Claude Lévi-Strauss was the last French intellectual giant. He was one of the greatest social anthropologists of the age, and his reputation spread well beyond the confines of his discipline as the most distinguished post-war exponent of structuralism, a mode of analysis which, in its more loosely defined forms, was a dominant force in the human sciences from the 1950s through to the 1970s and 1980s.

The name Lévi-Strauss thus became an intellectual touchstone, familiar to everyone from literature students to sociologists. The same often happened to the titles of his books: from Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté to Le Cru et le cuit, L’Origine des manières de table and La Pensée sauvage, they were for many years an obligatory part of the contemporary cultural baggage, quite irrespective of their often daunting intellectual difficulty.

Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in 1908 in Brussels, where his father, a painter, happened to be carrying out some portrait commissions. From the age of 2 to early adulthood, he grew up at 26 rue Poussin, in the comfortably middle-class 16th arrondissement of Paris. While Claude was given the traditional Jewish bar mitzvah in order not to hurt the feelings of his maternal grandfather, a rabbi, neither of his parents was a believer.

The household atmosphere was above all artistic. When money from portrait commissions was lacking, as it often was, his father would turn the home into a fabrics workshop. Claude himself produced several designs. Music was particularly important. It was a source of great family pride that his father’s grandfather, from Alsace, had been a director of the court dance orchestra under King Louis-Philippe, and the young Claude grew up knowing Offenbach by heart.

He also took violin lessons and composed small pieces for trio as well as the beginnings of an opera. Most of his later writings are shaped by musical structures and metaphors. Indeed, he perceived myth as a structure analogous to music: as he famously, and somewhat obscurely wrote, “myth and music appear as conductors of an orchestra of which the listeners are the silent performers”.

Lévi-Strauss made early contact with the two thinkers who would be the dominant intellectual figures of his generation, Freud and Marx. He became familiar with the latter’s writings at the Lycée Janson de Sailly, where a friend’s father worked with the pioneering French psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte, and was introduced to the former at 16 through his father’s Belgian friends.

Marx inspired not only a strong sense of political activism, which lasted until the mid-1930s, but was also the subject of Lévi-Strauss’s first publication, a pamphlet on the French revolutionary Gracchus de Babeuf published by the Belgian Socialist press.

If Marx and Freud inspired Lévi-Strauss’s conviction that seemingly irrational forms of social or private behaviour are always amenable to intellectual analysis, his greatest intellectual influence was no doubt Kant, from whom he learnt that “the mind has its constraints, which it imposes on an ever-impenetrable reality, and it reaches this reality only through them”. After leaving Janson de Sailly, he unenthusiastically studied while at the same time undertaking a degree in philosophy. Although he later claimed to have gone through the process “like a zombie”, he nevertheless came third in the agrégation exam, which he took alongside the philosopher Simone Weil.

Other acquaintances made at this time were Simone de Beauvoir (who read his Structures élémentaires de la parenté when writing The Second Sex) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who both remained important intellectual friends, and whose brand of existentialism he valued well above Sartre’s.

After military service in Strasbourg, Lévi-Strauss obtained a teaching position in Mont-de-Marsan, where he also got involved with local politics for the SFIO, as the French socialists were then known. However, his attempt to get elected ended the day it began when he crashed a car he was driving without a licence (it had been lent to him by Pierre Dreyfus, later to become chairman of Renault).

By then he was married to his first wife, Dina, who was related to Emile Durkheim and Marcel Maus. When she too obtained her agrégation, the couple moved north, with her teaching in Amiens and him in Laon.

But Lévi-Strauss longed to travel and in 1935, through the good offices of the psychologist Georges Dumas, obtained a position teaching sociology at the new university of São Paulo.