Austere, prickly, solitary, Claude Lévi-Strauss is the least fashionable, and most influential, of the postwar French theorists. Lévi-Straussians are a nearly extinct tribe in Anglo-American universities, far outnumbered by Foucauldians, Derrideans and Deleuzians. But, in a paradox he might have enjoyed, his imprint has been deeper. Like the Amerindian myths he anatomised in obsessive detail in the four-volume Mythologiques, his ideas have seeped into our thinking. From the significance of the incest taboo, to the reasons we roast or boil our food, to the distinctions we draw between nature and culture, the way we think about behaviour and the mind has been indelibly shaped by the writings that bear his signature.

LRB 3 November 2011 | PDF Download