Claude Lévi-Strauss and structural anthropology

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Claude Lévi-Strauss and structural anthropology

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 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. During the Second World War 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.

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