Claude Levi-Strauss Dies at 100

Belgian anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss died on October 31, 2009, at the ripe old age of 100. His impact on anthropology (and archaeology as a subset of anthropology) was so earth-shattering that it's hard to remember what anthropology was like before him.

Claude Levi-Strauss, drawing by Pablo Secca

Lévi-Strauss was perhaps one of the earliest post-colonial researchers: to put it bluntly, he humanized people who were less "civilized" than the first world. It's hard to believe now, but before Lévi-Strauss, the standard explanation of the existence of modern hunter-gatherers was to consider them less than human, less intelligent, less "gifted" than those of us who turned our hands to agriculture and the lesser arts.

Lévi-Strauss' research could be said to have laid the groundwork for our modern understanding of the world, our (still fledgling) ability to look at alternative living methods as not a reflection of lesser intelligence, but of a pragmatic reaction to environmental conditions. Lévi-Strauss' structuralism pointed out that there are hard-wired components of our natures that are reflected in all of us, no matter where we were born, how much education we have or how we make our living. Although modern people are still chauvinistic as all get-out, we are less so for Lévi-Strauss' research and writings.

You can't say that Lévi-Strauss won't be missed—but his impact will continue to resonate for a long time in anthropology and the related sciences.

Here are some other attempts at explaining the importance of this truly astoundingly influential scholar:

• The Influence of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Robert Mackay, New York Times
• Famed Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss Dies, Constance Holden, Science Now
• Claude Lévi-Strauss Dies at 100 , New York Times
• Remembering Claude Lévi-Strauss, Academic Giant of the Twentieth Century, The Atlantic Wire
• Claude Levi-Strauss: Intellectual considered the father of modern anthropology whose work inspired structuralism, Independent

Selected Books of Levi-Strauss

And you'll notice that, every one of them is in print

• Tristes Tropiques
• Myth and Meaning
• The Jealous Potter
• The Raw and the Cooked
• Structural Anthropology