Claude Levi-Strauss
Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale du Collège de France et de l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
Charles M. and Martha Hitchcock Lectures
September 24, 1984 — 4:10 PMUniversity of California, Berkeley — UC Berkeley Campus
About Claude Levi-Strauss
Claude Levi-Strauss was a French social anthropologist who became a leading scholar in the structural approach to social anthropology. He is famous for theorizing that if social scientists can understand man’s mental structures they can then build a study of man which is as scientific as the laws of gravity.
Claude Levi-Strauss transformed the study of kinship, marriage and family from a descriptive to a theoretical field, showing how the world’s family and kinship structures are connected both through the symbolic processes of the human mind into universal principals of reciprocity in human social life.