French anthropologist Levi-Strauss dead at 100
French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who helped shape Western thinking about human civilisation, has died at the age of 100, his publisher Plon said Tuesday.
Levi-Strauss died overnight Saturday to Sunday, according to fellow academics at the school of social sciences.
Trained as a philosopher, Levi-Strauss shot to prominence with his 1955 book "Tristes Tropiques" (A World on the Wane), a haunting account of travels and studies in the Amazon basin and one of the 20th century's major works.
He was a leading proponent of structuralism, which sought to uncover the hidden, unconscious or primitive patterns of thought believed to determine the outer reality of human culture and relationships.
Structuralism was also, Levi-Strauss liked to say, "the search for unsuspected harmonies."
He had feted his 100th birthday on November 28, 2008.
French academia and the cultural elite had mobilised to pay homage to Levi-Strauss with a programme of films, lectures and reflection on his contribution to modern thinking.
Among the more striking conclusions of his work was the idea that there is no fundamental difference between the belief systems and myths of so-called "primitive" races and those of modern western societies.
He was the oldest member of France's prestigious Academie of leading intellectual figures, a respected but retiring figure, who had said he no longer felt at home on an overpopulated planet.
"France has lost one of its most remarkable and renowned intellectuals whose major work will continue to expand the thoughts of those who seek to better understand human societies," Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said.
In a 2005 television interview, Levi-Strauss expressed worry about ending his days in "this world that I do not love."
"What I see are the current devastation, the frightening disappearances of living species, be they plants or animals.
"Because of its current density, the human species is living in a type of internally poisonous regime and I think of the present, of the world in which I am ending my days, as this world that I do not love," he said.
Levi-Strauss was born in Brussels in 1908, the son of French Jewish parents from the German-speaking region of Alsace. He studied philosophy and in 1935 went to Brazil, where he became a professor at the University of Sao Paolo.
He studied the lives of the tribes of the Mato Grosso and the Amazonian rainforest, collecting material for theories on the underlying structures of human relationships and myths shared by various cultures.
Returning to France in 1939 he was conscripted, but after the Nazi invasion he was, as a Jew, forced to flee to the United States, where he taught while awaiting his chance to return home and restart his career.
He was given the chair in social anthropology at the College de France in 1959, where he worked until retirement in 1982.
In 1973, he was the first ethnologist to join the Academie.
"Straddling the worlds of philosophy and science, his work is essential for any attempt to reflect on our society and how it works," said Denis Bertholet, one of Levi-Strauss' biographers.
"He had an ecological approach to the world and to individuals that was ahead of its time."
Levi-Strauss said that in "The Savage Mind", he was not merely studying the thoughts of primitive peoples but the underlying structures of all thought.
"It is not so much the thoughts of savages but the savage thought," he said. "It's a form which is the prerogative of all humanity, which we can find in ourselves but which we prefer to go and seek in exotic societies."
Levi-Strauss was married three times, and had two sons.
