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Claude Gustave Lévi-Strauss |
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French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss is widely viewed as the chief academic proponent and popularizer of structuralism as an interdisciplinary, international theoretical movement. His best-known contributions are to the studies of the economics of kinship systems, the structural analysis of myth, and of "primitive" epistemology and aesthetics. Although his scholarly writings are not limited to these areas, he also declared that the term "structuralism" was open to abuse when applied outside the domain of anthropology and linguistics. As a theorist, Lévi-Strauss fundamentally changed the relationship between anthropology and linguistics by treating linguistics as a theoretical framework for anthropological inquiry, rather than merely relegating it to the minor role of a descriptive tool for fieldwork. Trained as a philosopher, however, he also never entirely abandoned philosophy--despite his protestations to the contrary--and wrote important critiques of both existentialism and phenomenology. His career is also remarkable as a model of influence studies: his friends and acquaintances have included an impressive range of the well-known theorists, philosophers, writers, and artists of the twentieth century, both from France and abroad.
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