One of the major figures in the intellectual history of the 20th century died last week at his home in the French countryside. Claude Levi-Strauss was an anthropologist and thinker, who became the father and guiding spirit of “structuralism”, a movement which asserted that seemingly disparate aspects of human life such as language, marriage customs, creation myths, ideas about property are actually shaped by deep and commonly shared “structures”. Levi-Strauss did his field work in Brazil and in other places in the Americas, and on the basis of his ruminations about the meaning of what he had found, he formed his theory. He rejected the notion of a ‘primitive mind’, since in the societies he studied, there was a continued search for meaning, and a sophisticated logic underlying beliefs and customs. His influence waned toward the end of the century, but for a while Structuralism was riding high. I don’t know how much anthropologists today are guided by his work, but I do think that everyone nowadays is pretty careful about using ‘primitive’ in the off-hand, and dismissive, way it was used before. There are many appreciations, too many to summarize or even link to here. Look at Arts and Letters Daily and then take your pick.