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106-676: The founders the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation and the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation. The assets of the foundation come from the federal budget, voluntary property contributions and donations, and other legal sources. The foundation made in 2011 an agreement with the University of São Paulo for founding the Laboratório de Estudos Russos (LERUSS). Some observers described

212-540: A "major" and a "minor" doctoral thesis . These were La vie familiale et sociale des indiens Nambikwara ( The Family and Social Life of the Nambikwara Indians ) and Les structures élémentaires de la parenté ( The Elementary Structures of Kinship ). In 2008, he became the first member of the Académie française to reach the age of 100 and one of the few living authors to have his works published in

318-536: A baccalaureate in June 1925 (age of 16). In his last year (1924), he was introduced to philosophy, including the works of Marx and Kant , and began shifting to the political left (however, unlike many other socialists, he never became communist). From 1925, he spent the next two years at the prestigious Lycée Condorcet preparing for the entrance exam to the highly selective École normale supérieure . However, for reasons that are not entirely clear, he decided not to take

424-399: A category defined by previous anthropologists, but also forms of thought common to all human beings. The first half of the book lays out Lévi-Strauss's theory of culture and mind, while the second half expands this account into a theory of history and social change. This latter part of the book engaged Lévi-Strauss in a heated debate with Jean-Paul Sartre over the nature of human freedom. On

530-402: A comprehensive organization of data that partly had been ordered by other researchers. The overall goal was to find out why family relations differed among various South American cultures. The father might have great authority over the son in one group, for example, with the relationship rigidly restricted by taboos . In another group, the mother's brother would have that kind of relationship with

636-530: A discipline in France, including the Laboratory for Social Anthropology where new students could be trained, and a new journal, l'Homme , for publishing the results of their research. In 1962, Lévi-Strauss published what is for many people his most important work, La Pensée Sauvage , translated into English as The Savage Mind (and later as Wild Thought ). The French title is an untranslatable pun, as

742-490: A few weeks in any one place and was never able to converse easily with any of his native informants in their native language, which is uncharacteristic of anthropological research methods of participatory interaction with subjects to gain a full understanding of a culture. In the 1980s, he discussed why he became vegetarian in pieces published in Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica and other publications anthologized in

848-653: A group of businessmen founded the Free School of Sociology and Politics (ELSP) (the current Foundation of the School of Sociology and Politics in São Paulo). In 1934, the intervenor of São Paulo (which corresponded to the governor), Armando de Sales Oliveira, founded the University of São Paulo (USP). That was one of the efforts to provide Brazil with modern administrative, educational, and military institutions in

954-446: A master order was to rate all the positions in a kinship system along several dimensions. For example, the father was older than the son, the father produced the son, the father had the same sex as the son, and so on; the matrilineal uncle was older and of the same sex, but did not produce the son, and so on. An exhaustive collection of such observations might cause an overall pattern to emerge. However, for Lévi-Strauss, this kind of work

1060-500: A million visitors a year – two theaters, a cinema, a TV channel and an orchestra. The University of São Paulo welcomes people from all continents and stimulates this process via networks and consortiums ( International Office – USP ), such as Erasmus Mundus , Associação das Universidades de Língua Portuguesa, and Rede Magalhães (SMILE – Student Mobility in Latin America, Caribbean and Europe), among others. According to ARWU ,

1166-458: A period known as "search for alternatives". One of the main initiatives included the founding, that same year, of the University of São Paulo. Its nucleus was the School of Philosophy, Sciences, and Languages, with professors from France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and other European countries. The ELSP assumed the goal of administrative elites to form a new model in which they noted an increasing role of

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1272-560: A person derived by participating in a custom. In the United States, where the shape of anthropology was set by the German-educated Franz Boas , the preference was for historical accounts. This approach had obvious problems, which Lévi-Strauss praises Boas for facing squarely. Historical information seldom is available for non-literate cultures. The anthropologist fills in with comparisons to other cultures and

1378-518: A relationship. And it does not offer the possibility of inferring the origins of the structure. A proper solution to the puzzle is to find a basic unit of kinship which can explain all the variations. It is a cluster of four roles – brother, sister, father, son. These are the roles that must be involved in any society that has an incest taboo requiring a man to obtain a wife from some man outside his own hereditary line. A brother may give away his sister, for example, whose son might reciprocate in

1484-510: A sense of control over events when the outcome is uncertain. In the Trobriand Islands , he found proof of this claim in the rites surrounding abortions and weaving skirts. But in the same tribes, there is no magic attached to making clay pots even though it is no more certain a business than weaving. So, the explanation is not consistent. Furthermore, these explanations tend to be used in an ad hoc, superficial way – one postulates

1590-409: A subject that, according to critics, has always been considered secondary to the university's leaders. Claude L%C3%A9vi-Strauss Claude Lévi-Strauss ( / k l ɔː d ˈ l eɪ v i ˈ s t r aʊ s / klawd LAY -vee STROWSS ; French: [klod levi stʁos] ; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in

1696-482: A systematic increase in the total number of graduate vacancies, encouraged by the state government. The gap caused by the removal of teachers and students chased by the military regime was interrupted by the campaign of political amnesty in the early 1980s. Several units of USP celebrated the return of their deposed professors, although many of them were rehired under different conditions (former full professors took new positions as assistant professors). Parallel to

1802-452: A time when we are trying to give meaning to globalization, to build a fairer and more humane world, I would like Claude Lévi-Strauss's universal echo to resonate more strongly". In a similar vein, a statement by Lévi-Strauss was broadcast on National Public Radio in the remembrance produced by All Things Considered on 3 November 2009: "There is today a frightful disappearance of living species, be they plants or animals. And it's clear that

1908-468: A trait of personality when needed. However, the accepted way of discussing organizational function did not work either. Different societies might have institutions that were similar in many obvious ways and yet, served different functions. Many tribal cultures divide the tribe into two groups and have elaborate rules about how the two groups may interact. However, exactly what they may do—trade, intermarry—is different in different tribes; for that matter, so are

2014-458: A visiting professor of ethnology. The couple lived and did their anthropological work in Brazil from 1935 to 1939. During this time, while he was a visiting professor of sociology, Claude undertook his only ethnographic fieldwork. He accompanied Dina, a trained ethnographer in her own right, who was also a visiting professor at the University of São Paulo, where they conducted research forays into

2120-429: Is an online database that allows simultaneous consultation in all university libraries. It is also integrated into a system named Integrated Research, which integrates all online databases signed by the university. This makes academic research faster and provides researchers with easy access to international publications. The University of São Paulo manages a rich set of museums and art galleries , most of them located on

2226-407: Is concerned with the objective data of field research. He notes that it is logically possible for a different atom of kinship structure to exist–sister, sister's brother, brother's wife, daughter – but there are no real-world examples of relationships that can be derived from that grouping. The trouble with this view has been shown by Australian anthropologist Augustus Elkin, who insisted on

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2332-524: Is forced to rely on theories that have no evidential basis, the old notion of universal stages of development or the claim that cultural resemblances are based on some unrecognized past contact between groups. Boas came to believe that no overall pattern in social development could be proven; for him, there was no single history, only histories. There are three broad choices involved in the divergence of these schools; each had to decide: Social scientists in all traditions relied on cross-cultural studies, as it

2438-461: Is just one particular instance of a universal law of human thought. In studying myth, Lévi-Strauss tries "to reduce apparently arbitrary data to some kind of order, and to attain a level at which a kind of necessity becomes apparent, underlying the illusions of liberty." Laurie suggests that for Levi-Strauss, "operations embedded within animal myths provide opportunities to resolve collective problems of classification and hierarchy, marking lines between

2544-513: Is less widely read than the much shorter and more accessible Pensée Sauvage , despite its position as Lévi-Strauss's masterwork. Lévi-Strauss completed the final volume of Mythologiques in 1971. On 14 May 1973, he was elected to the Académie française, France's highest honour for a writer. He was a member of other notable academies worldwide, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters . In 1956, he became foreign member of

2650-514: Is not structuralist in this sense. Lévi-Strauss's later works are more controversial, in part because they impinge on the subject matter of other scholars. He believed that modern life and all history were founded on the same categories and transformations that he had discovered in the Brazilian backcountry — The Raw and the Cooked , From Honey to Ashes, The Naked Man (to borrow some titles from

2756-417: Is to that between husband and wife, that is, A is to B as C is to D. Therefore, if we know A, B, and C, we can predict D. An example of this law is illustrated in the diagram. The four relation units are marked with A to D. Lévi-Strauss noted that if A is positive, B is negative, and C is negative, then it can inferred that D is positive, thereby satisfying the constraint 'A is to B as C is to D'; in this case,

2862-543: Is written and specific to the chosen field of studies, including more in-depth questions in physics, chemistry, and mathematics for engineering; history, math, and geography for law; and so on. In-depth written Portuguese questions are required for all. More recently, students have also been able to access the university by taking the nation-wide high school evaluation test, ENEM, through the Unified Selection System (SISU). Each undergraduate course manages

2968-476: The Mythologiques ). For instance, he compares anthropology to musical serialism and defends his "philosophical" approach. He also pointed out that the modern view of primitive cultures was simplistic in denying them a history. The categories of myth did not persist among them because nothing had happened–it was easy to find the evidence of defeat, migration , exile, and repeated displacements of all

3074-520: The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine . This article about an organization in Russia is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . University of S%C3%A3o Paulo The Universidade de São Paulo (English: University of São Paulo , USP ) is a public research university in the Brazilian state of São Paulo , and the largest public university in Brazil. Since its founding,

3180-664: The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade . On the death of Maurice Druon on 14 April 2009, he became the dean of the Académie , its longest-serving member. He died on 30 October 2009, at age 100. The death was announced four days later. French President Nicolas Sarkozy described him as "one of the greatest ethnologists of all time". Bernard Kouchner , the French Foreign Minister , said Lévi-Strauss "broke with an ethnocentric vision of history and humanity ... At

3286-621: The Faculty of Philosophy, Languages and Human Sciences – Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humana s , FFLCH) with the existing Polytechnic School of Engineering (founded in 1893), the Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture ( Escola Superior de Agricultura Luiz de Queiroz ) (founded in 1901), the Medical School (founded in 1912), the traditional Law School (founded in 1827), the old School of Pharmacy and Dentistry (founded in 1898),

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3392-587: The Grand-croix de la Légion d'honneur , was a Commandeur de l'ordre national du Mérite , and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres . In 2005, he received the XVII Premi Internacional Catalunya ( Generalitat of Catalonia ). After his retirement, he continued to publish occasional meditations on art, music, philosophy, and poetry. Lévi-Strauss sought to apply the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure to anthropology. At

3498-474: The Great Depression had hit France, and Lévi-Strauss found himself needing to provide not only for himself but his parents as well. In 1935, after a few years of secondary school teaching, he took up a last-minute offer to be part of a French cultural mission to Brazil in which he would serve as a visiting professor of sociology at the University of São Paulo while his then-wife, Dina , served as

3604-571: The Institute of Biomedical Sciences (ICB), the Institute of Geosciences (IGc), and the Institute of Biosciences (IB) in 1969. During the 1970s and part of the 1980s, some critics believed that the USP underwent an intellectual dissection in terms of knowledge production and the quality of human resources. During the past decades, the university played an essential role in the discussion and dissemination of important political ideas that contributed to

3710-898: The Mato Grosso and the Amazon Rainforest . They first studied the Guaycuru and Bororó Indian tribes , staying among them for a few days. In 1938, they returned for a second, more than half-year-long expedition to study the Nambikwara and Tupi -Kawahib societies. At this time, his wife had an eye infection that prevented her from completing the study, which he concluded. This experience cemented Lévi-Strauss's professional identity as an anthropologist . Edmund Leach suggests, from Lévi-Strauss's own accounts in Tristes Tropiques , that he could not have spent more than

3816-645: The National Congress , founders and executives of notable Brazilian companies, as has been alma mater for numerous alums of important positions in Brazilian society. Regarding research, the USP is among Brazil's largest research institutions, producing more than 25% of the scientific papers published by Brazilian researchers in high-quality conferences and journals. After its defeat in the Constitutionalist Revolution , São Paulo needed institutional improvements. Therefore, in 1933,

3922-561: The Paraíba Valley ( State of São Paulo 's rural area), with about 1,600 students in total and of these 1,200 at graduation. In 2007, a second Law School was established in the city of Ribeirão Preto , also in the State of São Paulo 's countryside. Today, the USP has five hospitals and offers 247 undergraduate programs and 239 graduate programs in all areas of study. The university houses altogether 24 museums and galleries – with half

4028-795: The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences . He then became a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1960 and the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1967. He received the Erasmus Prize in 1973, the Meister-Eckhart-Prize for philosophy in 2003, and several honorary doctorates from universities such as Oxford , Harvard , Yale , and Columbia . He also was the recipient of

4134-456: 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 (1955) which established his position as one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought. As well as sociology , his ideas reached into many fields in the humanities , including philosophy . Structuralism has been defined as "the search for

4240-441: The Académie française Hélène Carrère d'Encausse said: "He was a thinker, a philosopher.... We will not find another like him". The Elementary Structures of Kinship was published in 1949 and quickly came to be regarded as one of the most important anthropological works on kinship. It was even reviewed favorably by Simone de Beauvoir , who saw it as an important statement of the position of women in non-Western cultures. A play on

4346-562: The Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmospheric Sciences (founded in 1886), and the School of Veterinary Medicine (founded in 1919). The FFCL emerged as the integrating element of the university, bringing together courses in various areas of knowledge. Also, in 1934, the School of Physical Education (sports science) of the State of São Paulo was created, the first civil school of physical education in Brazil, which would later be part of

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4452-580: The U.S. It is noteworthy that he received none of the medals and honours usually awarded to Resistants, let alone created Compagnon de la Libération . After a brief stint from 1946 to 1947 as a cultural attaché to the French embassy in Washington, DC , Lévi-Strauss returned to Paris in 1948. At this time, he received his state doctorate from the Sorbonne by submitting, in the French tradition, both

4558-519: The USP received professors and researchers from all over the world, such as David Bohm (US), Giuseppe Occhialini (Italy), François Châtelet (France), Anatol Rosenfeld (Germany), Helmi Nasr (Egypt), Gérard Lebrun (France), Fritz Köberle ( Austria ), Alexander Grothendieck (France), and Heinz Dieter Heidemann (Germany). The University of São Paulo is the result of a combination of the newly founded School of Philosophy, Sciences and Languages (Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras, FFCL, currently

4664-480: The USP was classified in first place regarding the number of doctorates awarded during 2011. USP is ranked among the top 70 universities in the world, in the Ranking "Top Universities by Reputation 2013" published by Times Higher Education . According to the 2013 Academic Ranking of World Universities , the USP is placed in the group of the 101–151 top world universities. According to the 2020 CWTS Leiden Ranking ,

4770-625: The University of São Paulo is ranked 7th in the world. In the 2024 QS World University Rankings , the University of São Paulo ranked 85th in the world and is ranked 1st in Latin America. As of 2021, the University of São Paulo is the first Latin American institution in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings to be ranked at 201-250th. The USP operates four hospitals, among them University of São Paulo Medical School Public Hospital ,

4876-414: The activities in a given kind of society would partake of the same character; some sort of internal logic would cause one level of culture to evolve into the next. On this view, a society can easily be thought of as an organism, the parts functioning together as do the parts of a body. In contrast, the more influential functionalism of Bronisław Malinowski described the satisfaction of individual needs, what

4982-518: The artist Claude Lorrain , whose work he admired and later wrote about. During the First World War , from age 6 to 10, he lived with his maternal grandfather, who was the Rabbi of Versailles. Despite his religious environment early on, Claude Lévi-Strauss was an atheist or agnostic, at least in his adult life. From 1918 to 1925 he studied at Lycée Janson de Sailly high school, receiving

5088-507: The belief that there was no one "authentic" version of a myth, rather that they were all manifestations of the same language, he sought to find the fundamental units of myth, namely, the mytheme . Lévi-Strauss broke each of the versions of a myth down into a series of sentences, consisting of a relation between a function and a subject. Sentences with the same function were given the same number and bundled together. These are mythemes. What Lévi-Strauss believed he had discovered when he examined

5194-541: The central campus in the city of São Paulo: Brazilian students take the USP's entrance exam, the vestibular , which is prepared and administered by FUVEST (University Foundation for Vestibular), subject to regulations approved by the university's Undergraduate Studies Council. In 2012, 159,603 students signed up for Fuvest's vestibular for 10,982 openings. Candidates must take a multiple-choice test involving chemistry, physics, mathematics, biology, geography, history, Portuguese, and English. The second round of tests

5300-553: The central figures on which structuralist thought is based). In addition, Lévi-Strauss was also exposed to the American anthropology espoused by Franz Boas , who taught at Columbia University . In 1942, while having dinner at the Faculty House at Columbia, Boas died in Lévi-Strauss's arms. This intimate association with Boas gave his early work a distinctive American inclination that helped facilitate its acceptance in

5406-426: The classical view of anthropology, putting the secondary family members first and insisting on analyzing the relations between units instead of the units themselves. In his own analysis of the formation of the identities that arise through marriages between tribes, Lévi-Strauss noted that the relation between the uncle and the nephew was to the relation between brother and sister, as the relation between father and son

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5512-410: The courses, which often results in a considered excessive fragmentation of teaching and research and the disconnection between the knowledge produced in each of the units. Each unit is divided into departments. A department is usually responsible for one of the courses offered by the unit or for a specific search line. In the case of units with only one or two courses, departments are not responsible for

5618-563: The criteria for distinguishing the groups. Nor will it do to say that dividing in two is a universal need of organizations, because there are a lot of tribes that thrive without it. For Lévi-Strauss, the methods of linguistics became a model for all his earlier examinations of society. His analogies usually are from phonology (though also later from music, mathematics, chaos theory , cybernetics , and so on). "A really scientific analysis must be real, simplifying, and explanatory," he writes. Phonemic analysis reveals features that are real, in

5724-446: The cultural outlook and forms of social organization that persisted for centuries around that sea. He is right in that history is difficult to build up in a non-literate society, nevertheless, Jean Guiart's anthropological and José Garanger's archaeological work in central Vanuatu, bringing to the fore the skeletons of former chiefs described in local myths, who had thus been living persons, shows that there can be some means of ascertaining

5830-421: The democratization of the country, bringing together many leftist intellectuals (such as Florestan Fernandes , Boris Fausto, Paul Singer, Antonio Candido , Gioconda Mussolini among others). During the Brazilian dictatorship , a large number of professors from the USP were persecuted and even tortured – many were forced to leave the country. This slowed down scientific production in Brazil. It also promoted

5936-420: The density of human beings has become so great, if I can say so, that they have begun to poison themselves. And the world which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world that I like." The Daily Telegraph said in its obituary that Lévi-Strauss was "one of the dominating postwar influences in French intellectual life and the leading exponent of Structuralism in the social sciences". Permanent secretary of

6042-600: The development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology . He held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France between 1959 and 1982, was elected a member of the Académie française in 1973 and was a member of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He received numerous honors from universities and institutions throughout the world. Lévi-Strauss argued that

6148-429: The discussion of novels, political speeches, sports, and movies. His reasoning makes the best sense when contrasted against the background of an earlier generation's social theory. He wrote about this relationship for decades. A preference for "functionalist" explanations dominated the social sciences from the turn of the 20th century through the 1950s, which is to say that anthropologists and sociologists tried to state

6254-504: The entire course but for a part of it. Due to the aforementioned fragmentation and decentralization of the university, it is common to see departments with similar profiles in different units, which raises criticism as to the effectiveness of public investments and duplication of efforts. The administrative structure of the USP has in the Rectory its central organ, as well as in the Rector

6360-451: The exam. In 1926, he went to Sorbonne in Paris, studying law and philosophy , as well as engaging in socialist politics and activism. In 1929, he opted for philosophy over law (which he found boring), and from 1930 to 1931, put politics aside to focus on preparing for the agrégation in philosophy, in order to qualify as a professor. In 1931, he passed the agrégation, coming in 3rd place, and youngest in his class at age 22. By this time,

6466-494: The fifth section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études , the 'Religious Sciences' section where Marcel Mauss was previously professor, the title of which chair he renamed "Comparative Religion of Non-Literate Peoples". While Lévi-Strauss was well known in academic circles, in 1955 he became one of France's best-known intellectuals by publishing Tristes Tropiques in Paris that year by Plon (best-known translated into English in 1973, published by Penguin). Essentially, this book

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6572-522: The foundation as an instrument for projecting the Russian state's soft power and as a tool for propaganda . Since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine , the general Western disposition is that the Russian world as a concept and its instruments have been associated with Russian irredentism , imperialism and totalitarianism . In July 2022 the EU imposed sanctions on Russkiy Mir Foundation in relation to

6678-685: The headquarters of some of its units to the City University Armando de Salles Oliveira , in São Paulo. In 1963, the Heart Institute of the University of São Paulo was founded. After that, new institutes and schools were created, for instance, the School of Journalism, Communications and Arts (ECA) in 1966. Over the years, some of the university's old departments were transformed into autonomous faculties or institutes, such as

6784-475: The history of some groups which otherwise would be deemed a historical. Another issue is the experience that the same person can tell one a myth highly charged in symbols, and some years later a sort of chronological history claiming to be chronic of a descent line (e.g., in the Loyalty islands and New Zealand), the two texts having in common that they each deal in topographical detail with the land-tenure claims of

6890-462: The incest taboo, one is facing an objective limit of what the human mind has accepted so far. One could hypothesize some biological imperative underlying it, but so far as social order is concerned, the taboo has the effect of an irreducible fact. The social scientist can only work with the structures of human thought that arise from it. And structural explanations can be tested and refuted. A mere analytic scheme that wishes causal relations into existence

6996-458: The job of myth to be a sleight of hand, an association of an irreconcilable binary opposition with a reconcilable binary opposition, creating the illusion, or belief, that the former had been resolved. Lévi-Strauss sees a basic paradox in the study of myth . On one hand, mythical stories are fantastic and unpredictable: the content of myth seems completely arbitrary. On the other hand, the myths of different cultures are surprisingly similar: On

7102-498: The kinds known to recorded history. Instead, the mythic categories had encompassed these changes. He argued for a view of human life as existing in two timelines simultaneously, the eventful one of history and the long cycles in which one set of fundamental mythic patterns dominates and then perhaps another. In this respect, his work resembles that of Fernand Braudel , the historian of the Mediterranean and 'la longue durée,'

7208-601: The largest hospital complex in Latin America and the major teaching and training site for the university's Faculty of Medicine, which is highly ranked within Latin America . All of them are: The USP has 42 libraries managed by the Integrated Library System ( SIB – Sistema Integrado de Bibliotecas in Portuguese), which is also responsible for the university's online system, DEDALUS. Dedalus

7314-461: The main figure of the university. Subordinated to the Rectory are the four Pro-Rectorates, specialized agencies in each of the university's fields of activity: Pro-Rectorate (PRG), Post-Graduation Pro-Rectorate (PRPG), Pro-Rectory of Research (PRP) and Pro-Rectory of Culture and Extension (PRC). In recent years, there has been discussion about creating a Pro-Rectorate for Student Assistance,

7420-534: The myth's cultural evolution from one end of the Western Hemisphere to the other. He accomplished this in a typically structuralist way, examining the underlying structure of relationships among the elements of the story rather than focusing on the content of the story itself. While Pensée Sauvage was a statement of Lévi-Strauss's big-picture theory, Mythologiques was an extended, four-volume example of analysis. Richly detailed and extremely long, it

7526-422: The next generation by allowing his sister to marry exogamously . The underlying demand is a continued circulation of women to keep various clans peacefully related. Right or wrong, this solution displays the qualities of structural thinking. Even though Lévi-Strauss frequently speaks of treating culture as the product of the axioms and corollaries that underlie it, or the phonemic differences that constitute it, he

7632-591: The one hand it would seem that in the course of a myth anything is likely to happen. ... But on the other hand, this apparent arbitrariness is belied by the astounding similarity between myths collected in widely different regions. Therefore the problem: If the content of myth is contingent [i.e., arbitrary], how are we to explain the fact that myths throughout the world are so similar? Lévi-Strauss proposed that universal laws must govern mythical thought and resolve this seeming paradox, producing similar myths in different cultures. Each myth may seem unique, but he proposed it

7738-479: The one hand, Sartre's existentialist philosophy committed him to a position that human beings fundamentally were free to act as they pleased. On the other hand, Sartre also was a leftist who was committed to ideas such as that individuals were constrained by the ideologies imposed on them by the powerful. Lévi-Strauss presented his structuralist notion of agency in opposition to Sartre. Echoes of this debate between structuralism and existentialism eventually inspired

7844-488: The point that in a four-class marriage system, the preferred marriage was with a classificatory mother's brother's daughter and never with the true one. Lévi-Strauss's atom of kinship structure deals only with consanguineal kin. There is a big difference between the two situations, in that the kinship structure involving the classificatory kin relations allows for the building of a system which can bring together thousands of people. Lévi-Strauss's atom of kinship stops working once

7950-528: The posthumous book Nous sommes tous des cannibales (2013): A day will come when the thought that to feed themselves, men of the past raised and massacred living beings and complacently exposed their shredded flesh in displays shall no doubt inspire the same repulsion as that of the travellers of the 16th and 17th century facing cannibal meals of savage American primitives in America, Oceania, Asia or Africa. Lévi-Strauss returned to France in 1939 to take part in

8056-429: The purpose of a social act or institution. The existence of a thing was explained, if it fulfilled a function. The only strong alternative to that kind of analysis was a historical explanation, accounting for the existence of a social fact by stating how it came to be. The idea of social function developed in two different ways, however. The English anthropologist Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown , who had read and admired

8162-564: The relations are contrasting. The goal of Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology , then, was to simplify the masses of empirical data into generalized, comprehensible relations between units, which allow for predictive laws to be identified, such as A is to B as C is to D. Lévi-Strauss's theory is set forth in Structural Anthropology (1958). Briefly, he considers culture a system of symbolic communication, to be investigated with methods that others have used more narrowly in

8268-542: The relations between mythemes was that a myth consists of juxtaposed binary oppositions . Oedipus , for example, consists of the overrating of blood relations and the underrating of blood relations, the autochthonous origin of humans, and the denial of their autochthonous origin. Influenced by Hegel , Lévi-Strauss believed that the human mind thinks fundamentally in these binary oppositions and their unification (the thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad), and that these are what makes meaning possible. Furthermore, he considered

8374-530: The resulting intellectual emptiness of political repression in the 1960s-80s, academic units were fragmented; new faculties and institutes were created, resulting in new courses, new lines of research, and graduate programs . Originally conceived as the university's academic core – gathering itself the various fields of knowledge – the FFCL ( School of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters ) saw its departments gain autonomy and become separate units. The Institute of Physics

8480-531: The said descent line (see Douglas Oliver on the Siwai in Bougainville). Lévi-Strauss would agree to these aspects be explained inside his seminar but would never touch them on his own. The anthropological data content of the myths was not his problem. He was only interested in the formal aspects of each story, considered by him as the result of the workings of the collective unconscious of each group, which idea

8586-472: The sense that users of the language can recognize and respond to them. At the same time, a phoneme is an abstraction from language – not a sound, but a category of sound defined by the way it is distinguished from other categories through rules unique to the language. The entire sound structure of a language may be generated from a relatively small number of rules. In the study of the kinship systems that first concerned him, this ideal of explanation allowed

8692-461: The son, while the father's relationship was relaxed and playful. A number of partial patterns had been noted. Relations between the mother and father, for example, had some sort of reciprocity with those of father and son– if the mother had a dominant social status and was formal with the father, for example, then the father usually had close relations with the son. But these smaller patterns joined in inconsistent ways. One possible way of finding

8798-414: The state of São Paulo. The USP corresponds to the idea of "university" as a set of autonomous schools, institutes, and colleges, each responsible for one area of knowledge (the aforementioned thirty-six teaching, research, and extension). Like most Brazilian universities, it grants autonomy to its teaching, research, and extension units regarding the didactic organization and curricular definition of each of

8904-1016: The state. At the same time, the USP focused on training teachers for secondary schools, experts in sciences, engineers, lawyers, physicians, and professors. The ELSP followed a sociological American model, while the USP used the French academic world as its primary source of inspiration. Foreign professors such as Claude Lévi-Strauss (France), Fernand Braudel (France), Roger Bastide (France), Robert H. Aubreton (France), Heinrich Rheinboldt (Germany), Paul Arbousse Bastide (France), Jean Magüé (France), Martial Gueroult (France), Emilio Willems (Germany), Donald Pierson (US), Gleb Vassielievich Wataghin ( Russia ), Pierre Monbeig (France), Giacomo Albanese ( Italy ), Luigi Fantappiè (Italy), Vilém Flusser (Czech Republic), Giuseppe Ungaretti (Italy) and Herbert Baldus (Germany), broadcast in various institutions new standards for teaching and research, creating new generations of scientists in Brazil . Since its foundation

9010-439: The time, the family was traditionally considered the fundamental object of analysis but was seen primarily as a self-contained unit consisting of a husband, a wife, and their children. Nephews, cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents all were treated as secondary. Lévi-Strauss argued that akin to Saussure's notion of linguistic value , families acquire determinate identities only through relations with one another. Thus, he inverted

9116-488: The title of Durkheim's famous Elementary Forms of the Religious Life , Lévi-Strauss' Elementary Structures re-examined how people organized their families by examining the logical structures that underlay relationships rather than their contents. While British anthropologists such as Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown argued that kinship was based on descent from a common ancestor, Lévi-Strauss argued that kinship

9222-415: The true MoBrDa is missing. Lévi-Strauss also developed the concept of the house society to describe those societies where the domestic unit is more central to the social organization than the descent group or lineage. The purpose of structuralist explanation is to organize real data in the simplest effective way. All science, he says, is either structuralist or reductionist. In confronting such matters as

9328-509: The underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity." He won the 1986 International Nonino Prize in Italy. Gustave Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in 1908 to French-Jewish (turned agnostic) parents who were living in Brussels , where his father was working as a portrait painter at the time. He grew up in Paris, living on a street of the upscale 16th arrondissement named after

9434-638: The university has maintained its status as the country's most prestigious educational institution. The university was founded in 1934, regrouping already existing schools in the state of São Paulo, such as the Law School , the Polytechnic School , and the College of Agriculture . The university's foundation in that year was marked by the creation of the Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Literature , and subsequently new departments. Currently,

9540-529: The university is involved in teaching, research, and university extension in all areas of knowledge, offering a broad range of courses. It has eleven campuses, four of them in the city of São Paulo . The remaining campuses are in the cities of Bauru , Lorena , Piracicaba , Pirassununga , Ribeirão Preto and two in São Carlos . University of São Paulo alumni and faculty include past or present 13 Brazilian presidents , numerous Nobel nominees , members of

9646-426: The university. In 1944, the Medical School opened its public hospital ( Hospital das Clínicas da Universidade de São Paulo ). The School of Engineering of Sao Carlos (EESC) emerged in the same year. In subsequent years, several other research units were also created, such as a second Medical School located in the city of Ribeirão Preto (São Paulo's inland) in 1952. In the 1960s, the university gradually transferred

9752-430: The vacancies available for each admission process. International students may come through several exchange programs. In 2012, the USP hosted over 2,300 exchange students. Roughly a third of the international students are enrolled in humanities and social sciences, with another third in engineering courses. The USP does not require its students, national or foreign, to pay any tuition, as its source of funding comes from

9858-701: The war effort and was assigned as a liaison agent to the Maginot Line . After the French capitulation in 1940, he was employed at a lycée in Montpellier , but then was dismissed under the Vichy racial laws (Lévi-Strauss's family, originally from Alsace, was of Jewish ancestry). Around that time, he and his first wife separated. She stayed behind and worked in the French resistance , while he managed to escape Vichy France by boat to Martinique , from where he

9964-579: The word pensée means both 'thought' and ' pansy ', while sauvage has a range of meanings different from English 'savage'. Lévi-Strauss supposedly suggested that the English title be Pansies for Thought , borrowing from a speech by Ophelia in Shakespeare 's Hamlet (Act IV, Scene V). French editions of La Pensée Sauvage are often printed with an image of wild pansies on the cover. The Savage Mind discusses not just "primitive" thought,

10070-413: The work of the French sociologist Émile Durkheim , argued that the goal of anthropological research was to find the collective function, such as what a religious creed or a set of rules about marriage did for the social order as a whole. Behind this approach was an old idea, the view that civilization developed through a series of phases from the primitive to the modern, everywhere in the same manner. All of

10176-463: The work of younger authors such as Pierre Bourdieu . Now a worldwide celebrity, Lévi-Strauss spent the second half of the 1960s working on his master project, a four-volume study called Mythologiques . In it, he followed a single myth from the tip of South America and all of its variations from group to group north through Central America and eventually into the Arctic Circle , thus tracing

10282-521: Was a memoir detailing his time as a French expatriate throughout the 1930s and his travels. Lévi-Strauss combined exquisitely beautiful prose, dazzling philosophical meditation, and ethnographic analysis of the Amazonian peoples to produce a masterpiece. The organizers of the Prix Goncourt , for instance, lamented that they were not able to award Lévi-Strauss the prize because Tristes Tropiques

10388-475: Was always necessary to supplement information about a society with information about others. Thus, some idea of a common human nature was implicit in each approach. The critical distinction, then, remained twofold: For Lévi-Strauss, the choice was for the demands of the social order. He had no difficulty bringing out the inconsistencies and triviality of individualistic accounts. Malinowski said, for example, that magic beliefs come into being when people need to feel

10494-516: Was based on the alliance between two families that formed when women from one group married men from another. Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lévi-Strauss continued to publish and experienced considerable professional success. On his return to France, he became involved with the administration of the CNRS and the Musée de l'Homme before finally becoming a professor ( directeur d'études ) of

10600-458: Was built in the East Zone of the city of São Paulo a new School of Arts, Sciences, and Humanities (EACH), taking a few courses that go beyond the traditional Brazilian university model and aim to diversify the areas of the consolidated institution. [22] On 21 March 2006, the USP approved the merger of a second School of Chemical Engineering (FAENQUIL) in the city of Lorena (rural area), at

10706-427: Was considered "analytical in appearance only". It results in a chart that is far more difficult to understand than the original data and is based on arbitrary abstractions (empirically, fathers are older than sons, but it is only the researcher who declares that this feature explains their relations). Furthermore, it does not explain anything. The explanation it offers is tautological —if age is crucial, then age explains

10812-531: Was finally able to continue travelling. ( Victor Serge describes conversations with Lévi-Strauss aboard the freighter Capitaine Paul-Lemerle from Marseilles to Martinique in his Notebooks.). In 1941, he was offered a position at the New School for Social Research in New York City and granted admission to the United States. A series of voyages brought him, via South America, to Puerto Rico , where he

10918-652: Was investigated by the FBI after German letters in his luggage aroused the suspicions of customs agents. Lévi-Strauss spent most of the war in New York City. Along with Jacques Maritain , Henri Focillon , and Roman Jakobson , he was a founding member of the École Libre des Hautes Études , a sort of university-in-exile for French academics. The war years in New York were formative for Lévi-Strauss in several ways. His relationship with Jakobson helped shape his theoretical outlook (Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss are considered to be two of

11024-421: Was nonfiction. Lévi-Strauss was named to a chair in social anthropology at the Collège de France in 1959. At roughly the same time he published Structural Anthropology , a collection of his essays that provided both examples and programmatic statements about structuralism. At the same time as he was laying the groundwork for an intellectual program, he began a series of institutions to establish anthropology as

11130-472: Was taken from the linguists, but cannot be proved in any way although he was adamant about its existence and would never accept any discussion on this point. Similar to his anthropological theories, Lévi-Strauss identified myths as a type of speech through which a language could be discovered. His work is a structuralist theory of mythology which attempted to explain how seemingly fantastical and arbitrary tales could be so similar across cultures. Because he had

11236-456: Was the first department to extricate itself from the old FFCL, followed by other natural science departments. In 2004, the university founded the Institute of International Relations to study global matters in a multidisciplinary environment (law, political science, economy, and history) with Brazilian and international students and professors ( International Exchange Program ). In 2005, it

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