Having already developed an interest in anthropology, Lévi-Strauss was recruited in 1935 as part of a team of French academics to teach at the newly established University of São Paulo, in Brazil. Thus began his lifelong research on the peoples of the Americas. While in Brazil, Lévi-Strauss and his first wife, Dina, an ethnologist, went on various expeditions to the interior where they had to travel through the wreckage of several tribal groups before they could find peoples they considered relatively unsullied. This expansive fieldwork, with relatively short stays in various places, attracted criticism from orthodox anthropologists, who insisted that fieldwork should consist of long periods in one place.

Wilcken, however, says it set the tone of Lévi-Strauss’s work. ‘He combined rapid assimilation of situations and ethnographic materials with boldly intuitive model-building. Time and again these hit-and-run tactics would pay off.’ Lévi-Strauss did not like fieldwork, and his natural hunting ground was the library, where he consumed and assimilated prodigious amounts of information. Despite his orthodox critics, he had briefly gone through anthropology’s peculiar rite de passage in the Brazil bushlands, and went on to write a fabulously successful anti-travel writing account of his fieldwork in Tristes Tropiques (1955), a book that, as Wilcken says, ‘was more than simply a mesmerizing read – it was life-changing’ for many. The superb descriptive passages, combined with a philosophical pessimism about the modern world, remain compelling.

In 1949 he produced his formidable The Elementary Structures of Kinship, which drew on the material he soaked up from American libraries while in exile in New York during World War II, and as France’s cultural attaché until 1948. Inspired by the linguist Roman Jakobson, whom he had met in the United States, he applied the apparent scientific precision of linguistics to kinship model building, and the book’s enormous geographical and intellectual scope gave it an academic aura that spread beyond the confines of anthropology.

Structuralism had been born, and in whatever field its principles were applied it claimed to demonstrate the generative possibilities of basic binary principles, while displacing human volition. A slew of new intellectuals – Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault – declared the death of the author and acknowledged their debt to Lévi-Strauss, although the latter kept his distance. Structuralism entered an ideological vacuum that had opened up in France after World War II, and following the mid 1950s crisis of Marxism. ‘Suddenly,’ writes Wilcken, ‘arcane analyses of tiny South American tribes began to look attractive, even inspired.’

Being in the right place at the right time seems to have been a talent of his, but Wilcken underplays Lévi-Strauss’s canny ability to manoeuvre himself into advantageous administrative or academic positions, such as when he became the cultural attaché in New York. His driving ambition was to be part of the French intellectual élite. At the end of 1959 he achieved this when he entered the prestigious Collège de France. After that, he was free to indulge himself intellectually.

What is best about this biography is Wilcken’s portrait of a man with a peculiar imagination that combined what looks like scientific rigour with artistic flair – hence the subtitle to the book. He correctly points to Lévi-Strauss’s fascination with music and the way its highly formalised notation gave rise to such exhilarating sensations. The idea of a logic lying behind cultural bricolage – for which he became famous – almost certainly had its roots in the artistic milieu in which Lévi-Strauss grew up. After flirting with surrealism as a young man, his unusual imagination went in search of a discipline that could accommodate it, and found anthropology.

Having reached the pinnacle of French academia, he could now make anthropology what he wanted it to be. During the 1960s he worked on the four-volume Mythologiques: The Raw and the Cooked, From Honey to Ashes, The Origin of Table Manners,and The Naked Man. Wilcken explains why Lévi-Strauss was drawn to study myth: ‘Myth represented the mind in the act of spontaneous creation, unfettered by reality. Unlike kinship structures, whose models were tainted by all manner of sociological factors, myth was pure thought, a faithful reflection of the properties of the mind.’ And with them he had withdrawn into his own world: ‘He rose at five each morning and entered into a communion with the indigenous groups he was working on, inhabiting their worlds and their myths “as if in a fairytale”.’ His office was hung with mobiles made of paper and wire that looped back on one another to trace the logic of a particular myth. He was in his element.

Reality burst through in May 1968 when the students rioted against Gaullism, closed down the universities, and denounced structuralism for its denial of the significance of human action. Lévi-Strauss, who had been an active socialist in the 1920s, looked on in dismay and withdrew to his apartment. Structuralism began its long decline. Lévi-Strauss would only emerge centre stage once again for his one hundredth birthday, which was followed shortly after by his death. There would be three more books, but they were not greeted as momentous, just variations on well-established themes. Lévi-Strauss had been the reluctant head of structuralism anyway, and he always insisted that he stood alone. By his mid nineties he would say unsentimentally, ‘I don’t have a place in this world anymore. It’s a different world and I’ve finished my work here.’

One of the paradoxes of this man who produced such an enormous volume of arcane and idiosyncratic work was that he was able to popularise it so well in interviews with the mass media. His Myth and Meaning (1978), based on interviews given to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, is one of the best introductions to his work; his powers of exposition should be the envy of any scholar. His combination of erudition, literary phrasing, scientific pretension, and popularising is what ensures Lévi-Strauss’s enduring uniqueness.

Lévi-Strauss was married three times, but in this biography we only meet his first wife. The last we hear of her is when she joins the Resistance during World War II. Later, Lévi-Strauss uses some of her notes for his Tristes Tropiques. It would have been nice to know where she ended up; I’m sure Wilcken could have found out.

Dan Sperber, who started out as an anthropologist but moved on to cognitive psychology, and who, as Wilcken notes, wrote one of the best short appraisals of Lévi-Strauss’s work, claimed in his obituary that Lévi-Strauss was a precursor of cognitive science. This is true only up to a point. The aridness of much cognitive research is at odds with Lévi-Strauss’s poetic temperament, and he would surely have stood apart from them, too.