UNESCO/Michel Ravassard · CC BY 3.0

Argued, against the grain of colonial-era anthropology, that so-called "savage" thought followed the same underlying logical structures as modern Western reasoning — a claim that founded structural anthropology and reshaped how the humanities thought about myth and kinship generally. His 1955 memoir-travelogue Tristes Tropiques, recounting fieldwork in Brazil, became a literary as well as scholarly landmark. Born in Belgium to a French-Jewish family, he held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France for over two decades and was elected to the Académie française in 1973.