The father of structural anthropology did only one stint of fieldwork
Claude Lévi-Strauss insisted that so-called savage and civilised minds share the same structures. Yet his only ethnographic fieldwork came during a few years in Brazil in the 1930s, and a fellow anthropologist, reading his own account, doubted he ever stayed more than weeks in one place or chatted freely in local languages.
Lévi-Strauss was born in Brussels in 1908 to French-Jewish parents who had become agnostic; his father was painting portraits there. He grew up in Paris on a street honouring the painter Claude Lorrain, an artist he would later admire in print, and during the First World War, aged six to ten, he lived with his maternal grandfather, the rabbi of Versailles. As an adult he was an atheist or agnostic.
A sharp student, he earned his baccalaureate at 16, discovered Marx and Kant, and moved leftward without ever becoming a communist. For unclear reasons he skipped the entrance exam for the École normale supérieure, studied law and philosophy at the Sorbonne, found law dull, and in 1931 passed the philosophy agrégation in third place, the youngest in his year at 22. The Depression soon left him supporting his parents as well as himself.
In 1935 he accepted a last-minute place on a French cultural mission to Brazil, becoming a visiting sociology professor in São Paulo; his wife Dina, a trained ethnographer, held a matching post in ethnology. Together they visited the Guaycuru and Bororó for a few days, then in 1938 set out on an expedition of over six months to the Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib. Dina's eye infection forced her to withdraw, and he finished alone. Edmund Leach later argued that such brief, language-limited contact fell short of normal participant observation.
Still, the experience made him an anthropologist. Tristes Tropiques, published in 1955, set out his view that human characteristics are the same everywhere and made him a central figure of structuralism, the search for patterns of thought underlying all human activity. His influence spread into philosophy and the humanities. From 1959 to 1982 he was professor of social anthropology at the Collège de France, entered the Académie française in 1973, and died in 2009, weeks short of 101.
Source: Claude Lévi-Strauss
