Claude Lévi-Strauss

He wasn't the kind of anthropologist devoted to field work in far-flung places. "I hate traveling and explorers" is the first line of Tristes Tropiques, his classic 1955 account of his years in Brazil and other locales. Instead, his position as one of the greatest figures in anthropology, and as a giant in postwar intellectual life generally, rests upon his effort to draw from anthropology a larger philosophy of human cultures.

Building on the linguistic science developed by the pioneering semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure, Lévi-Strauss became a pivotal figure in the development of structuralism, which holds that universal mental structures underlie the behaviors, social relations and beliefs of virtually all societies in all eras. It was an idea with many critics, but in the 1960s, '70s and '80s, structuralism became a hugely influential school of thought, with offshoots--some of them just barely related to Lévi-Strauss's original thinking--in many other disciplines, including sociology and literature.

Lévi-Strauss, who was 100 when he died on Oct. 30 in Paris, also transformed notions about tribal societies. When he entered the field of anthropology in the 1930s, "primitive peoples" were regarded pretty much as just that--mindless and crude. Lévi-Strauss penetrated the intricacy of their myths and cultural practices and found tribal peoples to be sophisticated and intellectually curious, a picture of them he laid out in his 1962 book The Savage Mind. And in his four-volume Mythologies, he showed the immense complexity behind the stories tribal people use to explain the world.