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Claude Lévi-Strauss Dies at 100 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com

A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of “structuralism,” a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France. And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.

His legacy is imposing. “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. The volumes — “The Raw and the Cooked,” “From Honey to Ashes,” “The Origin of Table Manners” and “The Naked Man,” published from 1964 to 1971 — challenge the reader with their complex interweaving of theme and detail.

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By the 1980s, structuralism as imagined by Mr. Lévi-Strauss had been displaced by French thinkers who became known as poststructuralists: writers like Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. They rejected the idea of timeless universals and argued that history and experience were far more important in shaping human consciousness than universal laws.

“French society, and especially Parisian, is gluttonous,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss responded. “Every five years or so, it needs to stuff something new in its mouth. And so five years ago it was structuralism, and now it is something else. I practically don’t dare use the word ‘structuralist’ anymore, since it has been so badly deformed. I am certainly not the father of structuralism.”

But Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s version of structuralism may end up surviving post-structuralism, just as he survived most of its avatars. His monumental four-volume work, “Mythologiques,” may ensure his legacy, as a creator of mythologies if not their explicator.

The final volume ends by suggesting that the logic of mythology is so powerful that myths almost have a life independent from the peoples who tell them. In his view, they speak through the medium of humanity and become, in turn, the tools with which humanity comes to terms with the world’s greatest mystery: the possibility of not being, the burden of mortality.

Tags: /Claude Lévi-Strauss /Mythologiques /anthropologist /anthropology /french /structuralism /post-structuralism /Michel Foucault /Roland Barthes /Jacques Derrida