ABSTRACT
Lévi-Strauss’s original training was in philosophy, but, like a number of his contemporaries, he quickly became disillusioned with the subject as it was then taught, preferring the concrete and exotic experiences of ethnology to what seemed the rhetorical abstractions of philosophy. After a year in secondary education, he was offered a teaching post in sociology at the University of São Paulo, which enabled him to undertake a series of fieldwork expeditions into the Brazilian interior. During his contact with the indigenous inhabitants, he developed a lasting sense of affinity with his subjects, movingly expressed in his influential autobiography, Tristes tropiques. The crucial experience, however, were the years he spent teaching in New York during the war, when he met most of the leading American anthropologists of the day, and began what was to be a lifelong friendship and collaboration with the Russian phonologist Roman Jakobson. Decisively, Jakobson introduced him to structural linguistics, which inspired him to apply similar techniques of analysis to his own research in anthropology.
