Claude Lévi-Strauss and structural anthropology

From Geography

Revision as of 12:36, 1 October 2012

General

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) was a French cultural anthropologist and considered as one of the main thinkers in the twentieth century. He was born in Brussels in a French family of artists and attended Lycee Janson de Sailly in Paris and Sorbonne. In 1928 he passed his philosophy examination and became a high-level school teacher, which can be seen as the first step towards becoming a professor at a university. Becoming desillusioned with philosophy soon after graduating, he left France for Brazil to work at the university of Sao Paulo. He was the founding father of French structuralism. He became famous with the book Triste Tropiques (1955). In this book he wrote about his travel to the Brazilian inlands. Central theme in Triste Tropiques is the disappearing of cultures living in the Brazilian jungle. These disappearing cultures are under thread by the modern Western culture. In 1941, after having faced discrimination against jews by the French Vichy regime, Levi-Strauss escaped and moved to New York (Guardian, 2009). There he met Roman Jakobsen and got acquainted with his structuralist (linguistic) way of thinking. Lévi-Straus saw structuralism as a possibility to make social science more scientific. After the world war two he extended his structural anthropology to many publications. Structures of family ties became his main interest, for example myths and rites. His goal to make social science make more scientific (exact) has failed because his way of thinking add hypotheses that are extreme difficult to test despite his accurate observations.

Structural anthropology

According to structural theory meaning is produced and reproduced within a culture. This happens through various practices and activities which serve as systems. Lévi Strauss analyzed these cultural phenomena such as mythology, kinship, food preparations and language systems to discover what ordered patterns, or structures, they seemed to display. This could expose the structure of human mind. Levi-Strauss focused his attention on the patterns or structures existing beneath the customs and beliefs of all cultures. According to Lévi-Strauss there must be universal properties behind the surface of every individual culture.

References

The Guardian. (2009). Claude Levi-Strauss obituary. Vinddatum 1 okrober 2012, op http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/nov/03/claude-levi-strauss-obituary

Edited by Bert Hegger on October 1st 2012.