Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in Belgium in 1908. He was raised and educated in France and in 1932 he received a degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne. He never took to the discipline, however, and after teaching for several years, he returned to this institution to study sociology. Lévi-Strauss' heart was not in this either, but the time he spent studying in this field exposed him to the works of French sociologists Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss. Both of these scholars would influence his work further down the road.
The field Claude Lévi-Strauss truly wished to study was anthropology. At the time in France, anthropologists primarily studied skeletal remains, making sociology more along the lines of his interest. Still, he was not satisfied. In 1935 he embarked on a journey to São Paulo, Brazil, where he became a professor of sociology. His motive for taking the position was not a desire to go back to teaching. Lévi-Strauss was interested in conducting fieldwork and he knew that living in Brazil would give him the opportunity to do so. In the years he taught he made brief visits to the lands of the native Bororo Indians. Eventually he resigned from his post so that he might be able to travel to the interior of the country in order to do more extensive research. In 1939 he traveled to France on leave with the intent to return to Brazil, but this was never to happen. That same year he was drafted. His military term only lasted as long as the French Army and Lévi-Strauss found himself in a precarious position in Vichy France because of his Jewish heritage. As a part of a movement to rescue European intellectuals, he traveled to New York in 1941 where he obtained a position teaching at the New School for Research through Robert Lowie and Alfred Métraux. There he met many early American anthropologists including Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict and Ralph Linton. He was particularly impressed by Boas because they shared an interest in linguistics.
Lévi-Strauss was first introduced to the study of linguistics by Roman Jakobson, a Russian refugee living in New York during World War II. They became life-long friends. Jakobson’s mentorship significantly modified the course of Lévi-Strauss' career, and not just by introducing him to linguistics. It was Jakobson who convinced Lévi-Strauss to write his first book, Elementary Structure of Kinship, which was published in 1949. He intended to write another volume as a continuation of this topic but put this off because he believed that the mathematical equations involved would be facilitated by analysis on computers that were still in the developmental stages. Instead he wrote Tristes Tropiques in 1955, a travelogue about his time spent in Brazil. After this, he began the work that he is most famous for today. Structural Anthropology was published in 1958, and immediately received fierce criticism. At the same time it propelled Lévi-Strauss into the spotlight. Somewhat to his dismay, Lévi-Strauss became an intellectual icon in France.
Over the years he has published numerous works on structural anthropology, kinship and myth. He also played an instrumental role in the founding of L’Homme, the French equivalent of American Anthropologist. Lévi-Strauss taught for years at the College de France, filling the chair once held by Marcel Mauss. He still lives in France and has continued to publish throughout his retirement.
