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Claude Levi-Strauss Biography

Claude Levi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss (English: /klɔːd ˈleɪvi ˈstraʊs/; French: [klod levi stʁos]; 28 November 1908, Brussels – 30 October 2009, Paris) 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".

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Claude Levi-Strauss Quotes

The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of a complexity as yet unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious mass of noxious by-products which now contaminate the globe. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.

Achievement, Face, Faces, Order, Round, Thing

How can my old photographs fail to create in me a feeling of emptiness and sorrow? They make me acutely aware that this second deprivation will be final this time.

Aware, Deprivation, Feelings, Finals, Photographs, Sorrow

Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of progress are in danger of failing to recognize. . . the immense riches accumulated by the human race. By underrating the achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accomplished.

Devalue, Enthusiastic, Ideas, Partisans, Past, Race

Teaching and research are not to be confused with training for a profession. Their greatness and their misfortune is that they are a refuge or a mission.

Confused, Greatness, Refuge, Research, Teaching

[ Serialism ] is like a sailless ship, driven out to sea by its captain, who has grown tired of its being used only as a pontoon, and who is privately convinced that by subjecting life aboard to the rules of an elaborate protocol, he will prevent the crew from thinking nostalgically either of their home port or of their ultimate destination.

Destination, Home, Protocol, Thinking, Tired, Ultimate

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

Language, Logic, Men, Nothing, Reason

Scientific knowledge advances haltingly and is stimulated by contention and doubt.

Contention, Doubt, Knowledge, Science, Stimulated

These facts make the creator of music a being like the gods, and make music itself the supreme mystery of human knowledge.

Facts, Humans, Knowledge, Music, Mystery, Supreme

Music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated, that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by few, and that it alone among all the languages unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable - these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods.

Character, Contradictory, Make, Mean, Music

Nor must we forget that in science there are no final truths.

Final, Finals, Forget, Science, Truths

No contact with savage Indian tribes has ever daunted me more than the morning I spent with an old lady swathed in woolies who compared herself to a rotten herring encased in a block of ice.

Block, Herring, Ice, Morning, Spent, Tribes

Freedom is neither a legal invention nor a philosophical conquest, the cherished possession of civilizations more valid than others because they alone have been able to create or preserve it. It is the outcome of an objective relationship between the individual and the space he occupies, between the consumer and the resources at his disposal.

Civilization, Individual, Philosophical, Relationship, Space, Valid

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.

Colour, Degrees, Distance, Journey, Moving, Social

I have never known so much naive conviction allied to greater intellectual poverty.

Conviction, Intellectual, Known, Naive, Poverty

Civilization has ceased to be that delicate flower which was preserved and painstakingly cultivated in one or two sheltered areas of a soil rich in wild species. . . Mankind has opted for monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as beetroot is grown in the mass. Henceforth, man's daily bill of fare will consist only of this one item.

Creating, Flower, Men, Rich, Sheltered, Species

I think that a society cannot live without a certain number of irrational beliefs. They are protected from criticism and analysis because they are irrational.

Certain, Criticism, Irrational, Numbers, Protected, Thinking

Understanding arises from reducing one type of reality into another.

Reality, Reducing, Type, Understanding

Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization; and for us European earth-dwellers, the adventure played out in the heart of the New World signifies in the first place that it was not our world and that we bear responsibility for the crime of its destruction.

Civilization, Country, Heart, Responsibility

The dogma of cultural relativism is challenged by the very people for whose moral benefit the anthropologists established it in the first place. The complaint the underdeveloped countries advance is not that they are being westernized, but that the westernization is proceeding too slowly.

Benefits, Country, Established, People, Slowly

I hate travelling and explorers

Explorers, Hate, I Hate, Travelling

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