‘Cannibals boiled their friends and roast their enemies’, News - World

By AP

Posted On Thursday, November 05, 2009 at 02:22:00 AM

A Caduveo facepainted woman. Caduveo was one of the native Brazilian tribes that Strauss studied

Claude Lévi-Strauss, the last of the French intellectuals — like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur — passed away. He was 100.

The French intellectual was regarded as having reshaped the field of anthropology, introducing structuralism —concepts about common patterns of behavior and thought, especially myths, in a wide range of human societies.

During his six-decade career, Lévi-Strauss authored literary and anthropological classics including Tristes Tropiques (1955) and The Savage Mind (1963).

Mythologiques, his four-volume work about the structure of native mythology in the Americas, attempts nothing less than an interpretation of the world of culture and custom, shaped by analysis of several hundred myths of little-known tribes and traditions.

Beginning with the Caduveo and Bororo tribes in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, where he did his first and primary fieldwork, he carried on extensive work in the world of primitive tribes.

Born on November 28, 1908, in Brussels, Belgium, in a distinguished French-Jewish artistic family, Lévi-Strauss studied in Paris and attended the Lycée Janson de Sailly in Paris, and then the Sorbonne, where in 1928, at an exceptionally early age and with great success, he passed the formidable philosophy agrégation examination.

Lévi-Strauss was so revered that at least 25 countries celebrated his 100th birthday. He taught at universities in Paris, New York and São Paulo and also worked for the United Nations and the French government.

He won worldwide acclaim and was awarded honorary doctorates at universities, including Harvard, Yale and Oxford, as well as universities in Sweden, Mexico and Canada.

As a child, he loved to collect disparate objects and juxtapose them. “I had a passion for exotic curios,” he says in “Conversations.”

“My small savings all went to the secondhand shops.” A large collection of Jewish antiquities from his family’s collection, he said, was displayed in the Musée de Cluny; others were looted after France fell to the Nazis in 1940.

A skilled handyman who believed in the virtues of manual labor and outdoor life, Levi-Strauss was also an ardent music-lover who once said he would have liked to have been a composer had he not become an ethnologist. He was warm and had a delightful sense of humour.

He was charming and very considerate and respectful towards whoever he was dealing with, irrespective of status.

Lévi-Strauss married Dina Dreyfus in 1932, Rose Marie Ullmo in 1946, and Monique Roman in 1954, and had a son by each of his second and third wives — Laurent and Matthieu. He is survived by Monique and his sons.