French anthropologist who applied structural linguistics to kinship, myth, and culture — founding structural anthropology and becoming one of the dominant intellectual figures of 20th-century France.
The Elementary Structures of Kinship: the exchange of women as the fundamental structure of human societies — all kinship systems are variations on a deep structure. Structural analysis of myth: myths have invariant deep structures expressed through binary oppositions. The Raw and the Cooked (Mythologiques, 4 vols): a structural analysis of hundreds of Native American myths. Tristes Tropiques: a literary-philosophical memoir and one of the great works of 20th-century French prose. Bricolage: the mythical mode of thought as distinct from scientific thought.
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