Claude Lévi-Strauss 一 Miti di oggi (1997)

Claude Lévi-Strauss (Brussels, November 28, 1908 – Paris, October 30, 2009), interviewed by Silvia Ronchey and Giuseppe Scaraffia for the program "Until the End of the World" (November 17, 1997, RAIDUE), discusses his work on myths, which he defines, borrowing a term from Max Ernst, as a collage. The French anthropologist, denying structuralism the status of philosophy tout court, explains that the aim of this method of analysis is to unravel concrete problems from every perspective, such as marital relationships or kinship ties. Responding to burning current issues—such as violence and pedophilia—Lévi-Strauss emphasizes the importance of dialogue with history. Claude Lévi-Strauss, born in Brussels on November 28, 1908, after studying law and philosophy, turned to ethnology. He taught high schools for two years before being appointed to the French university mission in Brazil, where he became a professor at the University of São Paulo (1935–1938). The accounts of his missions were included in Tristi tropici, the text that made him famous. From 1941, he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York, where, with Focillon, Maritain, and others, he founded the École Libre des Hautes Études. During his time in New York, he worked on his doctoral thesis, "The Elementary Structures of Kinship," which was published in 1949. Recalled to France by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he returned to the United States as cultural attaché at the French Embassy, ​​where he remained until 1949, when he left to devote himself to his scientific work. In the same year, he was appointed deputy director of the Musée de l'Homme and, in 1950, he entered the École Pratique des Hautes Études, whose VI section later became the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. At the suggestion of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, he was elected to the Collège de France in 1959, where he held the chair of Social Anthropology until 1982, directing the laboratory he had created in 1960. In 1961, with Émile Benveniste, Pierre Gourou, and Jean Pouillon, he founded the magazine «L’Homme», destined to become the symbol of that construction site of intersecting knowledge that constitutes the profound reason for the human sciences.