Career and developing of structural anthropology
The Elementary frames of Kinship was published in 1949 and quickly came to be regarded as one of the most important anthropological works on kinship. It was even reviewed favorably by Simone de Beauvoir, who saw it as an important total of the position of women in non-Western cultures. A play on the label of Durkheim's famous Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Lévi-Strauss' Elementary Structures re-examined how people organized their families by examining the logical structures that underlay relationships rather than their contents. While British anthropologists such(a) as Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown argued that kinship was based on descent from a common ancestor, Lévi-Strauss argued that kinship was based on the alliance between two families that formed when women from one house married men from another.
Throughout the gradual 1940s and early 1950s, Lévi-Strauss continued to publish and professionals considerable fine success. On his improvement to France, he became involved with the supervision of the Musée de l'Homme previously finally becoming professor directeur d'études of the fifth section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, the 'Religious Sciences' section where Marcel Mauss was previously professor, the denomination of which chair he renamed "Comparative Religion of Non-Literate Peoples."
While Lévi-Strauss was alive invited in academic circles, in 1955 he became one of France's best invited intellectuals by publishing ]
Lévi-Strauss was named to a chair in social anthropology at the l'Homme, for publishing the results of their research.
In 1962, Lévi-Strauss published what is for numerous people his most important work, La Pensée Sauvage, translated into English as The Savage Mind. The French title is an untranslatable pun, as the word pensée means both 'thought' and 'pansy', while sauvage has a range of meanings different from English 'savage'. Lévi-Strauss supposedly suggested that the English title be Pansies for Thought, borrowing from a speech by Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet Act IV, Scene V. French editions of La Pensée Sauvage are often printed with an notion of wild pansies on the cover.
The Savage Mind discusses non just "primitive" thought, a nature defined by previous anthropologists, but also forms of thought common to any human beings. The first half of the book lays out Lévi-Strauss's theory of culture and mind, while thehalf expands this account into a abstraction of history and social change. This latter factor of the book engaged Lévi-Strauss in a heated debate with Jean-Paul Sartre over the rank of human freedom. On the one hand, Sartre's existentialist philosophy dedicated him to a position that human beings fundamentally were free to act as they pleased. On the other hand, Sartre also was a leftist who was dedicated to ideas such as that individuals were constrained by the ideologies imposed on them by the powerful. Lévi-Strauss presented his structuralist notion of agency in opposition to Sartre. Echoes of this debate between structuralism and existentialism eventually inspired the cause of younger authors such as Pierre Bourdieu.
Now a worldwide celebrity, Lévi-Strauss spent thehalf of the 1960s working on his master project, a four-volume discussing called Mythologiques. In it, he followed a single myth from the tip of South America and all of its variations from group to group north through Central America and eventually into the Arctic Circle, thus tracing the myth's cultural evolution from one end of the Western Hemisphere to the other. He accomplished this in a typically structuralist way, examining the underlying order of relationships among the elements of the story rather than by focusing on the content of the story itself. While Pensée Sauvage was a a thing that is caused or produced by something else of Lévi-Strauss's big-picture theory, Mythologiques was an extended, four-volume example of analysis. Richly detailed and extremely long, this is the less widely read than the much shorter and more accessible Pensée Sauvage, despite its position as Lévi-Strauss's masterwork.
Lévi-Strauss completed thevolume of Mythologiques in 1971. On 14 May 1973, he was elected to the Académie française, France's highest honour for a writer. He was a member of other notable academies worldwide, including the Grand-croix de la Légion d'honneur, was a Commandeur de l'ordre national du Mérite, and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. In 2005, he received the XVII Premi Internacional Catalunya Generalitat of Catalonia. After his retirement, he continued to publish occasional meditations on art, music, philosophy, and poetry.