Loyer Emmanuelle. Levi-Strauss: a Biography

Polity Press, 2018. — 2988 p. — ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1201-0Claude Lévi-Strauss not only transformed his academic discipline, he also profoundly changed the way that we view ourselves and the world around us. In this award-winning biography, Emmanuelle Loyer recounts Lévi-Strauss’s childhood in an assimilated Jewish household. As a professor, Lévi-Strauss left Paris in 1935 for São Paulo. His rugged expeditions into the Brazilian hinterland, where he discovered the Amerindian Other, made him into an anthropologist. The racial laws of the Vichy regime would force him to leave France yet again, this time for the USA in 1941, where he became Professor Claude L. Strauss. Lévi-Strauss’s return to France, after the war, ushered in the period during which he produced his greatest works: several decades of intense labour in which he reinvented anthropology, establishing it as a discipline that offered a new view on the world. In 1955, Tristes Tropiques offered indisputable proof of this the world over. During those years, Lévi-Strauss became something of a French national monument, as well as a celebrity intellectual of global renown.