The New York Times November 4 , 2009 Claude Lévi - Strauss , Anthropologist , Dies at 100 By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN Claude Lévi - 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 1960 s and ’ 70 s , has died at 100 . His son Laurent said Mr . Levi - 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 Côte - 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 . ” A powerful thinker , Mr . Lévi - Strauss was a profound influence even on his critics , and 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 . “ People realize he is one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20 th century , ” Philippe Descola , the chairman of the anthropology department at the Collège de France , said last November in an interview with The New York Times on the centenary of Mr . Levi - Strauss ’ s birth . Mr . Lévi - Strauss was so revered that at least 25 countries celebrated his 100 th birthday . A descendant of a distinguished French - Jewish artistic family , Mr . Lévi - Strauss was a quintessential French intellectual , as comfortable in the public sphere as in the academy . He taught at universities in Paris , New York and São Paulo and also worked for the United Nations and the French government . His legacy is imposing . “ Mythologiques , ” hisfour - 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 . In his analysis of myth and culture , Mr . Lévi - Strauss might contrast imagery of monkeys and jaguars ; consider the differences in meaning of roasted and boiled food ( cannibals , he suggested , tended to boil their friends and roast their enemies ) ; and establish connections between weird mythological tales and ornate laws of marriage and kinship . Many of his books include diagrams that look like maps of interstellar geometry , formulas that evoke mathematical techniques , and black - and - white photographs of scarified faces and exotic ritual that he made during his field work . His interpretations of North and South American myths were pivotal in changing Western thinking about so - called primitive societies . He began challenging the conventional wisdom about them shortly after beginning his anthropological research in the 1930 s — an experience that became the basis of an acclaimed 1955 book , “ Tristes Tropiques , ” a sort of anthropological meditation based on his travels in Brazil and elsewhere . The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational , basing their approaches to life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food , clothing and shelter . Mr . Lévi - Strauss rescued his subjects from this limited perspective . Beginning with the Caduveo and Bororo tribes in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil , where he did his first and primary fieldwork , he found among them a dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins , a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths , and an implicit sense of order and design , even among tribes who practiced ruthless warfare . His work elevated the status of “ the savage mind , ” a phrase that became the English title of one of his most forceful surveys , “ La Pensée Sauvage ” ( 1962 ) . “ The thirst for objective knowledge , ” he wrote , “ is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘ primitive . ’ ” The world of primitive tribes was fast disappearing , he wrote . From 1900 to 1950 , more than 90 tribes and 15 languages had disappeared in Brazil alone . This was another of his recurring themes . He worried about the growth of a “ mass civilization , ” of a modern “ monoculture . ” He sometimes expressed exasperated self - disgust with the West and its “ own filth , thrown in the face of mankind . ” In this seeming elevation of the savage mind and denigration of Western modernity , he was writing within the tradition of French Romanticism , inspired by the 18 th - century philosopher Jean - Jacques Rousseau , whom Mr . Lévi - Strauss revered . It was a view that helped build Mr . Lévi - Strauss ’ s public reputation in the era of countercultural romanticism in the 1960 s and ’ 70 s . But such simplified romanticism was also a distortion of his ideas . For Mr . Lévi - Strauss , the savage was not intrinsically noble or in any way “ closer to nature . ” Mr . Lévi - Strauss was withering , for example , when describing the Caduveo , whom he portrayed as a tribe so in rebellion against nature — and thus doomed — that it even shunned procreation , choosing to “ reproduce ” by abducting children from enemy tribes . His descriptions of American Indian tribes bear little relation to the sentimental and pastoral clichés that have become commonplace . Mr . Lévi - Strauss also made sharp distinctions between the primitive and the modern , focusing on the development of writing and historical awareness . It was an awareness of history , in his view , that allowed the development of science and the evolution and expansion of the West . But he worried about the fate of the West . It was , he wrote in The New York Review of Books , “ allowing itself to forget or destroy its own heritage . ” With the fading of myth ’ s power in the modern West , he also suggested that music had taken on myth ’ 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 . Lévi - Strauss rejected Rousseau ’ s idea that humankind ’ s problems derive from society ’ s distortions of nature . In Mr . Lévi - Strauss ’ s view , there is no alternative to such distortions . Each society must shape itself out of nature ’ 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 humanity ’ s mythmaking , and he showed how those universal motifs played out in societies , even in the ways a village was laid out . For Mr . Lévi - Strauss , for example , every culture ’ s mythology was built around oppositions : hot and cold , raw and cooked , animal and human . And it is through these opposing “ binary ” 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 . Lévi - Strauss ’ s “ structural ” 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 society ’ 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 “ Tristes Tropiques ” with the statement “ I hate traveling and explorers . ” ) To his mind , as he wrote in “ The Raw and the Cooked , ” translated from “ Le Cru et le Cuit ” ( 1964 ) , he had taken “ ethnographic research in the direction of psychology , logic , and philosophy . ” In radio talks for the Canadian Broadcasting Company in 1977 ( published as “ Myth and Meaning : Cracking the Code of Culture ” ) , Mr . Lévi - Strauss demonstrated how a structural examination of myth might proceed . He cited a report that in 17 th - 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 ? Mr . Lévi - Strauss cited a series of North American myths that associate twins with opposing natural forces : threat and promise , danger and expectation . one myth , for example , includes a magical hare , a rabbit , whose nose is split in a fight , resulting , literally , in a harelip , suggesting an incipient twinness . With his injunctions , the Peruvian priest seemed aware of associations between cosmic disorder and the latent powers of twins . Mr . Lévi - Strauss ’ s ideas shook his field . But his critics were plentiful . They attacked him for ignoring history and geography , using myths from one place and time to help illuminate myths from another , without demonstrating any direct connection or influence . In an influential critical survey of his work in 1970 , the Cambridge University anthropologist Edmund Leach wrote of Mr . Lévi - Strauss : “ Even now , despite his immense prestige , the critics among his professional colleagues greatly outnumber the disciples . ” Mr . Leach himself doubted whether Mr . Lévi - Strauss , during his fieldwork in Brazil , could have conversed with “ any of his native informants in their native language ” or stayed long enough to confirm his first impressions . Some of Mr . Lévi - Strauss ’ s theoretical arguments , including his explanation of cannibals and their tastes , have been challenged by empirical research . Mr . Lévi - Strauss conceded that his strength was in his interpretations of what he discovered and thought that his critics did not sufficiently credit the cumulative impact of those speculations . “ Why not admit it ? ” he once said to an interviewer , Didier Eribon , in “ Conversations with Lévi - Strauss ” ( 1988 ) . “ I was fairly quick to discover that I was more a man for the study than for the field . ” Claude Lévi - Strauss was born on Nov . 28 , 1908 , in Belgium to Raymond Lévi - Strauss and the former Emma Levy . He grew up in France , near Versailles , where his grandfather was a rabbi and his father a portrait painter . His great - grandfather Isaac Strauss was a Strasbourg violinist mentioned by Berlioz in his memoirs . As a child , he loved to collect disparate objects and juxtapose them . “ I had a passion for exotic curios , ” he says in “ Conversations . ” “ My small savings all went to the secondhand shops . ” A large collection of Jewish antiquities from his family ’ s collection , he said , was displayed in the Musée de Cluny ; others were looted after France fell to the Nazis in 1940 . From 1927 to 1932 , Claude obtained degrees in law and philosophy at the University of Paris , then taught in a local high school , the Lycée Janson de Sailly , where his fellow teachers included Jean - Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir . He later became a professor of sociology at the French - founded University of São Paulo in Brazil . Determined to become an anthropologist , he began making trips into the country ’ s interior , accompanied by his wife , Dina Dreyfus , whom he married in 1932 . “ I was envisaging a way of reconciling my professional education with my taste for adventure , ” he said in “ Conversations , ” adding : “ I felt I was reliving the adventures of the first 16 th - century explorers . ” His marriage to Ms . Dreyfus ended in divorce , as did a subsequent marriage , in 1946 , to Rose - Marie Ullmo , with whom he had a son , Laurent . In 1954 he married Monique Roman , and they , too , had a son , Matthieu . Besides Laurent , Mr . Lévi - Strauss is survived by his wife and Matthieu as well as Matthieu ’ s two sons . Mr . Lévi - Strauss left teaching in 1937 and devoted himself to fieldwork , returning to France in 1939 for further study . But on the eve of war , he was drafted into the French Army to serve as a liaison with British troops . In “ Tristes Tropiques , ” he writes of his “ disorderly retreat ” from the Maginot Line after Hitler ’ s invasion of France , fleeing in cattle trucks , sleeping in “ sheep folds . ” In 1941 , Mr . Lévi - Strauss was invited to become a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research in New York , with help from the Rockefeller Foundation . He called it “ the most fruitful period of my life , ” spending time in the reading room of the New York Public Library and befriending the distinguished American anthropologist Franz Boas . He also became part of a circle of artists and Surrealists , including Max Ernst , André Breton and Sartre ’ s future mistress , Dolorès Vanetti . Ms . Vanetti , who shared his “ passion for objects , ” Mr . Lévi - Strauss said in “ Conversations , ” regularly visited an antique shop on Third Avenue in Manhattan that sold artifacts from the Pacific Northwest , leaving Mr . Lévi - Strauss with the “ impression that all the essentials of humanity ’ s artistic treasures could be found in New York . " After the war , Mr . Lévi - Strauss was so intent on pursuing his studies in New York that he was given the position of cultural attaché by the French government until 1947 . on his return to France , he earned a doctorate in letters from the University of Paris in 1948 and was associate curator at the Musée de l ’ Homme in Paris in 1948 and 1949 . His first major book , “ The Elementary Structures of Kinship , ” was published in 1949 . ( Several years later , the jury of the Prix Goncourt , France ’ s most famous literary award , said that it would have given the prize to “ Tristes Tropiques , ” his hybrid of memoir and anthropological travelogue , had it been fiction . ) After the Rockefeller Foundation gave the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris a grant to create a department of social and economic sciences , Mr . Lévi - Strauss became the director of studies at the school , remaining in the post from 1950 to 1974 . Other positions followed . From 1953 to 1960 , he served as secretary general of the International Social Science Council at Unesco . In 1959 , he was appointed professor at the Collège de France . He was elected to the French Academy in 1973 . By 1960 , Mr . Lévi - Strauss had founded L ’ Homme , a journal modeled on The American Anthropologist . By the 1980 s , 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 . Nadim Audi contributed reporting from Paris .