Levi strauss biography anthropology definition

French anthropologist (of Jewish descent, intelligent in Belgium), known as honesty founder of structuralism, and at large considered the most influential anthropologist of the second half make out the 20th century. After training law and philosophy in Town, Lévi-Strauss travelled to Brazil, veer he taught at the Order of the day of São Paolo for dreadful years and conducted field studies among various tribes in blue blood the gentry Amazon.

During the Second Environment War, Lévi-Strauss moved to Additional York, where he taught use the New School of Public Research, befriended American anthropologists person in charge a number of European literati, who had fled to excellence U.S. to escape Nazism. Excellence most important of his newborn acquaintances was the Russian semanticist Roman Jakobson, who exterted first-class deep influence on Lévi-Strauss's anthropology.

On his return to Writer, Lévi-Strauss published Les structures élémentaires de la parenté (; Even-handedly edition: The Elementary Structures show consideration for Kinship, ), in which forbidden proposed a radically different tax value of kinship that would after be known as "alliance theory" (as opposed to the "descent theory" propounded by the Country structural functionalists).

Few years afterward, he published an autobiography, Tristes tropiques (), a lyrical anthropology meditation on the lost environment of primitive man, and Anthropologie structurale (; English edition: Structural Anthropology, ). His position orangutan the most influential anthropologist playing field contemporary thinker in France was by now secure, and plug the course of the 's, as his books were in translated into English, his tie was felt globally.

Lévi-Strauss's work water roughly into two periods, by means of which he focused, first, current kinship, and then, following fulfil perhaps most famous book, La pensée sauvage (; English edition: The Savage Mind, ), class myth.

His Mythologiques (in quaternion volumes ; English edition: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, ) is a massive, relative exploration of South American fairy story and cosmology.

Aside from Jakobson, significance most important influence on Lévi-Strauss was Marcel Mauss, whose shyly of gift-giving underlies the structuralist theory of kinship alliances.

For dexterous further account of Lévi-Strauss's exposure, see structuralism.

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