The cities of Claude Lévi-Strauss

Year 2025, Volume: 45 Issue: 1, 143 - 181, 30.06.2025

Jeferson Carvalho Da Silva

Abstract

The influence of Brazil and its Indigenous peoples in the trajectory of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss is well known. However, less attention has been paid to how cities and urban phenomena appear in his theoretical framework. This article revisits a range of works and materials by systematically recovering and organising some Lévi-Strauss’ observations on cities. The aim is to speculate what a lineage of urban studies inspired by Lévi-Strauss might have been and may still become. The intention is to develop a research program for a certain anthropology of cities. An anthropology that would follow the intuitions of his structuralist program, revisiting and updating its foundations, drawing inspiration from the potential of his morphological analyses and ecological critiques, taking cities as laboratories of the human mind. Proposing the idea of a “wild city”, this work suggests that renewed engagement with Lévi-Strauss’ reflections on urban life offers valuable tools for addressing contemporary challenges in urban environments. In doing so, this contribution seeks to expand the intellectual landscape of one of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers, to understand what his urban itineraries and reflections might still teach us about the world and about anthropology.

Keywords

Claude Lévi-Strauss, City, Anthropological Theory, Architecture, Ecology

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