Strauss was born in Brussels in 1908, the son of French Jewish parents from the German-speaking region of Alsace. He studied philosophy and in 1935 went to Brazil, where he became a professor at the University of Sao Paolo. He studied the lives of the tribes of the Mato Grosso and the Amazonian rainforest, collecting material for theories on the underlying structures of human relationships and myths shared by various cultures. __
