From the NYT obituary for Claude Lévi-Strauss: 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… 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… “The thirst for objective knowledge,” he wrote, “is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive.’ ” Of course humans have always had an obsessive interest in the odd ways of That Tribe Across the River, but how many scholars can say they’ve had so much influence on the way “we” discuss “they” today, whether as political bloggers or Media Village Idiots?