by Rhonda Allen

Created on: June 28, 2009   Last Updated: July 13, 2009

Claude Gustav Levi-Strauss is social anthropologist who is best known for his contribution to the development of the theory of Structuralism in modern social anthropology.

Levi-Strauss was born to French Jewish parents in 1908. His father was a painter, and Claude Levi-Strauss was born in Brussels during an assignment there. The family returned to Paris in the early part of Claude's life and he grew up in France, attending lower school there before continuing his education at the Sorbonne.

At Sorbonne, Levi-Strauss began his educational career studying both law and philosophy but came to a change of heart in the middle of his schooling and decided not to pursue a career in law. He graduated from Sorbonne in 1931, after completing his laureate in philosophy. Claude Levi-Strauss taught secondary school for a few years directly following his college graduation, but left teaching to become part of a French Cultural Mission team headed to Brazil. In Brazil, he taught as a visiting professor at the University of Sao Paolo.

During his four years in Brazil, Levi-Strauss was in a position to begin making trips into the Matto Grasso and the Brazilian Rainforest to study native social structure. He made brief studies of several different Indian tribes, among them the Bororo and Nambikwara societies. These trips marked the beginning of Claude Levi-Strauss' ethnographic fieldwork, and they are considered to be the official beginning of his career as working social anthropologist.

In 1939, Levi-Strauss returned to Paris to help with the war effort. He served in the army till after the French capitulation, and then began to teach at a school in Montpelier. That job ended when Claude was dismissed due to his Judaic ancestry, and he left France for a job at the New School for Social Research in New York City. He was instrumental in forming the Ecole Libre de Haute Estude to serve as a very unique learning experience for French exiles. He served as a cultural attache in the French embassy in Washington, DC in 1946 and 1947 before returning to Paris to receive his doctorate from Sorbonne.

His doctoral thesis, 'The Elementary Structures of Kinship' was published a year later. This work was almost instantly granted status as one of the most important papers ever written on the nature of kinship in anthropology. Claude Levi-Strauss continued to research and write through the late 1940's and 1950's with a great significant amount of academic and professional success.

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