Anthropologist Levi-Strauss dies

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8340936.stm

Admittedly never read any of his books but for his contribution to science I must offer a salute. I believe his ideas have been fairly influential in some areas of continental philosophy also. So a double salute.

Prior to his death one of my party tricks with people who kind of know about Levi-Strauss and know how old his work is, but not really know about him, was to say "hey, you know Claude Levi-Strauss is still alive." Then they'd be in disbelief, and I'd show them the Wikipedia article and they would be astonished. If he had lived for 27 days longer, he would have been 101.

He's been deconstructed.
Boo hoo.

At first I thought it was about the guy who created Levi's jeans.

Shifting scaffolding topic

The problem I have with Structuralism is its rigid crystallization of an arbitrarily imposed structure. Building a framework is fine, but it is a fiction (necessary) unless falsifiable, like the Bohr model of the atom.

Levi-Strauss's structural analysis of less complicated cultures and societies (so-called 'primitive' ones) is a Western idea, Eurocentric and simplistic. To be fair, though, claude Levi-Strauss is a product of his time, and honestly tried to understand something unfamiliar, using the tools he had to build a scaffold he could use to build a theory to advance knowledge. It was a useful framework, much like the work of Franz Boaz.

A long and productive life.