Claude Levi-Strauss, 100; his ideas, research transformed anthropology

A powerful thinker, he became an avatar of structuralism, a school of thought in which universal structures were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations.

Dr. Levi-Strauss was a profound influence, even on his critics, and there were many. And his writing - a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument, and elaborate metaphors - resembles little that had come before in anthropology.

“People realize he is one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century,’’ Philippe Descola, the chairman of the anthropology department at the College de France, said last November on the centenary of Dr. Levi-Strauss’s birth. Dr. Levi-Strauss was so revered that 25 countries celebrated his 100th birthday.

Dr. Levi-Strauss was a quintessential French intellectual, as comfortable in the public sphere as in the academy. He taught at universities in Paris, New York, and Sao Paulo and also worked for the United Nations and the French government.

His legacy is imposing. “Mythologiques,’’ his four-volume work about the structure of native mythology in the Americas, attempts nothing less than an interpretation of the world of culture and custom, shaped by analysis of several hundred myths of little-known tribes and traditions.

The volumes - “The Raw and the Cooked,’’ “From Honey to Ashes,’’ “The Origin of Table Manners,’’ and “The Naked Man,’’ published from 1964 to 1971 - challenge the reader with their complex interweaving of theme and detail.

In his analysis of myth and culture, Dr. Levi-Strauss might contrast imagery of monkeys and jaguars; consider the differences in meaning of roasted and boiled food (cannibals, he suggested, tended to boil their friends and roast their enemies); and establish connections between weird mythological tales and ornate laws of marriage and kinship.

Many of his books include diagrams that look like maps of interstellar geometry, formulas that evoke mathematical techniques, and black-and-white photographs of scarified faces and exotic ritual that he made during his field work.

His interpretations of North and South American myths were pivotal in changing Western thinking about so-called primitive societies. He began challenging the conventional wisdom about them shortly after beginning his anthropological research in the 1930s, an experience that became the basis of an acclaimed 1955 book, “Tristes Tropiques,’’ a sort of anthropological meditation based on his travels in Brazil and elsewhere.

The accepted view had held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, basing their approaches to life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food, clothing, and shelter.

Dr. Levi-Strauss rescued his subjects from this limited perspective. Beginning with the Caduveo and Bororo tribes in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, where he did his first and primary field work, he found among them a dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins; a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths; and an implicit sense of order and design, even among tribes who practiced ruthless warfare.

His work elevated the status of “the savage mind, ’’ a phrase that became the English title of one of his most forceful surveys, “La Pensée Sauvage’’ (1962).

“The thirst for objective knowledge,’’ he wrote, “is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call `primitive.’’’

The world of primitive tribes was fast disappearing, he wrote. From 1900 to 1950, more than 90 tribes and 15 languages had disappeared in Brazil alone. This was another of his recurring themes. He worried about the growth of a “mass civilization,’’ of a modern “monoculture.’’ He sometimes expressed exasperated self-disgust with the West and its “own filth, thrown in the face of mankind.’’

In this seeming elevation of the savage mind and denigration of Western modernity, he was writing within the tradition of French Romanticism, inspired by the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom Dr. Levi-Strauss revered. It was a view that helped build Mr. Levi-Strauss’s public reputation in the era of countercultural romanticism in the 1960s and ‘70s.

But such simplified romanticism was also a distortion of his ideas. For Dr. Levi-Strauss, the savage was not intrinsically noble or in any way “closer to nature.’’ He was withering, for example, when describing the Caduveo, whom he portrayed as a tribe so in rebellion against nature - and thus doomed - that it even shunned procreation, choosing to “reproduce’’ by abducting children from enemy tribes.

His descriptions of American Indian tribes bear little relation to the sentimental and pastoral cliches that have become commonplace. He also made sharp distinctions between the primitive and the modern, focusing on the development of writing and historical awareness. It was an awareness of history, in his view, that allowed the development of science and the evolution and expansion of the West.

Dr. Levi-Strauss’s ideas shook his field. But his critics were plentiful. They attacked him for ignoring history and geography, and for using myths from one place and time to help illuminate myths from another, without demonstrating any direct connection or influence.

Claude Levi-Strauss was born in Belgium and grew up in France, near Versailles.

He obtained degrees in law and philosophy at the University of Paris, then taught in a local high school, the Lycee Janson de Sailly, where his fellow teachers included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

In 1941, Dr. Levi-Strauss fled Nazi Germany’s invasion of France and became a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, with help from the Rockefeller Foundation. He called it “the most fruitful period of my life,’’ spending time in the reading room of the New York Public Library and befriending the distinguished American anthropologist Franz Boas.

His first major book, “The Elementary Structures of Kinship,’’ was published in 1949. (Several years later, the jury of the Prix Goncourt, France’s most famous literary award, said that it would have given the prize to “Tristes Tropiques,’’ his hybrid of memoir and anthropological travelogue, had it been fiction.)

By the 1980s, structuralism as imagined by Dr. Levi-Strauss had been displaced by French thinkers who became known as poststructuralists. They rejected the idea of timeless universals and argued that history and experience were far more important in shaping human consciousness than universal laws.

“French society, and especially Parisian, is gluttonous,’’ Dr. Levi-Strauss said. “Every five years or so, it needs to stuff something new in its mouth. And so five years ago it was structuralism, and now it is something else.’’