French · 1908–2009
French anthropologist who founded structural anthropology and reshaped the humanities. Born in Brussels, raised in Paris, he taught philosophy before fieldwork in Brazil transformed his thinking. Tristes Tropiques (1955) blends memoir, travelogue, and theory into something unprecedented—a meditation on what it means to study other cultures while acknowledging the destruction colonialism brings. His four-volume Mythologiques analyzed indigenous American myths through binary oppositions. Elected to the Académie française, he lived to 100. His influence extends from anthropology to literary criticism to philosophy. He wrote with elegance unusual in the social sciences.