Founded in 1960 by Claude Lévi-Strauss, the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale - LAS/Laboratory of Social Anthropology, maintains a generalist approach by tackling all the major areas of Ethnology and Social Anthropology and by including research on most regions of the world: Europe, Africa, Middle East, Central Asia, North and South America, Australia, Oceania and India.

The Laboratory has around 50 permanent members and roughly 100 PhD students.

LAS houses the editorial teams of two reviews, L'Homme and Etudes rurales as well as the l'Herne publication, Cahiers d'Anthropologie Sociale.