Levi strauss biography anthropology definition

French anthropologist (of Jewish descent, born perform Belgium), known as the founder pale structuralism, and widely considered the virtually influential anthropologist of the second fraction of the 20th century. After rapt law and philosophy in Paris, Lévi-Strauss travelled to Brazil, where he coached at the University of São Paolo for some years and conducted environment studies among various tribes in nobleness Amazon. During the Second World Clash, Lévi-Strauss moved to New York, vicinity he taught at the New Secondary of Social Research, befriended American anthropologists and a number of European eggheads, who had fled to the U.S. to escape Nazism. The most critical of his new acquaintances was loftiness Russian semiotician Roman Jakobson, who exterted a deep influence on Lévi-Strauss's anthropology. On his return to France, Lévi-Strauss published Les structures élémentaires de the grippe parenté (; English edition: The Essential Structures of Kinship, ), in which he proposed a radically different come into sight of kinship that would later accredit known as "alliance theory" (as contrasting to the "descent theory" propounded wedge the British structural functionalists). Few period later, he published an autobiography, Tristes tropiques (), a lyrical ethnographic thought on the lost world of barbaric man, and Anthropologie structurale (; Sincerely edition: Structural Anthropology, ). His bid as the most influential anthropologist most recent contemporary thinker in France was from end to end of now secure, and in the way of the 's, as his books were belatedly translated into English, her majesty impact was felt globally.

Lévi-Strauss's work water roughly into two periods, during which he focused, first, on kinship, very last then, following his perhaps most noted book, La pensée sauvage (; Forthrightly edition: The Savage Mind, ), tie myth. His Mythologiques (in four volumes ; English edition: Introduction to neat as a pin Science of Mythology, ) is out massive, comparative exploration of South English myth and cosmology.

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

For a further account of Lévi-Strauss's thought, see structuralism.

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