Claude L�vi-Strauss was a French Emigrant anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer and Franz Boas, the "father of modern anthropology". The work of L�vi-Strauss was also key in the development of the theory of structuralism and structural anthropology. He was honored by universities throughout the world and held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Coll�ge de France, and was elected a member of the Acad�mie fran�aise in 1973. He argued that the "savage" mind had the same structures as the "civilized" mind and that human characteristics are the same everywhere. These observations culminated in his famous book Tristes Tropiques, which positioned him as one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought, where his ideas reached into many fields in the humanities, as well as sociology and philosophy. Structuralism has been defined as "the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity." 

November 28th, 1908 in City of Brussels  /  Died:   Oct 31st, 2009 - aged 100