Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss dies at age 100 (Roundup)

Nov 3, 2009, 17:30 GMT

Paris - French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, widely considered one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century, has died at age 100, the Academie Francaise said Tuesday.

Levi-Strauss, who would have turned 101 on November 28, died early Sunday.

In a statement released by his office, French President Nicolas Sarkozy paid tribute to a man he called 'an indefatigable humanist' and 'a great scientist, always open to the world, who created modern anthropology and raised the reputation of French social and human sciences to its highest point.'

The Brussels-born Levi-Straus was one of the founders of structuralism, and was the first to apply that radical method to the study of anthropology.

Structuralism is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field as a complex system of interrelated parts.

In such works as Structural Anthropology (1958; Eng. translation 1963), Tristes Tropiques (1955; 1963), The Savage Mind (1962; 1966) and The Raw and the Cooked (1964; 1969), Levi-Strauss revolutionized the study of anthropology by considering culture as a system of symbolic communication.

He believed that culture could, and should, be examined with the analytical methods used in the analysis of novels, political speeches and cinema.

'A really scientific analysis must be real, simplifying, and explanatory,' he wrote in Structural Anthropology.

Levi-Strauss grew up in Paris and enrolled at the Sorbonne, studying law and philosophy. In 1935 he accepted a post in the French cultural mission to Brazil, and worked as visiting professor at the University of Sao Paolo.

During his four-year stay in Brazil he undertook his first ethnological fieldwork, including in the Amazon rain forest.

In 1942, he was offered a position at New York's New School for Social Research, where he spent the entire war.

He returned to Paris in 1948, accepting a chair in Social Anthropology at the Collège de France 11 years later.

Until October 2007, Levi-Strauss went to his office in the social anthropology laboratory at the College de France twice a week.