Anthropologist Levi-Strauss dies

Claude Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called "primitive man" and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and '70s, has died at 100.

His son Laurent said Levi-Strauss died of cardiac arrest Friday at his home in Paris. His death was announced Tuesday, the same day he was buried in the village of Lignerolles, in the Cote-d'Or region southeast of Paris, where he had a country home.

A powerful thinker, he became an avatar of "structuralism," a school of thought in which universal "structures" were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations. His work was a profound influence even on his many critics.

Levi-Strauss was so revered that at least 25 countries celebrated his 100th birthday.

His interpretations of North and South American myths were pivotal in changing Western thinking about so-called primitive societies. He began challenging the conventional wisdom about them shortly after beginning his anthropological research in the 1930s.

The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, basing their approaches to life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food, clothing and shelter.

Levi-Strauss rescued his subjects from this limited perspective. Beginning with the Caduveo and Bororo tribes in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, he found among them a dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins, a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths, and an implicit sense of order and design, even among tribes who practiced ruthless warfare.

"The thirst for objective knowledge," he wrote, "is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call 'primitive.'"

Levi-Strauss' ideas shook his field. But his critics were plentiful. They attacked him for ignoring history and geography, using myths from one place and time to help illuminate myths from another, without demonstrating any direct connection or influence.

In an influential critical survey of his work in 1970, the Cambridge University anthropologist Edmund Leach wrote of Levi-Strauss: "Even now, despite his immense prestige, the critics among his professional colleagues greatly outnumber the disciples."

Leach himself doubted whether Levi-Strauss, during his fieldwork in Brazil, could have conversed with "any of his native informants in their native language" or stayed long enough to confirm his first impressions. Some of Levi-Strauss' theoretical arguments have been challenged by empirical research.

Levi-Strauss conceded that his strength was in his interpretations of what he discovered and thought that his critics did not sufficiently credit the cumulative impact of those speculations. "Why not admit it?" he once said to an interviewer, Didier Eribon, in "Conversations with Levi-Strauss" (1988). "I was fairly quick to discover that I was more a man for the study than for the field."

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