Melvin Konner

Lévi-Strauss: He Changed How We See Culture, but Ignored His Own

The death of Claude Lévi-Strauss October 30 in Paris at age 100 closed an epoch in anthropology. His name was synonymous with structuralism, the dominant theory of culture in the late 20th century, and his mind and work were emblematic of French intellectual life at its most grand. Like Emile Durkheim, the great sociologist whose…