Claude Lévi-Strauss may have died on Friday, but his legacy will live on through the many ways in which he changed the way we live and view the world. He was 100 years old, just one month shy of turning 101.

A French anthropologist and cultural theorist, Lévi-Strauss helped the world understand that primitive and indigenous cultures are, at their root, no different than modern, "civilized" societies. He did this largely by applying a structuralist model to his ethnographic studies in places like the Amazon. Prior to Lévi-Strauss, discussions of structuralism were largely limited to the study of linguistics, though the term refers to any analysis that breaks a given field down into a system of interrelated parts. In other words, structuralism assumes that there is no hierarchy, per se, but rather a network of elements that together comprise a system's meaning, or in the case of cultures, order.

What does this mean for us? Lévi-Strauss forever changed the way people think of foreign cultures, power, and indigenous communities. His appropriation of structuralism influenced the study of literature, philosophy, psychology, and even architecture as professionals and academics in those fields began to apply his approach to their own work. He also helped pave the way for other French ethnographers, who would in-turn inspire filmmakers of the French New Wave, whose work often told fictional stories with an anthropological/documentary approach.

It would also be hard to divorce Mr. Lévi-Strauss from the development of feminism, cultural relativism, postmodernism, and any other mode of thought that imagines alternatives to the traditional, patriarchal systems that have had such dominance in the history of civilization. He inspired people to cast an non-judging eye on utterly unfamiliar ways of life, and to appreciate the deep-seated logic that governs human communities, despite their superficial differences. He will be missed, but we are lucky to have his legacy to build on for generations to come.

[Image: Telegraph]