Claude Lévi-Strauss Dies at 100 - Obituary (Obit) -...
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Claude LĂĂ,©vi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called "primitive man" and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and '70s, has died at 100.
His son Laurent said Mr. LĂĂ,©vi-Strauss died of cardiac arrest Friday at his home in Paris. His death was announced Tuesday, the same day he was buried in the village of Lignerolles, in the CĂĂ,´te-d'Or region southeast of Paris, where he had a country home.
"He had expressed the wish to have a discreet and sober funeral, with his family, in his country house," his son said. "He was attached to this place; he liked to take walks in the forest, and the cemetery where he is now buried is just on the edge of this forest."
With the fading of mythââ,¬s power in the modern West, he also suggested that music had taken on mythââ,¬s function. Music, he argued, had the ability to suggest, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society.
With the fading of mythâ€s power in the modern West, he also suggested that music had taken on mythâ€s function. Music, he argued, had the ability to suggest, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society.
But Mr. LĂ©vi-Strauss rejected Rousseauâ€s idea that humankindâ€s problems derive from societyâ€s distortions of nature. In Mr. LĂ©vi-Straussâ€s view, there is no alternative to such distortions. Each society must shape itself out of natureâ€s raw material, he believed, with law and reason as the essential tools.
This application of reason, he argued, created universals that could be found across all cultures and times. He became known as a structuralist because of his conviction that a structural unity underlies all of humanityâ€s mythmaking, and he showed how those universal motifs played out in societies, even in the ways a village was laid out.
For Mr. LĂ©vi-Strauss, for example, every cultureâ€s mythology was built around oppositions: hot and cold, raw and cooked, animal and human. And it is through these opposing â€oebinary” concepts, he said, that humanity makes sense of the world.
This was quite different from what most anthropologists had been concerned with. Anthropology had traditionally sought to disclose differences among cultures rather than discovering universals. It had been preoccupied not with abstract ideas but with the particularities of rituals and customs, collecting and cataloguing them.
Mr. LĂ©vi-Straussâ€s â€oestructural” approach, seeking universals about the human mind, cut against that notion of anthropology. He did not try to determine the various purposes served by a societyâ€s practices and rituals. He was never interested in the kind of fieldwork that anthropologists of a later generation, like Clifford Geertz, took on, closely observing and analyzing a society as if from the inside. (He began â€oeTristes Tropiques” with the statement â€oeI hate traveling and explorers.”)
To his mind, as he wrote in â€oeThe Raw and the Cooked,” translated from â€oeLe Cru et le Cuit” (1964), he had taken â€oeethnographic research in the direction of psychology, logic, and philosophy.”
In radio talks for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1977 (published as â€oeMyth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture”), Mr. LĂ©vi-Strauss demonstrated how a structural examination of myth might proceed. He cited a report that in 17th-century Peru, when the weather became exceedingly cold, a priest would summon all those who had been born feet first, or who had a harelip, or who were twins. They were accused of being responsible for the weather and were ordered to repent, to correct the aberrations. But why these groups? Why harelips and twins?
