Lévi-Strauss, Claude

Bio Sketch

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, one of the founding figures of structuralism. His work on kinship systems, myth, and the structures of human thought influenced many fields including architectural theory. In Structural Anthropology (1958), he argued that cultural phenomena (including kinship) are systems of representation rather than natural facts—a view cited by Colquhoun and referenced in Learning from Las Vegas.

Key Works

The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949)
Tristes Tropiques (1955)
Structural Anthropology (1958)
The Savage Mind (1962)
Mythologiques (1964–71)

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

Lévi-Strauss's structuralism provides:

Framework for understanding cultural systems as structures of representation
Method for analyzing architectural meaning as conventional rather than natural
Connection between anthropology and architectural theory

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

source-notes/venturi-1977-learning-from-las-vegas
The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — the structuralist anthropologist Baudrillard turns against: the Bororos serve as the test case against exporting the unconscious ("There is no dialectic and no unconscious in primitive societies. These concepts analyze only our own societies, which are ruled by political economy," ch. I, "Epistemology I: In the Shadow of Marxist Concepts," pp. 47–48 — the demand being to ask "what represses psychoanalysis" instead), and The Raw and the Cooked's reflexivity is quoted in Baudrillard's footnote to be judged "the extreme of liberal thought and the most beautiful way of preserving the initiative and priority of Western thought" (ch. III, "Epistemology III: Materialism and Ethnocentrism," p. 84, n. 34) — a "harmonious vision of two thought processes" that "renders their confrontation perfectly inoffensive, by denying the difference of the primitives as an element of rupture." The verdict extends to the museum treatment of primitive objects ("But these objects are not art at all"), so that the structuralist recognition of the primitive becomes the very form of its domestication (see structuralism, primitive-societies-as-alterity).