I raise this question as a heartfelt tribute to Lévi-Strauss (and the Don), not to mention as something good to think. I’ve written out my own answer in a short blog post with pictures (which won’t come out here), and if you’re interested, you can see it here:
http://blockbusteranthropology.blogspot.com/2009/12/levi-strauss-joins-godfather.html

“And I refused to be a fool, dancing on a string held by all those big shots. I make no apologies–that’s my life.” –Don Corleone, GF

“Writing…seems to have favoured the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.” –Lévi-Strauss, “The Writing Lesson”

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/claude-levi-strauss/

http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/the_kings_wayward_eye_for_claude_levi_strauss/

There is an amount of myth-making – in the Barthesian sense – in academic discourse, that allows big names to be circulated as currencies. L.-S. is no exception.

Benny Lévy (alias Pierre Victor) – Sartre’s legendary personal secretary in late years – makes a similar point about Marx in France (e.g., Louis Althusser’s reading of Marx).

As to L.-S. as an archivist, or conservator – there is, in my view, a paradox: yes, he wanted to preserve, and in doing so – to get the work done – he invented a certain number of devices (e.g., topological ones as the Klein’s bottle [La potière jalouse/The jeallous potter] – this typing of space-time becomes even more evident as he passes from the analysis of myth to artifacts in La voie des masques/The way of the masks).

“modernity as acultural and modernism as a universal solvent”

The Humanist study of our own traditions is founded on scholarly connoisseurship,
but “political scientists” and the new academy sees modernity as acultural modernism and a universal solvent for our problems.
Don’t fall into the trap of arguing that Levi-Strauss invented what he was only trying to preserve.

And – Badiou, Alain (2007) Being and Event, Continuum International Publishing Group.

Thank you for the references.

Outside of Americanist anthropology my impression is that when Lévi-Strauss’ work is taught at all in the US that the focus tends to be on what he had to say about transformations at the level of the individual human’s mind. I think that sort of cognition is what Bloch intends when he writes “cognitive sciences” rather than what has been branded cogsci.

bq. […] the meaning of symbols and concepts had to be studied both within the context of the working of the brain and the specificity of the historical flow of a particular culture.

Well said, in my opinion. Another common perception of non-Americanist US-based anthropologists is that Lévi-Strauss unerringly adopted an ahistorical point of view. That’s just received wisdom as Lévi-Strauss was clearly interested in temporal transformations.

Lévi-Strass was also interested in transformations across space. I understand this as basically an adoption of the Boasian concept of culture area. A good reading is:

@incollection{darnell_text_2004,
address = {Lincoln},
title = {Text, symbol and tradition from {Franz B}oas to {Claude Lévi-Strauss}},
shorttitle = {Text, symbol and tradition},
booktitle = {Coming to shore: {Northwest C}oast ethnology, traditions and visions},
publisher = {University of Nebraska Press},
author = {Regna Darnell},
editor = {Marie Mauzé and Sergei Kan and Michael E. Harkin},
year = {2004},
note = {oclc = 55078480},
pages = {7–22}
}

I was totally unaware of Felix Klein’s or Alain Badiou’s existence prior to your post, so I can’t comment there!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/nov/03/claude-levi-strauss-obituary

What do you think of it? There is a perception of Lévi-Strauss’ structural anthropology in the UK – and maybe in the US – which I wonder might hark back to Leach’s dramatic break with L.-S. It’s the link between linguistics and brain/cognitive science.

My readings of L.-S. are not exhaustive, but still extant (with Mythologiques as principal intellectual investment). Do you know a reference in which L.-S. might have made the connection to brain/cognitive science himself?

When I read L.-S. I found him quite critical to psychologising structuralism (just as he was critical of structural art because it’s generative informatic approach). In his own terms he rather was the archivist of the rainforest (a Middle Age that had not known its Rome).

In this aspect, his work reminds me more of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project – still having mainly Mythologiques in mind – than a morphologist of the Amerindian mind.

In Norway, when my teachers (hesitantly) taught L.-S., they always quoted the much celebrated rocks, ‘animals and plants are good to think…’ (sont bons à penser) and regularly added a ‘…with’. Interesting (in the light of what Bloch writes later in the article on the “hateful I” and the death of the subject). Old habits die hard.

In my reading, L.-S. was more concerned with mathematical logic – the transformational geometry of Felix Klein (oddly unreferenced) – to make sense of how storytelling affected the subsequent possibilities of telling stories (contredire s’écrit ausssi conte-redire).

In sum, he was concerned with groups of transformations, in a way that might bring him close to someone like Alain Badiou, to whom mathematics is more interesting as an ontology, than as a set of operations carried out by a mathematician.

I guess this is what makes Lévi-Strauss a philosopher – in my mind and memory.