Libération, 4 November 2009

"The Levi-Strauss century" — with a full-page portrait, Libération pays hommage to the father of modern anthropology, who died on 30 October at age of 100. His most celebrated work Tristes Tropiques — an account of his encounters with Indian tribes in Brazil, published in 1955 — launched his reputation as a world renowned writer and scholar. Structuralism — the quest to uncover "universal structures" that regulate societies — became the label for his school of thought, which proved to be hugely influential not only in anthropology and ethnology, but also in philosophy, linguistics and psychoanalysis. Claude Lévi-Strauss's greatest contribution, concludes Libération, was "to negate any notion of the superiority of one culture over anotherdefinitively." In Le Figaro, writer and fellow member of the Académie française, Jean d'Ormesson, notes that "his loss will be felt in Harvard and Yale, in Brazil and in all the universities of the world. He may well be the last French intellectual to leave such a worldwide legacy."