Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908–d. 2009) was the preeminent French anthropologist of the twentieth century and one of the most influential thinkers on the subjects of myth, culture, religion, and social organization. He is the originator of the best-known version of “structuralism,” a theoretical framework that examines elementary units of cultural systems, such as myth, and the principles by which they are organized at a systemic level. His work has been highly influential within and outside anthropology, especially in fields such as literary studies and philosophy. Indeed, a generation of “post-structuralist” French philosophers, such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean Baudrillard, arose to modify and contest structuralism, and thus to affirm its importance.