Claude Lévi-Strauss (French pronunciation: ; (Brussels, 28 November 1908 – Paris, 30 October 2009) 1234 was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, known as the "father of modern anthropology".5 He was also one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought where his ideas reached into fields including the humanities and philosophy, although he rejected the title of "father" of structuralism. Structuralism has been defined as "the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity."2

In 1962, Lévi-Strauss published what is for many people his most important work, La Pensée Sauvage. The title is a pun untranslatable in English—in English the book is known as The Savage Mind, but this title fails to capture the other possible French meaning of 'Wild Pansies'. In French pensée means both 'thought' and 'pansy,' the flower, while sauvage means 'wild' as well as 'savage' or 'primitive'. The book concerns primitive thought, forms of thought we all use. (Lévi-Strauss suggested the English title be Pansies for Thought, riffing off a speech by Ophelia in Hamlet.) The French edition to this day retains a flower on the cover.

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 part of the book engaged Lévi-Strauss in a heated debate with Jean-Paul Sartre over the nature of human freedom. On the one hand, Sartre's existentialist philosophy committed him to a position that human beings were fundamentally free to act as they pleased. On the other hand, Sartre was also a leftist who was committed to the idea that, for instance, 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 would eventually inspire the work of younger authors such as Pierre Bourdieu.