Claude Levi-Strauss, 100, a towering anthropologist

Claude Levi-Strauss, 100, one of the preeminent social anthropologists of the 20th century, whose studies of indigenous Brazilian tribes led to influential theories examining human behavior and culture, died over the weekend in Paris. No cause of death was reported.

He was often paired with writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Andre Malraux as the towering French intellectuals of the last century. He said his life's work was "an attempt to show that there are laws of mythical thinking as strict and rigorous as you would find in the natural sciences."

He was best known for popularizing a social-science theory known as "structuralism," a philosophical method of approaching anthropology that identified behavioral codes crucial to the functioning of any society and that are inherent in the human mind.

In his best-known books, translated as A World on the Wane (1955) and The Savage Mind (1962), he set out to show that there was little distinction between so-called civilized and primitive societies.

His mid-1960s essay The Culinary Triangle viewed cultural development through the lens of food. He examined, for example, how natives of the Amazon instinctively make culinary distinctions between roasting and boiling. "Boiling provides a means of complete conservation of the meat and its juices," he wrote, "whereas roasting is accompanied by destruction and loss. Thus one denotes economy; the other prodigality; the latter is aristocratic, the former plebeian."

His method of thinking intruded into many branches of academia, notably philosophy, comparative religion, and comparative literature. In a long career, his reputation as a theorist constantly bounced in and out of favor. "Hardly a month passes in France," essayist Susan Sontag wrote in 1963, "without a major article in some serious literary journal, or an important public lecture, extolling or attacking the ideas and influence of Levi-Strauss."

Richard Shweder of the University of Chicago said Mr. Levi-Strauss' theories come down to this: Logically deduce all the possible ways in which people can behave. Then, observe which behaviors are actually exhibited in the real world. Finally, try to explain the reason why some behaviors exist and why other logically possible behaviors are never seen. These reasons form a grammar, a structure, upon which all cultures are based.

American anthropologists sometimes questioned his analytic thoroughness, even while they acknowledged the importance of his work. He wrote four volumes about mythology. A native of Brussels, Belgium, he taught at the Sorbonne, the College de France, and, for part of World War II, the New School for Social Research in New York.

In A World on the Wane, he wrote that his view of mankind was ultimately of a race destined for extinction. "The world began without the human race and will certainly end without it."