Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 1908-2009

Claude Lévi-Strauss was a major figure in anthropology. In 1959 he was appointed to the Chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France, a position he held, with considerable intellectual flourish, for twenty-three years. In a lifetime of over a century, he remained productive into his nineties, propounding a form of analysis that became popularly known as ‘structuralism’. His publications included major works on the foundations of kinship, on systems of complex social classification and on the logic of myth. Elected to the Académie française, Lévi-Strauss eventually became Dean of the French Academy.

Posted to Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, XVIII