The main purpose of this article is to analyse the relations between history and ethnography in the 20th Century, based on anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss' works. His works since The elementary mind, ranging from articles on the theme like Tristes Tropiques and The savage mind, up to Marc Bloch Conference, in 1983, and to Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss (De près et de loin), stimulated discussions among disciplines, which characterized half century of debates and controversy causing changes in the historiographic field. In the middle of that intellectual struggle is the notion of "structure". In one side, it´s always Lévi-Strauss, in the other, Lucien Febvre, Ferdinand Braudel and the very project of the Annales appear successively.
ethnography; structure; intellectual history