Claude Lévi-Strauss and structural anthropology
From Geography
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. 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.
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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.
Geographical example
Lévi-Strauss was one of the first who develop the concept of structuralism in the anthropology. Before the concept of structuralism was only used in the context of languages. He discovered that there are certain society structures. His main interest became structures of families, for example myths. In tribes, families who lived a long time ago, he find symbolic relations, which can be find also in different myths. Because cultural phenomenons can be understood with binary oppositions (high/low, men/woman, alive/dead). When we take the opposition alive/dead for example, the basic structuur is universal, but cultures are approaching this differently: it's culture dependent. So, the basic deep structures which are everywhere and always, are universal and are there in the oppositioin alive/dead.
References
The Guardian. (2009). Claude Levi-Strauss obituary. Vinddatum 1 oktober 2012, op http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/nov/03/claude-levi-strauss-obituary
Contributors
- Edited by Bert Hegger on October 1st 2012.
- Page added to the category Post-structuralism by Marleen Revenberg, 23 October 2012
- Page edited with a geographical example by Marleen Revenberg, 24 October 2012
- Picture added by Doris Roelvink, October 25th 2012
