Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 1908-2009

Claude Lévi-Strauss (28 November 1908, Brussels, Blegium – 30 October 2009, Paris, France); grew up in Paris; At the Sorbonne in Paris, Lévi-Strauss studied law and philosophy; in 1935, took up a last-minute offer to be part of a French cultural mission to Brazil in which he would serve as a visiting professor of sociology at the University of São Paulo while his then wife, Dina, served as a visiting professor of ethnology; conducted research forays into the Mato Grosso and the Amazon Rainforest; returned to France, 1939; employed at a lycée in Montpellier, but then was dismissed under the Vichy racial laws as Levi-Strauss was Jewish; In 1941, he was offered a position at the New School for Social Research in New York City and granted admission to the United States; returned to Paris in 1948; held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France between 1959 and 1982 and was elected a member of the Académie française in 1973; position as one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought