Claude Lévi - Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) was born in 1908 in Brussels to French parents. He studied law and then philosophy in Paris. After two years of teaching in secondary education, in 1934, he was appointed as a professor of sociology at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. It was there that his career in ethnology began, organizing numerous expeditions over the next four years to the regions of the Amazon and Mato Grosso. He returned to France in 1939, and in 1941, following the French armistice, he left for the United States. From 1942 to 1945, he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York. In 1950, he became a directeur d'études at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. From 1959 until his retirement in 1982, he held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France. In 1973, he was elected a lifetime member of the French Academy. Numerous studies have been written about Lévi-Strauss's work. He passed away on October 30, 2009, at his home in Paris, just days before his 101st birthday.