Lévi-Strauss, Claude

Claude Lévi-Strauss played a decisive role in internationalizing “communications” as a topic of transdisciplinary research in the 1950s and 1960s. His writings relayed concepts among communities of American and French academics, as well as among natural scientists, engineers, and social scientists. His reinterpretation of engineering in the perspective of cybernetics and information theory established premises that informed a generation of debates in the fields of semiotics, structuralism, poststructuralism, and anthropology on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet, the very success of his conceptual approaches to communications, and the widespread assimilation of his theses into mainstream scholarship, has often rendered his influence and originality invisible to later generations of scholars. This entry recovers the history of Lévi-Strauss's interventions and innovations that have proven most relevant to communications research.