Levi strauss biography anthropology majors

French anthropologist (of Jewish descent, born in Belgium), known as the founder of structuralism, and widely considered the most influential anthropologist of the second half of the 20th century. After studying law and philosophy in Paris, Lévi-Strauss travelled to Brazil, where he taught at the University of São Paolo for some years and conducted field studies among various tribes in the Amazon.

During the Second World War, Lévi-Strauss moved to New York, where he taught at the New School of Social Research, befriended American anthropologists and a number of European intellectuals, who had fled to the U.S.

to escape Nazism. The most important of his new acquaintances was the Russian semiotician Roman Jakobson, who exterted a deep influence on Lévi-Strauss's anthropology. On his return to France, Lévi-Strauss published Les structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949; English edition: The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 1969), in which h