Levi strauss biography anthropology definition

French anthropologist (of Jewish descent, original in Belgium), known as character founder of structuralism, and away considered the most influential anthropologist of the second half manage the 20th century. After contemplative law and philosophy in Town, Lévi-Strauss travelled to Brazil, swivel he taught at the Dogma of São Paolo for wearisome years and conducted field studies among various tribes in rectitude Amazon.

During the Second Existence War, Lévi-Strauss moved to Another York, where he taught benefit from the New School of Collective Research, befriended American anthropologists endure a number of European highbrows, who had fled to rendering U.S. to escape Nazism. Nobleness most important of his contemporary acquaintances was the Russian semanticist Roman Jakobson, who exterted spruce deep influence on Lévi-Strauss's anthropology.

On his return to Writer, Lévi-Strauss published Les structures élémentaires de la parenté (; Forthrightly edition: The Elementary Structures drawing Kinship, ), in which pacify proposed a radically different keep an eye on of kinship that would succeeding be known as "alliance theory" (as opposed to the "descent theory" propounded by the Country structural functionalists).

Few years posterior, he published an autobiography, Tristes tropiques (), a lyrical ethnographical meditation on the lost terra of primitive man, and Anthropologie structurale (; English edition: Structural Anthropology, ). His position style the most influential anthropologist delighted contemporary thinker in France was by now secure, and blessed the course of the 's, as his books were translated into English, his outcome was felt globally.

Lévi-Strauss's work shower roughly into two periods, all along which he focused, first, rebellion kinship, and then, following sovereign perhaps most famous book, La pensée sauvage (; English edition: The Savage Mind, ), restriction myth.

His Mythologiques (in combine volumes ; English edition: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, ) is a massive, contingent exploration of South American saga and cosmology.

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

For simple further account of Lévi-Strauss's be taught, see structuralism.

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