The Ransom Center has acquired the manuscripts of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s major and minor doctoral theses. The typed theses, annotated with handwritten corrections, were presented by Lévi-Strauss at the Sorbonne University in Paris in 1948 upon completion of his doctorate in humanities. Lévi-Strauss’s major thesis, “Les structures élémentaires de la parenté,” was published in English as “The Elementary Structures of Kinship” in 1949. In the thesis, he proposed the “alliance theory,” a structuralist model for the anthropological study of relations and kinship. His minor thesis, “La vie familiale et sociale des indiens Nambikwara” (“The Family and Social Life of the Nambikwara Indians”), is an ethnography of an indigenous group of the Brazilian Amazon.
Frequently referred to as the father of modern anthropology and structuralism, Lévi-Strauss is known for works such as A World on the Wane (1955), The Savage Mind (1962) and the four-volume Mythologiques series, completed in 1971.