No one with an interest in the wide variety of humans and human behavior will not have a passing knowledge of Claude Levi-Strauss and some part of his wide, and path breaking work.   However fragile his actual field work later came to be seen, his meta analysis and structuralist foundations almost single-handedly destroyed the existing biases that “primitive” peoples were primitive in any meaningful conceptual way.

The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, basing their approaches to life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food, clothing and shelter.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss rescued his subjects from this limited perspective. Beginning with the Caduveo and Bororo tribes in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, where he did his first and primary fieldwork, he found among them a dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins, a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths, and an implicit sense of order and design, even among tribes who practiced ruthless warfare.

His work elevated the status of “the savage mind,” a phrase that became the English title of one of his most forceful surveys, “La Pensée Sauvage” (1962).

“The thirst for objective knowledge,” he wrote, “is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive.’ ”

If you haven’t thought of him recently, or your long-ago reading of “The Savage Mind,” or “The Raw and the Cooked,” there’s a long, interesting obituary in the NY Times.