Deaths elsewhere

Last update: November 3, 2009 - 8:58 PM

Claude Levi-Strauss, the French philosopher widely considered the father of modern anthropology because of his then-revolutionary conclusion that so-called primitive societies did not differ greatly intellectually from modern ones, died last Friday at his home in Paris. He was 100.

Part philosopher, part sociologist and entirely humanist, he studied tribes in Brazil and North America, concluding that virtually all societies share powerful commonalities of behavior and thought, often expressing them in myths. Towering over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and '70s, he founded the school of thought known as structuralism, which holds that common features exist within the enormous varieties of human experience.

He concluded that primitive peoples were no less intelligent than "Western" civilizations and that their intelligence could be revealed through their myths and other cultural keystones. Those myths, he argued, all tend to provide answers to such universal questions as "Who are we?" and "How did we come to be in this time and place?"

His studies of American cultures, he said, were "an attempt to show that there are laws of mythical thinking as strict and rigorous as you would find in the natural sciences."

He was particularly intrigued with opposites, such as black and white, cooked and raw, or rational and emotional, that often serve as organizing elements in societies. He explored these binary concepts to find fundamental truths about humanity, noting, for example, that some cannibal groups boiled their friends but roasted their enemies.

His conclusions about the role of mythology were elegantly expanded in a series of books that included "Tristes Tropiques," "The Savage Mind" and "Mythologiques."

LOS ANGELES TIMES

Recent Obituaries stories

Deaths elsewhere - November 3, 2009

Deaths elsewhere - Clifford P. Hansen, 97, a Jackson Hole cattle rancher who became Wyoming's governor and then served two terms as a U.S. senator, died at his home Tuesday. More

Deaths elsewhere - November 3, 2009

Deaths elsewhere - Nan Robertson, 83, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter who brought distinction and change to her newspaper through professional and personal battles. More