. Many of the contributors examine the contributions Lévi-Strauss made to American and Canadian anthropology.
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Wiseman, Boris, ed. 2009. The Cambridge companion to Lévi-Strauss. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL9780521846301Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A less encyclopedic volume than Izard 2004, but with many of the same authors. The focus is more directly on the theoretical dimensions of Lévi-Strauss’s work. Its thrust is in the direction of considering Lévi-Strauss in new contexts, such as aesthetics, philosophy, and humanities.
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Early Life

Claude Lévi-Strauss’s maternal grandfather was a rabbi, but his father was secular. Nevertheless, one cannot help but imagine Lévi-Strauss’s lifelong interest in ritual having been shaped by the ancestral religion, much as was the case with the other great secular Jew who famously studied ritual, Sigmund Freud (and who would be a constant figure—often implicit—in Lévi-Strauss’s thought). From his father, a professional painter, Lévi-Strauss inherited a keen interest in art and aesthetics; indeed, his first scholarly publication, “Picasso et le cubisme” (Lévi-Strauss 1930), was on the painter Pablo Picasso (see also Wiseman 2007). Young Claude lived with his grandfather in Versailles during the First World War. He attended the Lycée Janson de Sailly and the Lycée Condorcet before matriculating at the Sorbonne. He originally intended to study law, but he ended up taking a degree in philosophy (see Johnson 2003). In 1935 he was asked by the French Ministry of Culture to take up a visiting post at the University of Sao Paolo, where he taught sociology in the Durkheimian mode. This was, as he describes it in Lévi-Strauss 1974, a life-changing experience, one which effectively turned him into an anthropologist. His journey up the Amazon, while not rising to the scientific standards of ethnographic fieldwork developed by Bronislaw Malinowski in Great Britain or Franz Boas in the United States, was nevertheless a rich experience, beautifully documented in Lévi-Strauss 1974 as well as his photographic volume, Lévi-Strauss 1994 (see also Hénaff 1998, Wilcken 2010).

Hénaff, Marcel. 1998. Claude Lévi-Strauss and the making of structural anthropology. Translated by Mary Baker. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.
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A comprehensive intellectual biography, with a thorough and insightful analysis of the evolution of Lévi-Strauss’s thought from his early interest in marriage exchange and alliance through the linguistic turn of the 1950s.
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Johnson, Christopher. 2003. Claude Lévi-Strauss: The formative years. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Examines the critical period of roughly 1940 through 1960, when Lévi-Strauss developed the theory of structuralism, began his four volume Mythologiques project, and built an institutional home for cultural anthropology in France.
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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1929–1930. Picasso et le cubisme. Documents 2:139–140.
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Ghost-written for the socialist politician Georges Monnet.
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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1974. Tristes tropiques. Translated by John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. New York: Atheneum.
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English translation of book first published in 1955. A magisterial memoir that traces Lévi-Strauss’s early life as a student, then as a young man in Brazil, and later as a refugee in the United States during the war. It is an extended meditation on culture, aesthetics, and modernity viewed through the prism of personal experience. It has been imitated by generations of anthropologists in the post-1980s period.
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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1994. Saudades do Brasil. Paris: Plon.
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A beautiful collection of photographs from Lévi-Strauss’s time in Brazil.
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Wilcken, Partick. 2010. Claude Lévi-Strauss: The poet in the laboratory. New York: Penguin.
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A very readable general biography of Claude Lévi-Strauss, with particular attention to his relationship to his father, his experience in Brazil, and his postwar career.
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Wiseman, Boris. 2007. Lévi-Strauss, anthropology, and aesthetics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511585883Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues for an understanding of the centrality of aesthetics in Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology. As the son of an artist and someone who both collected and commented on art, within and outside the Western tradition (Poussin was a favorite), Lévi-Strauss made important contributions to visual art appreciation.
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Intellectual Influences

The most important early influences on Lévi-Strauss were the sociologist Émile Durkheim and his nephew Marcel Mauss. Mauss, as demonstrated in the collaboration Durkheim and Mauss 1963, as well as in Mauss 1967, was interested in taking Durkheimian sociology, with its interest in symbols and their social function, into the domain of ethnology. This suited Lévi-Strauss’s early interests well. His first monograph, Lévi-Strauss 1969, was an explicit tribute to Durkheim. He titled it Les structures élémentaires de la parenté, echoing Durkheim 1947. Other early influences would include the tradition of French Enlightenment philosophy, especially Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose idea of “natural man” was an object of Lévi-Strauss’s quest in the Amazon and in the texts of North and South American Indian oral literature. And while Lévi-Strauss himself downplayed Descartes, it must be acknowledged that that great archetypically French rationalist bequeathed to Lévi-Strauss certain habits of mind, as well as an interest in dualism that permeates his work.

Durkheim, Emile. 1947. The elementary forms of the religious life. Translated by Joseph Ward Swain. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
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English translation of Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: Le système totémique en Australie, first published in 1912. A pioneering work on the sociology of religion, which introduces the concept of religious symbols as representations of the social order. The implicit evolutionism of Durkheim’s method in using the aborigines as exemplars of primitiveness is combined with a sophisticated analysis of symbols and their function, which clearly influenced Lévi-Strauss.
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Durkheim, Émile, and Marcel Mauss. 1963. Primitive classification. Edited and translated by Rodney Needham. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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English translation of De quelques formes primitives de classification, first published in 1903. Examines spatial, temporal, linguistic, and religious categories in several cultures.
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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969. The elementary structures of kinship. Rev. ed. Translated by James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer. Edited by Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon.
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English translation of Structures élémentaires de la parenté, originally published in French in 1949. Lévi-Strauss’s most important early work. He analyzes data on marriage and kinship from Australia and Southeast Asia and develops a theory of alliance and exchange based on marriage types. Drawing on the Maussian insight that reciprocity is at the core of social life, he deflects the longstanding English concern with consanguinity.
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Mauss, Marcel. 1967. The gift: Forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies. Translated by Ian Cunnison. New York: Norton.
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English translation of Essai sur le don, originally published in 1925. Mauss argues that the basis of all human society is reciprocity, which is seen most clearly in societies that institutionalize the “gift.” He examines the Northwest Coast potlatch, and exchange in Maori, Chinese, and other societies. This gave direct inspiration to Lévi-Strauss’s ideas on marriage exchange.
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Life in the United States

Lévi-Strauss was forced to flee France after the capitulation to the Nazis. He traveled by boat to Martinique—ironically, on the same vessel on which he had sailed to Brazil—eventually entering the United States via Puerto Rico. He was employed at the New School in New York, a famous refuge for Jewish exiles from continental Europe. This was, possibly apart from his Amazon voyage, the most significant period of his life. He was put in touch with fellow émigrés such as the great linguist Roman Jakobson and the French surrealist André Breton. It was Jakobson who introduced him to the structural linguistics that would provide the intellectual underpinning of all of his later work. Another, equally great, figure was Franz Boas. Boas had himself emigrated from Europe more than a half century before, and as a German Jew he was highly sensitive to European anti-Semitism. He acted as a mentor to Lévi-Strauss and the other émigrés. It was from Boas, and from visits to the American Museum of Natural History as well as to Manhattan art and curio dealers, that Lévi-Strauss acquired a life-long love of Northwest Coast culture and art. Items he collected during this period contributed to the Northwest Coast collection at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. More than this, Boas imparted to Lévi-Strauss an appreciation of the great Americanist tradition of ethnography, to which Boas himself contributed greatly. In a scene that begs to be interpreted from a symbolic standpoint, Boas died in Lévi-Strauss’s arms during a luncheon at the Columbia University faculty club in 1942. Lévi-Strauss remained in the United States until the end of 1947, serving as a cultural attaché in Washington, DC, after the war. Indeed, Lévi-Strauss had a great admiration for American society. His sympathetic descriptions of New York and Chicago echo those of other great French writers of the postwar period enamored of the essential modernity of America, notably Simone de Beauvoir, who, in Beauvoir 1956, celebrated the freedom and vitality of postwar American society, in contrast to a French society both exhausted by war and riven with political and social divisions.

Beauvoir, Simone de. 1956. The mandarins. Cleveland, OH: World Publishing.
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English translation of Les mandarins, first published in 1952. A thinly fictionalized account of de Beauvoir’s circle of Parisian intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre, her love affair with the American writer Nelson Algren, and her time spent in Chicago and New York after World War II.
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Mythologiques

While in New York, Lévi-Strauss became acquainted with the wealth of texts of Native American oral literature published by the Bureau of American Ethnology and other organizations, along with similar texts that had been collected by Boas, his students, and several generations of anthropologists and linguists trained in the Boasian method. These works provided the basis for Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of American Indian myth and culture, making it possible for him to attempt a heroic synthesis that embraced the Americas from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego, as seen in Lévi-Strauss 1969, Lévi-Strauss 1974, Lévi-Strauss 1978, and Lévi-Strauss 1981. Taken as a whole, these four volumes of Mythologiques represent an ambitious attempt to document the relations among mythological thought and text across the entirety of the New World. In the works, Lévi-Strauss identifies many common “mythemes” existing in both North and South America. He thus takes on the Boasian diffusionist paradigm in an original way. He argues that while specific forms of myths are often inverted as they cross cultural boundaries, the myths themselves reflect universal oppositions, such as culture-nature, male-female, and living-dead. At the same time, a key function of these myths is to mediate these oppositions. Thus, he argues, hunting is associated with death, agriculture with life, and so on. Trickster figures exist in between, as they are scavengers who neither kill nor cook their food. Thus, ravens and coyotes, in the myths of North America, both define culture and stand outside it. All of the indigenous cultures of the Americas are thus connected in a semiotic network that stresses certain recurrent themes as both expressions of and solutions to existential dilemmas. While this work exhibits the reach of Lévi-Straussian thought, it also betrays its limitations. Although brilliant and wholly original, it is clear that Lévi-Strauss is constructing an individual interpretation of American Indian mythology, rather than uncovering the objective underlying structure. For this reason, this work has been less influential on professional anthropology than the more explicitly theoretical essays.

Darnell, Regna. 2004. Text, symbol, and tradition in Northwest Coast ethnology from Franz Boas to Claude Lévi-Strauss. Paper presented at the Northwest Coast Ethnology Conference, Paris, June 2000. In Coming to shore: Northwest Coast ethnology, traditions, and visions. Edited by Marie Mauzé, Michael E. Harkin, and Sergei Kan, 7–23. Lincoln, NE: Univ. of Nebraska Press.
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The author argues for the continuity between Boasian and Lévi-Straussian textual approaches to Northwest Coast cultures.
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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969. The raw and the cooked. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper & Row.
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English translation of Le cru et le cuit, first published in 1964. Volume 1 of Mythologiques.
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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1974. From honey to ashes. Translated by John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper & Row.
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English translation of Du miel au cendres, first published in 1966. Volume 2 of Mythologiques.
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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1978. The origin of table manners. Translated by John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper & Row.
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English translation of L’origin des manières de table, first published in 1968. Volume 3 of Mythologiques.
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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1981. The naked man. Translated by John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper & Row.
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English translation of L’homme nu, first published in 1971. Volume 4 of Mythologiques.
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Paris in the 1950s–1960s

Lévi-Strauss returned to France in 1947 and submitted two works to the Sorbonne to obtain his doctorate (see Lévi-Strauss 1948 and Lévi-Strauss 1969, the latter cited under Intellectual Influences). At this point he began to engage in intellectual and academic “trench warfare,” directed primarily at the institutionally entrenched humanities, with a special focus on history, which he saw as politically and intellectually a threat to the “science humaine” he wished to establish in the French academy, as discussed in Harkin 2009 and Kambouchner 2009. He argued that the historiographic method was deeply marred by nationalistic and solipsistic bias. French historiography was a secular religion, and Lévi-Strauss was proposing a science that would rise above cultural and national perspectives. Like his favorite science, geology, Lévi-Strauss believed that anthropology could describe hidden processes and structures universally. He worked to institutionalize anthropology outside both its maternal discipline of sociology and the humanistic studies with which it competed. Most notably, in 1960 he founded the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale in Paris. He attracted like-minded, although not necessarily structuralist, anthropologists with interests in subjects such as religion, political organization, and myth. Thus, in many ways he was creating a French version of American cultural anthropology, with its emphasis on ideological and mental phenomena, in contradistinction to other national schools of anthropology, as in Germany or Great Britain. At this time, Lévi-Strauss began to lay out his own view of structuralism as an explicit methodological and theoretical framework, as seen in Lévi-Strauss 1963a. He revisited classic ethnological issues, such as totemism, in Lévi-Strauss 1963b. Additionally, he asserted a strong role for anthropology in public discourse, writing a treatise on race for UNESCO, Lévi-Strauss 1961. In Lévi-Strauss 1966 he reexamined a trope of la longue durée within anthropology, the doctrine of psychic unity. It was generally accepted by Franz Boas, who downplayed the role of biology in cultural attainment. However, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, a philosopher with an interest in ethnology, proposed that modern and primitive mentalities were radically different, with the latter participating in the nonhuman world to a much greater degree. Lévi-Strauss, in a sense, splits the difference. He argues that “primitive” people are in fact the superior inductive scientists, although uninterested in systemic thought. His idea of a “science of the concrete” borrows both from Boas and earlier precedents, such as Rousseau. The most memorable concept from Lévi-Strauss 1966 is that of “bricolage.” Bricolage is a common word in French; Lévi-Strauss develops a special meaning, that of the ability to work without a plan (it is contrasted with engineering) to see through a project, such as an outbuilding made of stones, bricks, and wood on hand. Bricolage becomes, in this essay, the essential mechanism of cultural adaptation. The connection between bricolage and the American philosophical school of pragmatism is obvious.

Harkin, Michael E. 2009. Lévi-Strauss and history. In The Cambridge companion to Lévi-Strauss. Edited by Boris Wiseman, 39–58. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Contrary to the common understanding of Lévi-Straussian structuralism as ahistoric and synchronic, Lévi-Strauss in fact engages deeply with the problem of historical understanding. The famous dichotomy between historically “hot” and “cold” societies is a statement about ideology, not an argument for people “without history.”
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Kambouchner, Denis. 2009. Lévi-Strauss and the question of humanism. In The Cambridge companion to Lévi-Strauss. Edited by Boris Wiseman, 19–38. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Although Lévi-Strauss is well-known for opposing a certain type of humanism, grounded in a metaphysical version of the ideology of the individual specific to Western culture (and embodied by one of Lévi-Strauss’s rivals, Sartre), he also had a great engagement with traditionally humanistic subjects and authors, such as Rousseau.
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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1948. La vie familiale et sociale des Indiens Nambikwara. Journal de la Société des Américanistes, new ser., 37:1–131.
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Examines dual organization and kinship, as well as politics and exchange relations in this Amazonian society.
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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1961. Race and history: The race question in modern science. Paris: UNESCO.
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English translation of Race et histoire, first published in 1952. Lévi-Strauss argues against racism in a manner similar to Franz Boas. At the same time, he asserts the importance of cultural difference and warns against cultural entropy, a theme to which he returns increasingly in his later career.
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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963a. Structural anthropology. Translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books.
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English translation of Anthropologie structurale, first published in 1958. Contains several important essays, most significantly “The Structural Study of Myth,” which takes as its text the story of Oedipus. Lévi-Strauss shows how the myth can be “read” both paradigmatically and syntagmatically, and how oppositions (the undervaluing vs. the overvaluing of kinship) can be teased out of the text. The choice of text was deliberate, and was part of a career-long dialogue with Freud.
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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963b. Totemism. Translated by Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon.
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English translation of Totémisme aujourd’hui, originally published in 1962. Takes on one of the classic problems in anthropology and argues that totemism must be viewed in the context of a system of meaning, with natural phenomena taking on the role of signs. Rather than viewing animals sharing a substance with their associated human totemic groups, the totemic animal stands in paradigmatic relation to other species.
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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The savage mind. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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English translation of Pensée Sauvage, first published in 1962. In addition to the concept of bricolage, Lévi-Strauss examines recurrent themes of his: totemism, art, structure and history, and myth. The title of the book could be rendered differently: “wild thoughts” is perhaps closer to the author’s intent.
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Reception in the English-Speaking World

Not surprisingly, the first Anglophone interpreters and translators of Lévi-Strauss were British anthropologists, who shared with him a common heritage in Durkheimian sociology. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown had brought Durkheim to British and American audiences, creating structural-functionalism in the process. This habit of selective reading continued with Lévi-Strauss, who was viewed primarily as writing about social rules and functions, which were organized along dualistic lines. Edmund Leach, Rodney Needham, and Mary Douglas were the primary conveyers of structuralism to Anglophone anthropology. While missing the full complexity of Lévi-Straussian thought, they nevertheless made good use of it. Works such as Douglas 1969 made important contributions to central anthropological problems, such as ritual and taboo. The speedy translation of Anthropologie structurale and Totémisme aujuord’hui (Lévi-Strauss 1963a and Lévi-Strauss 1963b, both cited under Paris in the 1950s–1960s) into English facilitated the broader dissemination of his thought, which soon became a topic of discussion in anthropological circles in the United States and Canada. Geertz 1973, for instance, is a highly critical review essay of the Lévi-Straussian corpus, casting it in terms of Gallic mentalism, to which the author contrasted his own version of interpretive anthropology contained within a pragmatic Anglo-Saxon tradition. This misreading of Lévi-Strauss (ignoring, among many other things, Lévi-Strauss’s deep engagement with that very American and pragmatic tradition of Boasian anthropology) neatly complemented the more positive misreading of British anthropology. It also nicely illustrated the principle of diffusion, on Lévi-Strauss’s own account: when elements of myth (or in this case theory) pass cultural boundaries, their meaning changes, not so much because something is lost in translation as because these elements take on additional semiotic value by virtue of having come from foreign parts. While Geertz 1973 was not alone in resisting what many viewed as another Left Bank intellectual fad, on the whole the reception to Lévi-Strauss was quite positive in North America. Most prominent among the Americans was Marshall Sahlins, who attended Lévi-Strauss’s seminar in Paris in the fateful spring of 1968. Sahlins 1976 synthesizes the structuralism of that seminar with the Marxism of the streets. Later, he attempted to historicize structuralism along lines suggested by Lévi-Strauss, as seen in Sahlins 1981 and Sahlins 1985. Lévi-Strauss spent time in Canada, and not only Quebec; he lectured at the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia. His influence on Canadian scholars such as Pierre Maranda and Eric Schwimmer was great.

Douglas, Mary. 1969. Purity and danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
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Begins with the insight that “dirt is matter out of place” and examines the Abominations of Leviticus and other examples of taboo from ethnographic contexts as categorically mixed, and hence dangerous. Douglas does not reconcile her position with Lévi-Strauss’s view of the same phenomena as categorical mediators. This problem connects interestingly with Lévi-Strauss’s argument in The Story of Lynx about fundamental differences in Old World and New World view of otherness. First published in 1966.
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Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The cerebral savage: On the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. In The interpretation of cultures. By Clifford Geertz, 345–359. New York: Basic Books.
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This review, originally published in 1967, appears in Geertz’s highly influential collection of essays. Although resoundingly negative, Geertz does render grudging respect and admiration for Lévi-Strauss’s erudition and writing.
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Sahlins, Marshall. 1976. Culture and practical reason. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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Argues that Western consumer culture is in fact a cultural system rather than a perfection of the natural mechanism of the marketplace. Employs structural oppositions, such as the category of edible versus inedible substances.
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Sahlins, Marshall. 1981. Historical metaphors and mythical realities: Structure in the early history of the Sandwich Islands kingdom. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.
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Examines the arrival of Captain Cook at Kealakekua Bay on the island of Hawaii. Argues that Cook fulfilled the structural role of Lono, the Hawaiian god of agriculture, who was ritually killed at the winter solstice.
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Sahlins, Marshall. 1985. Islands of history. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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A collection of essays expanding on Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (Sahlins 1981) that explores the relation between structure and event.
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The 1970s–1990s

The main thrust of Lévi-Strauss’s work later in his career was to extend and expand ideas he had developed during the 1950s. The publication of the second volume of Structural Anthropology (Lévi-Strauss 1976) developed themes from the first volume (Lévi-Strauss 1963a, cited under Paris in the 1950s–1960s). His series of three books on Native American mythology, Lévi-Strauss 1982, Lévi-Strauss 1985, and Lévi-Strauss 1995, fit well into the paradigm of Mythologiques, although each book is more topically focused. He returned to the problem of race with an update of his UNESCO essay in Lévi-Strauss 1971. He published a miscellany, Lévi-Strauss 1985, reminiscent of the two volumes of Structural Anthropology (Lévi-Strauss 1963a, cited under Paris in the 1950s–1960s, and Lévi-Strauss 1976). At the height of his powers, he was traveling widely in the United States, Canada, Japan, and elsewhere, teaching and lecturing. He sought, and gained, a wider audience for his ideas. For example, he gave a series of lectures for CBC Radio in Toronto, which were later published as Lévi-Strauss 1979. He allowed himself to be interviewed by selected interlocutors, leading to several books based on these interviews, including Lévi-Strauss and Eribon 1991. Although structuralism was now being seen as passé within anthropology, Lévi-Strauss became an increasingly important public intellectual, and he was extending his influence into fields such as philosophy and literary studies. He began, with Lévi-Strauss 1985, a type of belletristic writing, examining his life and work, as well as works of art and their implications for the broader questions of epistemology, aesthetics, and human nature that he was allowing himself to explore.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1971. Race et culture. Revue internationale des sciences sociales 23.4: 647–666.
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This essay was considered scandalous by many, who felt that his endorsement of the positive value of group difference and separation was perilously close to the position of racists.
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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1976. Structural anthropology. Vol. 2. Translated by Monique Layton. New York: Basic Books.
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English translation of Anthropologie structurale deux, first published in 1973. This revisits long-standing concerns, especially the structural study of kinship and myth, as well as engaging anthropology’s past with discussions of Rousseau, Durkheim, and Mauss, and its relation to the humanities.
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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1979. Myth and meaning. New York: Schocken.
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A published version of a series of lectures presented for the Canadian Broadcasting Company radio, in Toronto.
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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1982. The way of the masks. Translated by Sylvia Modelski. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press.
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English translation of La Voie des masques, first published in 1979. This work examines the relation among masks as objects, and associated rituals and myths in several Northwest Coast societies. Lévi-Strauss argues that as mask complexes cross cultural boundaries they experience structural inversion. If the plastic form remains the same, the meaning changes, and vice versa.
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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1985. The view from afar. New York: Basic Books.
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English translation of Le regard éloigné, which might also be rendered as “the distanced view,” a notion that combines both autobiographical and epistemological aspects. He argues as well that the anthropological construction of its object requires such play of perspectives, involving distance as well as engagement. This book, perhaps better than any single volume, represents the range of his interests and the ferocity of his intellect.
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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1995. The story of Lynx. Translated by Catherine Tihanyi. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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English translation of Histoire de Lynx, first published in 1991. This examines myths in North and South America, primarily the eastern Amazon and Northwest North America. It focuses on myths having to do with twins and doubleness. He explores questions of identity and difference, as well as cultural notions of history.
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Lévi-Strauss, Claude, and Didier Eribon. 1991. Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss. Translated by Paula Wissing. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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English translation of De près et de loin, first published in 1988. Eribon, a journalist, discusses aspects of Lévi-Strauss’s life and work, from his early fieldwork through the creation of the Laboratoire, his writing on race, and myth.
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The 1990s and 2000s

In his tenth decade, inevitably, Lévi-Strauss slowed down. However, he enjoyed reasonably good health until the last two or three years of his life, and continued to write and participate in professional life. In the mid-2000s he was still making regular appearances at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale. His interests turned more than ever to aesthetics, as seen in his collection of essays on art, literature, and music, Lévi-Strauss 1995 (cited under the 1970s–1990s). His lifelong love of Japanese art and culture is reflected in Lévi-Strauss 2011a. He returned to the issues addressed in the UNESCO essays a final time in Lévi-Strauss 2011b, a final statement of Lévi-Straussian pessimism. He always feared the global loss of identity due to the diminution of cultural difference, or cultural entropy. This was an accelerating process during his entire adult life. Population increase, migration, transportation, and communication technology: all the forces of modernity were eroding the vital barriers of culture, which, like a membrane, separated and defined, constituting self and other. In part, this is a specifically Gallic complaint: as a member of the Academie Française, he was concerned about French language and culture being overwhelmed by English and American culture. This is richly ironic, for like many Frenchmen he harbored strong positive feelings about American (and, for him, Japanese) culture. This is indeed the nature of the dynamic he saw: our pursuit of that otherness that so appeals to us has the effect of reducing the distance, and so devaluing the other and impoverishing ourselves in the process. This is, to be sure, one of the most serious problems of the modern world, related as it is to the rise of fundamentalism, reactionary nationalism, and terrorism. As he approached the end of his life, having seen the unfolding of a good portion of the modern era, his own career could be seen to have not only spanned that era, but also critically addressed many of its most pressing problems.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1997. Look, listen, read. Translated by Brian C. J. Singer. New York: Basic Books.
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English translation of Regarder écouter lire first published in 1993. A collection of essays on art, literature, and music in which Lévi-Strauss discusses his favorites, such as Nicolas Poussin and Richard Wagner.
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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 2011a. L’autre face de la lune: Ecrits sur le Japon. Paris: Seuil.
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A brief, posthumous publication of lectures on Japanese art and culture.
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Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 2011b. L’anthropologie face aux problèmes du monde moderne. Paris: Seuil.
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Addresses the central problems of modern society: globalization, overpopulation, and cultural entropy.
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