Claude Lévi-Strauss was said to have been named after the Baroque artist Claude Lorrain.
In the early 1930s, his fellow teachers at a high school in Paris included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
Simone de Beauvoir later viewed his work as an important statement of the position of women in so-called primitive societies.
He eventually would find himself at odds with Sartre, as the freedom implied in the theory of existentialism clashed with the notion of an underlying universal structure playing an important role in human behaviour. He was dismissed from a high-school teaching job in Vichy France for being a Jew.
In 1941 on his way to the U.S., he was investigated by the FBI after German letters in his luggage aroused the suspicion of customs agents in Puerto Rico. In 1942, while having dinner at the Faculty House at Columbia University in New York, his fellow anthropologist Franz Boas died of a heart attack in his arms.
The title of La Pensée Sauvage (1962) is a double entendre. In English, the book is known as The Savage Mind, but another translation from the French could be Wild Pansies. The author suggested the English title be Pansies for Thought. The French edition has a flower on the cover. He disliked travelling and began Tristes Tropiques with the statement: "I hate travelling and explorers."
He suggested that cannibals tend to boil their friends and roast their enemies.
In 2008, he became the first member of the Académie Francaise to reach the age of 100.
Staff and wires
