R.I.P. Claude Levi-Strauss
The very famous and highly influential anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss, has just died at the ripe age of 100, just a few weeks short of his 101st birthday. Frankly, I had not realized that he had been still alive all this time. The AP has his obituary: November 3, 2009 French Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss Dies at 100 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 12:22 p.m. ET PARIS (AP) -- Claude Levi-Strauss, widely considered the father of modern anthropology for work that included theories about commonalities between tribal and industrial societies, has died. He was 100. The French intellectual was regarded as having reshaped the field of anthropology, introducing the concept of structuralism -- concepts about common patterns of behavior and thought, especially myths, in a wide range of human societies. Defined as the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity, structuralism compared the formal relationships among elements in any given system. During ...