Title says it all. I wasn’t even aware he was still around.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091103/ap_on_en_ot/eu_obit_france_levi_strauss
Huh. My grad school advisor was heavily into him – a little too woo-woo for me (I never succeeded in writing a structural analysis, to my abiding chagrin), but an interesting theoretician.
I’m a fan of Marvin Harris’ Cultural Materialism myself. But I’ve found some things in Levi-Strauss I can accept.
A great mind.
Harris is too far in the direction of reductionism for me. I admire Levi-Strauss tremendously – he came up with way more than a few things that are worth considering – but my mind just doesn’t work that way.
This isn’t the jeans guy, is it? 
Levi-Strauss is still alive???
I’ve never read him – what I’ve read about him doesn’t grab me, but it certainly grabbed a lot of people.
–Cliffy
Nope.
Another person here who didn’t know Levi-Strauss was still recently around till now. The anthropology department at my undergrad heavily referenced Levi-Strauss and from my fuzzy recollections, I think they used his Structuralist school of thought along with the works of Malinowski as a basis on which to build more post-modern fields including feminist anthropology and others.
Regardless of how you might feel about Levi-Strauss’ ideas (I’m personally a bit ambivalent if only because his writings were so dry), they were highly influential and important in moving the field of anthropology to a deeper, more analytical level.
I’ll raise a French pastry* in his honor tonight!
*no, I don’t know what pastries have to do with Levi-Strauss, but they are delicious.
A giant of the field.
Add me to the “I’d thought he’d been dead for years.” But yeah, great minds.
Add me to the “Not the jeans guy I take it.”
Now who’s the most famous living Belgian anthropologist?
I knew he was alive, but only because we used to have “living or dead?” pop quizzes in grad school on famous theoreticians, and everyone missed him. Every now and again I’d check to see if he was still out there. I always tell my students to make sure they pronounce it lay-vee-strohss, not lee-vye-strowse.
I’m a big fan of Structuralism, though diluted with the last 50 years of scholarship more than a pure Lévi-Straussianism.
Apparently the jeans guy had “Levi” as a first name, so he’s just a Strauss.
I hadn’t known he was still among the living, either. Definitely one of the most influential anthropologists ever – he was one of the first, if not THE first, to start talking about how human societies are similar rather than merely cataloging differences. I remember learning about dualism and nearly falling out of my chair.