Claude Lévi-Strauss (; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a French anthropologist. He was born to French Jewish parents in Brussels. He grew up in Paris. He came up with structural anthropology, which is the idea that people think about the world in terms of opposites—such as high and low, inside and outside, life and death—and that every culture can be understood in terms of these opposites. "From the very start," he wrote, "the process of visual perception makes use of binary oppositions." ["Structuralism and Ecology", 1972]