Claude Levi-Strauss
Claude Levi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theory of structuralism and structural anthropology. He held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France between 1959 and 1982 and was elected a member of the Académie française in 1973. He received numerous honors from universities and institutions throughout the world and has been called, alongside James George Frazer and Franz Boas, the "father of modern anthropology"...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth28 November 1908
CountryFrance
Animals are good to think with.
Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor anyone in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe.
Not only does a journey transport us over enormous distances, it also causes us to move a few degrees up or down in the social scale. It displaces us physically and also for better or for worse takes us out of our class context, so that the colour and flavour of certain places cannot be dissociated from the always unexpected social level on which we find ourselves in experiencing them.
There is today a frightful disappearance of living species, be they plants or animals. And it's clear that the density of human beings has become so great, if I can say so, that they have begun to poison themselves. And the world in which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world that I like.
Anthropology found its Galileo in Rivers, its Newton in Mauss.
The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him.
I am the place in which something has occurred.
Objects are what matter. Only they carry the evidence that throughout the centuries something really happened among human beings.
Nor must we forget that in science there are no final truths.
Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.
I have never known so much naive conviction allied to greater intellectual poverty.
The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions.