Happy Birthday (a few days early) to Claude Lévi-Strauss, born one hundred years ago this Friday, November 28, in Brussels.

In France, the centennial celebration has been the occasion for a year-long fête, with essays and articles devoted to his life, work, and intellectual legacy. The highpoint took place in May, when Gallimard made Lévi-Strauss the newest addition to the 198 authors whose collected works appear in its Bibliothèque de la Pléiade series — the publishing equivalent, begun in 1931, of election to the Academie Française. The Bible-paper volumes of the Pléiade, in their concise and perfect Gallic elegance, are a perfect lure to book fetishists, and the Lévi-Strauss edition is no exception. At a budget-busting price of 71 Euros, it has nonetheless sold more than 20,000 copies in six months.

It’s rare for a living figure to appear in the Pléiade — in fact, with Julien Gracq’s death last year, Lévi-Strauss is the sole writer collected in the venerable series who is still breathing. But it is almost unheard of for a writer to collaborate in the manner that the anthropologist did (one of the benefits of hitting the century mark is that reflective opportunities appear that are rarely enjoyed by the merely mortal great thinkers). Where most writers’ Pléiade editions would depend on the posthumous decisions of editors — a monumental series of judgments as to what exactly of the writer’s work should be reprinted in a volume that plays no small role in the record left to posterity — Lévi-Strauss was able to take an active position in how his own mark would appear.

When Hugues Pradier of Gallimard approached Lévi-Strauss in 2004 with the Pléiade proposal, the anthropologist constructed what he called an “ideal outline” comprising four “blocks”: Tristes tropiques; Totemism and The Savage Mind; the self-described “small” Mythologiques (The Voice of the Masks, The Jealous Potter, and Histoire de Lynx); and his final book, Regarder écouter lire. The years represented, from 1955 and the publishing of Tristes tropiques to 1993, when Regarder écouter lire, Lévi-Strauss’s examination of aesthetics and the anthropology of art, is a nice chunk of his career, which began with fieldwork in Brazil in the late 1930s and flourished with Lévi-Strauss’s arrival in 1940 in New York, where he would work on his dissertation, The Elementary Structures of Kinship.

What the volume doesn’t do, perhaps surprisingly, is reprint some of the more famous tomes of that career — absent is that originary moment represented by the discipline-warping dissertation; the polemical essays that comprised Structural Anthropology; the UNESCO-sponsored Race and History; and the symphonic four-volume series of works on mythology published between 1964 and 1971, The Raw and the Cooked, From Honey to Ashes, The Origin of Table Manners, and The Naked Man.

Why the absences? The editor of the Pléiade Lévi-Strauss, Vincent Debaene, an assistant professor in the French department at Columbia, argues in his preface that the selections represent a double refusal: It avoided the production of a “too technical volume” but moreover avoided becoming another mythological reproduction of a “manifesto of structuralism.” A selection of texts that would have played into the latter tendency, Debaene wrote me by e-mail, “would have reduced Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism to an avant-garde which has now been passed over, and the volume would have just gathered the memories of a moment of ‘French Theory’ or of European thought –– and the native Indians would have just become what they were in 18th-century thought: some remote shadows, a conceptual tool to create a relativistic stance, a fiction which would have helped us to think of ourselves and of our present.”

All seven of the books selected for the Pléiade share a concern for “anthropological substance,” Debaene wrote. “All of them deal with ethnographical data, trying to understand North-West Coast masks, social organization of Bororos, Kwakiutl and Salish mythologies, Australian classificatory systems, etc. This volume thus creates an opportunity to re-read Lévi-Strauss’s work outside of the structuralist frame and to reconnect to the main anthropological concern: Why do people do what they do?” As such, all seven engage the core questions of the discipline of anthropology while offering what Debaene calls a “true piece of literature, but a literature which would not be defined by well-written descriptions or nice stylistic effects, but literature as a profound thought experiment, helping to connect through language to certain ways of reasoning which seem so foreign at first glance.” Could there be any more appropriate way to represent an anthropological career, then, in a series dedicated to the most lasting writers of France and beyond?

In his preface Debaene draws upon Lévi-Strauss’s most perennial addition to the last century’s literary and philosophical gallery of prototype-mascots, the bricoleur, in suggesting that the anthropologist approached his corpus of texts in 2004 much like the famed figure did his in Savage Mind. In that book, Lévi-Strauss wrote, “The ‘bricoleur’ may not ever complete his purpose but he always puts something of himself into it.” With his curatorial eye to his legacy, Lévi-Strauss seems to have put the bricolage perspective into editorial practice. —Eric Banks