Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologist, Dies at 100 By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN Published: November 3, 2009
Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called “primitive man,” died overnight between Saturday and Sunday. He was 100.
[...]
Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s “structural” approach, seeking universals about the human mind, cut against that notion of anthropology. He did not try to determine the various purposes served by a society’s practices and rituals. He was never interested in the kind of fieldwork that anthropologists of a later generation, like Clifford Geertz, took on, closely observing and analyzing a society as if from the inside. (He began “Tristes Tropiques” with the statement “I hate traveling and explorers.”)
[...]
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/world/europe/04levistrauss.html?partner=rss&emc=rss