Discover the biography of Claude Lévi-Strauss, considered the father of modern anthropology and one of the world’s leading thinkers of the 20th century. He was the founder of structural anthropology, an approach that completely changed the history of this discipline and gave it stronger status in academia.
Interestingly, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s dream was interplanetary, who on several occasions mentioned that his great fantasy was that man could colonize space and begin migrating to the Moon or perhaps to Mars.
- He had the illusion that they would build new civilizations and forget about the men who had remained on Earth.
- They would return to a wild state and he could go live with them.
“The world began without man and will end without him. ” – Claude Lévi-Strauss-
Francoise Heritier, who succeeded him at the Collége de France, summed up his contribution by saying that Claude Lévi-Strauss had taught humanity something fundamental: cultures sometimes have great differences between them.
However, Lévi-Strauss has shown that everyone’s cognitive characteristics are similar, so difference and universality always coexist in humans.
Claude Lévi-Strauss was accidentally born in Brussels, Belgium, on 28 November 1908, and his birth is said to have been accidental because his parents were French Jews travelling at the time.
His father was a backing man and his mother a housewife. The environment around him was very interested in art, especially painting, music and poetry.
Due to the start of World War I, he moved with one of his grandparents to Versailles, this grandfather was a very devoted rabbi and the first contacts with the synagogue were very cold and strict for Claude Lévi-Strauss. age, became fundamentally insensitive to religion.
However, she grew up a child in love with nature, who also showed great interest in the collection of rare and curious cultural objects. He was also highly intellectually stimulated, but did not steady during his time in school.
As a teenager, he returned to Paris, where his family lived, and joined a socialist organization.
At first, Claude Lévi-Strauss decided to study law, but in 1927 he changed his mind and opted for Philosophy, a subject he studied at the Sorbonne University.
There he met and maintained a close relationship with Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir; later, he confessed that philosophy attracted him, but he was also fed up, because he felt there was a lot of vanity and speculation in this field.
After completing his studies, he began working as a high school teacher for a long time; however, he was not entirely comfortable in this profession, he could not imagine teaching for the rest of his professional life.
Everything changed for him when he received a call from Célestin Bouglé, director of the Escola Supérieure Normale in Paris.
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s life changed radically from that moment on. Bouglé proposed traveling to Sao Paulo for a university mission as a professor of sociology at USP.
He arrived there in 1935 and in 1939 undertook ethnographic expeditions to Mato Grosso and the Amazon, an experience that marks the beginning of his great work: structural anthropology.
From his experience in Brazil, Claude Lévi-Strauss began to propose new ideas, a new method and great reflections, later spent time in the United States, as he suffered Nazi persecution during World War II and had to take refuge in the American country, where he established valuable intellectual contacts and ended up shaped the essence of his theories.
One of the highlights of his career was the publication of Sad Topics, considered one of the most important works of the twentieth century, his name was known all over the world for it, which made him an academic celebrity. and History, Myth and Meaning and the Mythological Series have dedicated it forever.
They say he was a distant man and could only write if he was surrounded by the company of lyrical music.
He died in 2009, having reached a century of existence, having received numerous awards and recognitions. His work divided the history of anthropology into two parts and allowed new research to be developed.