There are some people I often forget are alive, or I innocently assume that they're dead. Abe Vagoda is the first person who comes to mind, but Honest Abe is still kicking.
I must admit that I assumed Claude Levi-Strauss passed some time ago and I was wrong. Levi-Strauss hit 100 and the French museum Musée du Quai Branly celebrated his birthday with lectures and the usual trappings of a centenary soiree. Levi-Strauss is one of the most important anthropologists of the 20th century, and some might argue he is the thinker who revolutionized the field in such a way that he renewed and reinvigorated the study of anthropology. Along with Clifford Geertz, who is dead, Levi-Strauss incorporated elements of culture in a way that stressed the individual nature of cultures and pulled away from a Western-centric model of comprehending societies. Scholars in a variety of fields--including history--borrowed from concepts in each man's work. Of course he's not perfect and his writings are subject to the intellectual trends of his age, just like most people. But one shouldn't discount his role in improving the discipline.
Here's Friday's NYT story on this subject: CLS
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