"although Emmanuelle Loyer makes a case for Lévi-Strauss as a contemporary – and he has been canonized by the Greens – he has come to rest, rather, as a giant figure in the French cultural tradition: a monument to another time."
And you're surprised that we French have sometime a tooth against the Britons. This sentence is really poisonous. French anthropology is not of the "past glorious days and gone forever", it's still on top, for example with Philippe Descola.
One might suggest that your reading of that sentence is a bit prickly. The subject is not "French anthropology" in general, but rather Lévi-Strauss himself. Surely structuralism's heyday has passed, even within the context of French anthropology? (...and definitely in other contexts)
It's in the colon, which implies a causation, an explication or something similar. Here it means, CLS is a great figure of French philosophy, therefore a figure of the past.
Perhaps that would be a fair reading in French? In English one can't be so sure of such an interpretation. The sentence would still make sense if its subject were Voltaire rather than Lévi-Strauss. Being a monument to another time is simply one way for someone to be a giant figure in a cultural tradition. (Certainly, it's a clumsy sentence, but there's no indication of poisonous motivation.)
This determination to take offense via idiosyncratic hermeneutics seems so "stereotypical", one almost suspects trolling.
I find it hard to conclusively read the sentence as you do. Yes, there could be snark meant, but I cannot say positively that the author intends one to understand a French tradition of canonized fossils.
And you're surprised that we French have sometime a tooth against the Britons. This sentence is really poisonous. French anthropology is not of the "past glorious days and gone forever", it's still on top, for example with Philippe Descola.