Claude Lévi-Strauss was born on November 28 1908 in Brussels of French parents.
After graduating in law and studying philosophy (agrégation de philosophie in 1931, doctorat ès lettres in 1948), he turned to ethnology.
He taught for two years at the lycées of Mont-de-Marsan and Laon, before being appointed member of the French university mission in Brazil, and professor at the University of São Paulo (1935-1938). From 1935 to 1939, he organized and directed several ethnographic missions in Mato Grosso and Amazonia.
During these years, he studied the Indian tribes of Amazonia. His travels among these so-called primitive societies were recounted in the book Tristes tropiques, published in 1955, which made him famous at .
Returning to France on the eve of the war, he was mobilized in 1939-1940. He left France in 1941 for the United States, where he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York. After volunteering for the Free French Forces, he was assigned to the French scientific mission in the United States.
Along with H. Focillon, J. Maritain, J. Perrin and others, he founded the Free School of Advanced Studies in New York, becoming its Secretary General.
During his stay in New York, he devoted himself to theoretical reflection on systems of kinship and matrimonial alliance. This became the subject of his dissertation, published in 1949 at : les structures élémentaires de la parenté.
Recalled to France in 1944 by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he returned to the U.S. as cultural advisor to the French Embassy, a post he resigned in 1947 to devote himself to his scientific work.
In 1949, he was appointed deputy director of the Musée de l'Homme, and in 1950 director of studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, chair of comparative religions of unwritten peoples (Ve Section). At the same time, he was a member of the VIe Section of the same school, which later became the École des hautes études en sciences sociales.
At the suggestion of Pr Maurice Merleau-Ponty, he was elected to the Social Anthropology chair at the Collège de France in 1959, a position he held until 1982, while directing the Social Anthropology Laboratory he had founded in 1960.
In 1961, together with Emile Benveniste and Pierre Gourou, he founded the French scientific anthropology journal L'Homme, which embraced the discipline's many currents and interdisciplinary approach.
Claude Lévi-Strauss died on October 30 2009.