Distinguished anthropologist passes away, aged 100
While I was away this week, I was surprised to hear the news that anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has passed away. My own interests are anthropological only in the loosest sense, but the influence of Lévi-Strauss became massively influential across a broad range of cultural academic disciplines:
The fame of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who has died aged 100, extended well beyond his own subject of anthropology. He was without doubt the anthropologist best known to non-specialists. This is mainly because he is usually considered to be the founder of the intellectual movement known as structuralism, which was to have such influence, especially in the 1970s. He was one of those French intellectuals – like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur – whose influence spread to many other disciplines because they were philosophers in a much broader sense of the word than the academic philosophers of the British and American tradition. [Read More]
