Claude Levi-Strauss Facts
Claude Levi-Strauss Facts
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| Interesting Claude Levi-Strauss Facts: |
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| Claude Lévi-Strauss was born to French parents with a Jewish background, but was living in Brussels at the time, where his father was working as a painter. |
| He grew up in Paris, living on a street of the 16th arrondissement named after the artist Claude Lorrain, whose work he admired and later wrote about. |
| During the First World War, he lived with his grandfather. His grandfather was the rabbi of the synagogue of Versailles. |
| He attended school at the Lycée Janson de Sailly and the Lycée Condorcet. |
| At the Sorbonne in Paris, Lévi-Strauss studied law and philosophy. |
| He did not pursue his study of law, but obtained a degree in philosophy in 1931. |
| In 1935, after a few years of secondary-school teaching, he took a last-minute offer to be a part of a French cultural mission to Brazil where he would serve as a visiting professor of sociology at the University of São Paulo. |
| His wife, Dina, served as a visiting professor of ethnology. |
| The couple lived and did their anthropological work in Brazil from 1935 to 1939. |
| During this time, Claude undertook his only ethnographic fieldwork. |
| He accompanied Dina, who was also a visiting professor at the University of São Paulo, where they conducted research expeditions into the Mato Grosso and the Amazon Rainforest. |
| They first studied the Guaycuru and Bororo Indian tribes, and stayed among them for a couple of days. |
| In 1938 they returned for a second expedition more than half-year-long to study the Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib societies. |
| Levi-Strauss's wife suffered an injury that kept her from completing the study, which he then concluded. |
| This experience concreted Lévi-Strauss's professional identity as an anthropologist. |
| He suggested why he went vegetarian in pieces published in Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica and other publications in the 1980s. He said, "A day will come when the thought that to feed themselves, men of the past raised and massacred living beings and complacently exposed their shredded flesh in displays shall no doubt inspire the same repulsion as that of the travellers of the 16th and 17th century facing cannibal meals of savage American primitives in America, Oceania or Africa." |
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