Portal:Linguistics/Featured biography/August 2008

Claude Lévi-Strauss (born November 28, 1908) is a French anthropologist who developed structuralism as a method of understanding human society and culture. Outside anthropology, his works have had a large influence on contemporary thought, in particular on the practice of structuralism. Lévi-Strauss is a reference for authors such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Judith Butler.

Lévi-Strauss sought to apply the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure to anthropology, in which the family, which was treated as a self-contained unit, consisting of a husband, a wife, and their children, was traditionally considered the fundamental object of analysis. Nephews, cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents, however, were all treated as secondary. But Lévi-Strauss argued that, akin to Saussure’s notion of linguistic value, families only acquire determinate identities through relations with one another. Thus he inverted the classical view of anthropology, putting the secondary family members first and insisting on analysing the relations between units instead of the units themselves.

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