The work of Claude Lévi-Strauss played a major role in sparking a new upsurge in anthropological research and field ethnology in France.
His work has gradually emerged, in France and abroad, as a major contribution to contemporary anthropology. It is first and foremost the questions she poses and the way she poses them that have profoundly overturned previous perspectives, forcing most anthropologists concerned with scientific rigor, whether they agree with her or not, to consider their very diverse objects with fresh eyes and redefine their positions.
We would be tempted to say that no anthropologist has so far exerted such an intellectual influence on all disciplines interested in man and his works, apart from Claude Lévi-Strauss himself, who, in his inaugural lecture on January 5 1960, never ceased to recall the names of such great masters as Durkheim, Mauss and Espinas, whose contribution he said " we have the luxury of forgetting" .

The teaching of his chair was inseparable from the work of his laboratory. He conceived and organized numerous missions to different continents. In 1959, Claude Lévi-Strauss recalled that nothing better illustrated this aspect of his activity than the discovery in Tierra del Fuego by one of his members of the last Ona Indian, then 95 years old, whose last testimony to a once-famous culture he had captured on magnetic tape, and which was destined to disappear on his death.

The chair's own activities had a theoretical orientation, due to the very fact of its holder. The works published by M. Lévi-Strauss since the chair's inception have set out results that were always the first to emerge from his teaching at the Collège de France. Thus, the substance of La Pensée sauvage, Le Totémisme aujourd'hui, comes from the 1961-1962 lectures, le Cru et le cuit from the 1962-1963 lectures, Du Miel au cendres from the 1963-1964 lectures, and so on.

In his last lecture at the Collège de France, in 1982, Claude Lévi-Strauss concluded with these words : " For a long time, the main mission of ethnology will be to collect all that can still be learned about beliefs, customs and institutions, all of which constitute irreplaceable evidence of human richness and diversity. But it's also a good idea for ethnologists, without failing in their primary obligation, to look at those bangs of interference where information from societies that are very close to each other, and others that are very far away, sometimes cancel each other out, and more frequently reinforce each other. This is one of the tasks of today's anthropology ; it will be, even more, one of those of tomorrow's anthropology .