Claude Levi-Strauss

This volume of Lévi-Strauss's writings from 1941 to 1947 bears witness to a period of his work which is often overlooked but which was the crucible for the structural anthropology that he would go on to develop in the years that followed. Like many European Jewish intellectuals, Lévi-Strauss had sought refuge in New York while the Nazis overran and occupied...

Perhaps the most influential anthropologist of his generation, Claude Lévi-Strauss left a profound mark on the development of twentieth-century thought, equal to that of phenomenology and existentialism. Through a fertile mixture of insights gleaned from linguistics and from sociology and ethnology, Lévi-Strauss elaborated his theory of structural unity in culture and became the preeminent representative of structural anthropology. La Pensée...

Why is a dog “Fido” but a bird “Peter”? In this brilliant short text, Claude Lévi-Strauss shows that the way we name animals reveals a hidden structure of thought. What looks trivial turns out to be a system: classification, metaphor, and how we place ourselves in the world, everything is at play. Clear, surprising, and quietly profound, this short essay...