An example of a group in the social sciences

During his fieldwork, Claude Lévi-Strauss studied the customs of certain tribes and explored the subject with the support of André Weil, a renowned mathematician and one of the founding members of the Bourbaki group.

André Weil (1906–1998).

Through this collaboration, he notably used group theory to reveal the existence of rules governing kinship: these concern marriage (see Tangente 135, 2010) and the division of the population into disjoint groupings, which some ethnologists call clans. This is the case among the Kariera Aboriginal people of Western Australia.

Claude Lévi-Strauss -------------------

Born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1908, Claude Lévi-Strauss lived for more than 100 years and died in Paris on October 30, 2009. After passing the agrégation in philosophy, he left for Brazil at the age of 27 to teach sociology and conduct ethnographic fieldwork, particularly in the Amazon. He later published his doctoral thesis in 1949 on the subject of elementary kinship structures. He became holder of the chair of social anthropology at the Collège de France and a member of the Académie française. He was a major contemporary thinker in the humanities and one of the leading figures of structuralism in anthropology.

He wrote the enormously successful book Tristes Tropiques (Plon, 1955). In it, he recounts his travels for a broad readership. The book also contains numerous philosophical reflections drawing on fields as varied as geology, literature, music and sociology.

An example of a group in the social sciences

André Weil (1906–1998).

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