This article is about the anthropologist. For the clothing manufacturer, see Levi Strauss.

Claude Lévi-Strauss (IPA pronunciation [klod levi stʁos]), born November 28, 1908, is a French anthropologist who developed structuralism as a method of understanding human society and culture. Outside anthropology, his works have had a large influence on contemporary thought, in particular on the practice of structuralism. Lévi-Strauss is a reference for authors such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Judith Butler. See Anthropology. ... Alternative meaning: Claude L vi-Strauss, the French anthropologist. ... It has been suggested that Contemporary philosophy be merged into this article or section. ... November 28 is the 332nd day (333rd in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1908 (MCMVIII) was a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will display the full calendar). ... Image File history File links Flag_of_Belgium_(civil). ... Nickname: Map showing the location of Brussels in Belgium Coordinates: Country Belgium Region Brussels-Capital Region Founded 979 Founded (Region) June 18, 1989 Government  - Mayor (Municipality) Freddy Thielemans Area  - Region 162 km²  (62. ... Continental may refer to: The adjective of continent, such as in continental Europe, continental breakfast, or continental climate, or Continental Glacier; The culture of the continental nation states of Europe, inasmuch as it contrasts with the culture of Anglo-Saxon England; The Lincoln Continental, a car made by Lincoln division... Anthropology is the study of the physical and social characteristics of humanity through the examination of historical and present geographical distribution, cultural history, acculturation, and cultural relationships. ... Young people interacting within a an ethnically diverse society. ... Kinship is the most basic principle of organizing individuals into social groups, roles, and categories. ... Linguistics is the scientific study of language, which can be theoretical or applied. ... Structuralism as a term refers to various theories across the humanities, social sciences and economics many of which share the assumption that structural relationships between concepts vary between different cultures/languages and that these relationships can be usefully exposed and explored. ... It has been suggested that Folkloristics be merged into this article or section. ... The culinary triangle is a concept thought up by Claude Lévi-Strauss involving three types of cooking; these are boiling, roasting, and smoking, usually done to meats. ... Bricolage – from the French-language verb bricoler, meaning to tinker or to fiddle – is that languages equivalent of the English phrase do-it-yourself. Bricolage is also often contrasted to engineering: building by trial and error rather than based on theory. ... Roman Osipovich Jakobson (October 11, 1896 - July 18, 1982) was a Russian thinker who became one of the most influential linguists of the 20th century by pioneering the development of structural analysis of language, poetry, and art. ... Franz Boas Franz Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942[1]) was one of the pioneers of modern anthropology and is often called the Father of American Anthropology. Born in Germany, Boas worked for most of his life in North America. ... Marcel Mauss (May 10, 1872 – February 10, 1950) was a French sociologist best known for his role in elaborating on and securing the legacy of his uncle Émile Durkheim and the Année Sociologique. ... Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (Cyrillic ; Moscow, April 15, 1890 - Vienna, June 25, 1938) was a Russian linguist whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics. ... Jean-Jacques Rousseau, (June 28, 1712 – July 2, 1778) was a Genevan philosopher of the Enlightenment whose political ideas influenced the French Revolution, the development of socialist theory, and the growth of nationalism. ... Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818, Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883, London) was a German philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary. ... Emile Durkheim. ... Sigmund Freud (born Sigismund Schlomo Freud) May 6, 1856 – September 23, 1939; (IPA: ) was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who co-founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology. ... Michel Foucault (IPA pronunciation: ) (October 15, 1926 – June 25, 1984) was a French philosopher and historian. ... Gilles Deleuze (IPA: ), (January 18, 1925 – November 4, 1995) was a French philosopher of the late 20th century. ... Jacques Derrida (July 15, 1930 – October 8, 2004) was an Algerian-born French philosopher, known as the founder of deconstruction. ... Jacques Lacan Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan (April 13, 1901 – September 9, 1981) was a French psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and doctor. ... Image:J Butler. ... Piaget, by André Koehne Jean Piaget [] (August 9, 1896 – September 16, 1980) was a Swiss philosopher, natural scientist and developmental psychologist, well known for his work studying children and his theory of cognitive development. ... Jean Baudrillard (July 29, 1929 – March 6, 2007) (IPA pronunciation: [1]) was a French cultural theorist, philosopher, political commentator, and photographer. ... Pierre Bourdieu (August 1, 1930 – January 23, 2002) was an acclaimed French sociologist whose work employed methods drawn from a wide range of disciplines: from philosophy and literary theory to sociology and anthropology. ... Louis Pierre Althusser (Pronunciation: altuË¡seʁ) (October 16, 1918 – October 23, 1990) was a Marxist philosopher. ... Articles with similar titles include the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ... November 28 is the 332nd day (333rd in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1908 (MCMVIII) was a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will display the full calendar). ... See Anthropology. ... Structuralism as a term refers to various theories across the humanities, social sciences and economics many of which share the assumption that structural relationships between concepts vary between different cultures/languages and that these relationships can be usefully exposed and explored. ... Young people interacting within a an ethnically diverse society. ... Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning to cultivate), generally refers to patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activity significance. ... Structuralism as a term refers to various theories across the humanities, social sciences and economics many of which share the assumption that structural relationships between concepts vary between different cultures/languages and that these relationships can be usefully exposed and explored. ... Roland Barthes Roland Barthes (November 12, 1915 – March 25, 1980) (pronounced ) was a French literary critic, literary and social theorist, philosopher, and semiotician. ... Michel Foucault (IPA pronunciation: ) (October 15, 1926 – June 25, 1984) was a French philosopher and historian. ... Gilles Deleuze (IPA: ), (January 18, 1925 – November 4, 1995) was a French philosopher of the late 20th century. ... Jacques Derrida (July 15, 1930 – October 8, 2004) was an Algerian-born French philosopher, known as the founder of deconstruction. ... Jacques Lacan Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan (April 13, 1901 – September 9, 1981) was a French psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and doctor. ... Image:J Butler. ...

Biography

Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in Brussels and studied law and philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. He did not pursue his study of law, but agrégated in philosophy in 1931 after an epiphany resulting from a late night conversation strolling around the grounds of True's Yard, Kings Lynn with renowned cryptozoologist Lewis Daly. After a few years of teaching secondary school, in 1935 he took up a last-minute offer to be part of a French cultural mission to Brazil in which he would serve as a visiting professor at the University of São Paulo. Nickname: Map showing the location of Brussels in Belgium Coordinates: Country Belgium Region Brussels-Capital Region Founded 979 Founded (Region) June 18, 1989 Government  - Mayor (Municipality) Freddy Thielemans Area  - Region 162 km²  (62. ... Lady Justice or Justitia is a personification of the moral force that underlies the legal system (particularly in Western art). ... The philosopher Socrates about to take poison hemlock as ordered by the court. ... The Sorbonne, Paris, in a 17th century engraving The historic University of Paris (French: ) first appeared in the second half of the 12th century, but was in 1970 reorganised as 13 autonomous universities (University of Paris I–XIII). ... City flag City coat of arms Motto: Fluctuat nec mergitur (Latin: Tossed by the waves, she does not sink) Paris Eiffel tower as seen from the esplanade du Trocadéro. ... In France, the agrégation is a civil service competitive examination for some positions in the public education system. ... Entrance plaza to USPs main campus at São Paulo City, showing the Clock Tower The University of São Paulo (in Portuguese Universidade de São Paulo, USP) is one of the three public universities funded by the State of São Paulo. ...

Lévi-Strauss lived in Brazil from 1935 to 1939. It was during this time that he undertook his first ethnographic fieldwork, conducting periodic research forays into the Mato Grosso and the Amazon Rainforest. He studied first the Guaycuru and Bororo Indian tribes, actually living among them for a while. Several years later, he returned for a second, year-long expedition to study the Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib societies. It was this experience that cemented Lévi-Strauss's professional identity as an anthropologist. Edmund Leach suggests, from Lévi-Strauss's own accounts in Tristes-Tropiques, that he could not have spent more than a few weeks with any place and was never able to converse easily with any of his native informants in their native language. 1935 (MCMXXXV) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display full calendar). ... 1939 (MCMXXXIX) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display full year calendar). ... Flag of Mato Grosso See other Brazilian States Capital Cuiabá Largest City Cuiabá Area 906,806. ... Map of the Amazon rainforest ecoregions as delineated by the WWF. Yellow line encloses the Amazon rainforest. ... The Bororo are a Bororoan-speaking people in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil; they also extended into Bolivia and the Brazilian state of Goiás. ... The indigenous peoples of Brazil (povos indígenas in Portuguese) comprise a large number of distict ethnic groups who inhabited the countrys present territory prior its discovery by Europeans around 1500. ... The Nambikwara is an Amazonian Amerindian tribe, the subject of study by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, which was itself then subjected to a deconstruction by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his Of Grammatology. ... Sir Edmund Ronald Leach (November 7, 1910 – January 6, 1989) was a British anthropologist. ...

He returned to France in 1939 to take part in the war effort, but after French capitulation to the Germans, Lévi-Strauss, a Jew, fled Paris. Lévi-Strauss was offered a position in New York and granted admission to the United States. A series of voyages brought him via South America to Puerto Rico where he was investigated by the FBI after German letters in his luggage aroused the suspicions of customs agents. Lévi-Strauss spent most of the war in New York City. Together with other intellectual emigrés, he taught at the New School for Social Research. Along with Jacques Maritain, Henri Focillon and Roman Jakobson, he was a founding member of the École Libre des Hautes Études, a sort of university-in-exile for French academics. 1939 (MCMXXXIX) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will display full year calendar). ... New York, NY redirects here. ... New School University is an institute of higher learning in New York City. ... Jacques Maritain Jacques Maritain (November 18, 1882 – April 28, 1973) was a French Catholic philosopher. ... Henri Focillon, born in 1881 and died 1943, was a French art historian . ... Roman Osipovich Jakobson (October 11, 1896 - July 18, 1982) was a Russian thinker who became one of the most influential linguists of the 20th century by pioneering the development of structural analysis of language, poetry, and art. ...

The war years in New York were formative for Lévi-Strauss in several ways. His relationship with Jakobson helped shape his theoretical outlook (Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss are considered to be two of the central figures on which structuralist thought is based). In addition, Lévi-Strauss was also exposed to the American anthropology espoused by Franz Boas, who taught at Columbia University on New York's Upper West Side. In 1942 in fact, while having dinner at the Faculty House at Columbia, Boas died of a heart attack in Lévi-Strauss's arms. This intimate association with Boas gave his early work a distinctive American tilt that helped facilitate its acceptance in the U.S. After a brief stint from 1946 to 1947 as a cultural attaché to the French embassy in Washington, DC, Lévi-Strauss returned to Paris in 1948. It was at this time that he received his doctorate from the Sorbonne by submitting, in the French tradition, both a "major" and a "minor" thesis. These were The Family and Social Life of the Nambikwara Indians and The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Structuralism as a term refers to various theories across the humanities, social sciences and economics many of which share the assumption that structural relationships between concepts vary between different cultures/languages and that these relationships can be usefully exposed and explored. ... Anthropology is the study of the physical and social characteristics of humanity through the examination of historical and present geographical distribution, cultural history, acculturation, and cultural relationships. ... Franz Boas Franz Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942[1]) was one of the pioneers of modern anthropology and is often called the Father of American Anthropology. Born in Germany, Boas worked for most of his life in North America. ... Columbia University is a private research university in the United States. ... The Upper West Side is a neighborhood of the borough of Manhattan in New York City that lies between Central Park and the Hudson River above West 59th Street. ... 1942 (MCMXLII) was a common year starting on January 18 1815 (the link is to a full 1942 calendar). ... For other uses, see Boa (disambiguation). ... For other uses, see Boa (disambiguation). ... 1946 (MCMXLVI) was a common year starting on Tuesday. ... 1947 (MCMXLVII) was a common year starting on Wednesday (the link is to a full 1947 calendar). ... Aerial photo (looking NW) of the Washington Monument and the White House in Washington, DC. Washington, D.C., officially the District of Columbia (also known as D.C.; Washington; the Nations Capital; the District; and, historically, the Federal City) is the capital city and administrative district of the United... 1948 (MCMXLVIII) was a leap year starting on Thursday (the link is to a full 1948 calendar). ... The Sorbonne, Paris, in a 17th century engraving The Sorbonne today, from the same point of view The Collège de Sorbonne was a theological college of the University of Paris, founded in 1257 by Robert de Sorbon, after whom it is named. ...

The Elementary Structures of Kinship was published the next year and quickly came to be regarded as one of the most important anthropological works on kinship. It was even reviewed favorably by Simone de Beauvoir, who viewed it as an important statement of the position of women in non-western cultures. A play on the title of Émile Durkheim's famous Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Elementary Structures re-examined how people organized their families by examining the logical structures that underlay relationships rather than their contents. While British anthropologists such as Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown argued that kinship was based on descent from a common ancestor, Lévi-Strauss argued that kinship was based on the alliance between two families that formed when women from one group married men from another. Kinship is the most basic principle of organizing individuals into social groups, roles, and categories. ... La Beauvoir redirects here; also see: Beauvoir (disambiguation). ... Emile Durkheim. ... Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (January 17, 1881–October 24, British social anthropologist who developed the theory of Structural Functionalism, a framework that describes basic concepts relating to the social structure of primitive civilizations. ...

Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lévi-Strauss continued to publish and experienced considerable professional success. On his return to France, he became involved with the administration of the CNRS and the Musée de l'Homme before finally becoming chair of the fifth section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, the 'Religious Sciences' section previously chaired by Marcel Mauss, which he renamed "Comparative Religion of Non-Literate Peoples". The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) is one of the most prominent scientific research institutions in France. ... The Musée de lHomme (French for Museum of Man) was created in 1937 by Paul Rivet, for the event of the Worlds Fair. ... The École Pratique des Hautes Études is a university in Paris, France. ... Marcel Mauss (May 10, 1872 – February 10, 1950) was a French sociologist best known for his role in elaborating on and securing the legacy of his uncle Émile Durkheim and the Année Sociologique. ...

While Lévi-Strauss was well known in academic circles, it was in 1955 that he became one of France's best known intellectuals by publishing Tristes Tropiques. This book was essentially a travel novel detailing his time as a French expatriate throughout the 1930s. Lévi-Strauss combined exquisitely beautiful prose, dazzling philosophical meditation, and ethnographic analysis of the Amazonian peoples to produce a masterpiece. The organizers of the Prix Goncourt, for instance, lamented that they were not able to award Lévi-Strauss the prize because Tristes Tropiques was technically non-fiction. The Prix Goncourt is the most prestigious prize in French literature, given to the author of the best and most imaginative prose work of the year. Edmond de Goncourt, a successful author, critic, and publisher, bequeathed his entire estate for the foundation and maintenance of the Académie Goncourt. ...

Lévi-Strauss was named to a chair in Social Anthropology at the Collège de France in 1959. At roughly the same time he published Structural Anthropology, a collection of his essays which provided both examples and programmatic statements about structuralism. At the same time as he was laying the groundwork for an intellectual program, he began a series of institutions for establishing anthropology as a discipline in France, including the Laboratory for Social Anthropology where new students could be trained, and a new journal, l'Homme, for publishing the results of their research. Courtyard of the Collège de France. ... Structuralism as a term refers to various theories across the humanities, social sciences and economics many of which share the assumption that structural relationships between concepts vary between different cultures/languages and that these relationships can be usefully exposed and explored. ...

In 1962 Lévi-Strauss published what is for many people his most important work, La Pensée Sauvage. The title is a pun untranslatable in English — in English the book is known as The Savage Mind, but this title fails to capture the other possible French meaning of 'Wild Pansies'. In French pensée means both 'thought' and 'pansy,' the flower, while sauvage means 'wild' as well as 'savage' or 'primitive'. The book concerns primitive thought, forms of thought we all use. (Lévi-Strauss suggested the English title be Pansies for Thought, riffing off of a speech by Ophelia in Hamlet.) The French edition to this day retains a flower on the cover. Pansy, see Isabella Macdonald Alden. ... Ophelia is a female character from Hamlet by William Shakespeare. ... Hamlet and Horatio in the cemetery by Eugène Delacroix For other uses, see Hamlet (disambiguation). ...

The first half of the book lays out Lévi-Strauss's theory of culture and mind, while the second half expands this account into a theory of history and social change. This part of the book engaged Lévi-Strauss in a heated debate with Jean-Paul Sartre over the nature of human freedom. On the one hand, Sartre's existentialist philosophy committed him to a position that human beings were fundamentally free to act as they pleased. On the other hand, Sartre was also a leftist who was committed to the idea that, for instance, individuals were constrained by the ideologies imposed on them by the powerful. Lévi-Strauss presented his structuralist notion of agency in opposition to Sartre. Echoes of this debate between structuralism and existentialism would eventually inspire the work of younger authors such as Pierre Bourdieu. Culture theory is the branch of anthropology and other related social science disciplines (e. ... Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (June 21, 1905 – April 15, 1980), normally known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre (pronounced: ), was a French existentialist philosopher and pioneer, dramatist and screenwriter, novelist and critic. ... Existentialism is a philosophical movement in which individual human beings are understood as having full responsibility for creating the meanings of their own lives. ... Structuralism as a term refers to various theories across the humanities, social sciences and economics many of which share the assumption that structural relationships between concepts vary between different cultures/languages and that these relationships can be usefully exposed and explored. ... Existentialism is a philosophical movement in which individual human beings are understood as having full responsibility for creating the meanings of their own lives. ... Pierre Bourdieu (August 1, 1930 – January 23, 2002) was an acclaimed French sociologist whose work employed methods drawn from a wide range of disciplines: from philosophy and literary theory to sociology and anthropology. ...

Now a worldwide celebrity, Lévi-Strauss spent the second half of the 1960s working on his master project, a four-volume study called Mythologiques. In it, he took a single myth from the tip of South America and followed all of its variations from group to group up through Central America and eventually into the Arctic circle, thus tracing the myth's spread from one end of the American continent to the other. He accomplished this in a typically structuralist way, examining the underlying structure of relationships between the elements of the story rather than by focusing on the content of the story itself. While Pensée Sauvage was a statement of Lévi-Strauss's big-picture theory, Mythologiques was an extended, four-volume example of analysis. Richly detailed and extremely long, it is less widely read than the much shorter and more accessible Pensée Sauvage despite its position as Lévi-Strauss's masterwork. South America South America is a continent crossed by the equator, with most of its area in the Southern Hemisphere. ... For other uses, see Central America (disambiguation). ... World map showing the Arctic Circle in red A sign along the Dalton Highway marking the location of the Arctic Circle The Arctic Circle is one of the five major circles of latitude that mark maps of the Earth. ...

Lévi-Strauss completed the final volume of Mythologiques in 1971 and in 1973 he was elected to the Académie Française, France's highest honour for an intellectual. He is also a member of other notable academies worldwide, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He also received the Erasmus Prize in 1973. In 2003 he received the Meister-Eckhart-Prize for philosophy. He has received several honorary doctorates from universities such as Oxford, Harvard, and Columbia. He is also a recipient of the Grand-croix de la Légion d'honneur, and is a Commandeur de l'ordre national du Mérite and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. Although retired, he continues to publish occasional meditations on art, music and poetry. The Académie française In the French educational system an académie LAcadémie française, or the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. ... Raphaels fresco The School of Athens An academy is an institution of higher learning, research, or honorary membership. ... American Academy of Arts and Letters is an organization whose goal is to foster, assist, and sustain an interest in American literature, music, and art. ... The Erasmus Prize is an annual prize awarded by the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation, a Dutch non-profit organization, to individuals or institutions that have made notable contributions to European culture, society, or social science. ... The Meister Eckhart Prize is an award consisting of a biannual prize of £50,000 given to thinkers who produce high-quality work on the subject of identity by the Identity Foundation. ... The University of Oxford (usually abbreviated as Oxon. ... Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and a member of the Ivy League. ... High honour given to worthy artists and intellectuals in the name of the French Republic. ...

Anthropological theories

The culinary triangle, diagramming a structural analysis of symbolism within cuisine. Adapted from The Raw and the Cooked.

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Lévi Strauss' theories are set forth in Structural Anthropology (1958). Briefly, he considers culture a system of symbolic communication, to be investigated with methods that others have used more narrowly in the discussion of novels, political speeches, sports, and movies. Year 1958 (MCMLVIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

His reasoning makes best sense against the background of an earlier generation's social theory. He wrote about this relationship for decades.

A preference for "functionalist" explanations dominated the social sciences from the turn of the century through the 1950s, which is to say that anthropologists and sociologists tried to state what a social act or institution was for. The existence of a thing was explained if it fulfilled a function. The only strong alternative to that kind of analysis was historical explanation, accounting for the existence of a social fact by saying how it came to be. This does not cite its references or sources. ...

However, the idea of social function developed in two different ways. The English anthropologist Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, who had read and admired the work of the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, argued that the goal of anthropological research was to find the collective function, what a religious creed or a set of rules about marriage did for the social order as a whole. At back of this approach was an old idea, the view that civilization developed through a series of phases from the primitive to the modern, everywhere the same. All of the activities in a given kind of society would partake of the same character; some sort of internal logic would cause one level of culture to evolve into the next. On this view, a society can easily be thought of as an organism, the parts functioning together like parts of a body. Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (January 17, 1881–October 24, British social anthropologist who developed the theory of Structural Functionalism, a framework that describes basic concepts relating to the social structure of primitive civilizations. ... Emile Durkheim. ...

The more influential functionalism of Bronislaw Malinowski described the satisfaction of individual needs, what a person got out of participating in a custom. For the Olympic champion athlete see Bronislaw Malinowski (athlete). ...

In the United States, where the shape of anthropology was set by the German-educated Franz Boas, the preference was for historical accounts. This approach had obvious problems, which Lévi-Strauss praises Boas for facing squarely. Franz Boas Franz Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942[1]) was one of the pioneers of modern anthropology and is often called the Father of American Anthropology. Born in Germany, Boas worked for most of his life in North America. ...

Historical information is seldom available for non-literate cultures. The anthropologist fills in with comparisons to other cultures and is forced to rely on theories that have no evidential basis whatever, the old notion of universal stages of development or the claim that cultural resemblances are based on some untraced past contact between groups. Boas came to believe that no overall pattern in social development could be proven; for him, there was no history, only histories.

There are three broad choices involved in the divergence of these schools – each had to decide what kind of evidence to use; whether to emphasize the particulars of a single culture or look for patterns underlying all societies; and what the source of any underlying patterns might be, the definition of a common humanity.

Social scientists in all traditions relied on cross-cultural studies. It was always necessary to supplement information about a society with information about others. So some idea of a common human nature was implicit in each approach.

The critical distinction, then, remained: does a social fact exist because it is functional for the social order, or because it is functional for the person? Do uniformities across cultures occur because of organizational needs that must be met everywhere, or because of the uniform needs of human personality?

For Lévi-Strauss, the choice was for the demands of the social order. He had no difficulty bringing out the inconsistencies and triviality of individualistic accounts. Malinowski said, for example, that magic beliefs come into being when people need to feel a sense of control over events when the outcome was uncertain. In the Trobriand Islands, he found the proof of this claim in the rites surrounding abortions and weaving skirts. But in the same tribes, there is no magic attached to making clay pots even though it is no more certain a business than weaving. So, the explanation is not consistent. Furthermore, these explanations tend to be used in an ad hoc, superficial way – you just postulate a trait of personality when you need it. The Trobriand Islands are a 170 mi² archipelago of coral atolls off the eastern coast of New Guinea. ...

But the accepted way of discussing organizational function didn't work either. Different societies might have institutions that were similar in many obvious ways and yet served different functions. Many tribal cultures divide the tribe into two groups and have elaborate rules about how the two groups can interact. But exactly what they can do – trade, intermarry – is different in different tribes; for that matter, so are the criteria for distinguishing the groups.

Nor will it do to say that dividing-in-two is a universal need of organizations, because there are a lot of tribes that thrive without it.

For Lévi-Strauss, the methods of linguistics became a model for all his earlier examinations of society. His analogies are usually from phonology (though also later from music, mathematics, chaos theory, cybernetics and so on). Linguistics is the scientific study of language, which can be theoretical or applied. ... Phonology (Greek phonÄ“ = voice/sound and logos = word/speech), is a subfield of linguistics which studies the sound system of a specific language (or languages). ... A plot of the Lorenz attractor for values r = 28, σ = 10, b = 8/3 In mathematics and physics, chaos theory describes the behavior of certain nonlinear dynamical systems that under certain conditions exhibit dynamics that are sensitive to initial conditions (popularly referred to as the butterfly effect). ... Cybernetics is the study of feedback and derived concepts such as communication and control in living organisms, machines and organisations. ...

"A truly scientific analysis must be real, simplifying, and explanatory," he says (in Structural Anthropology). Phonemic analysis reveals features that are real, in the sense that users of the language can recognize and respond to them. At the same time, a phoneme is an abstraction from language – not a sound, but a category of sound defined by the way it is distinguished from other categories through rules unique to the language. The entire sound-structure of a language can be generated from a relatively small number of rules.

In the study of the kinship systems that first concerned him, this ideal of explanation allowed a comprehensive organization of data that had been partly ordered by other researchers. The overall goal was to find out why family relations differed in different South American cultures. The father might have great authority over the son in one group, for example, with the relationship rigidly restricted by taboos. In another group, the mother's brother would have that kind of relationship with the son, while the father's relationship was relaxed and playful.

A number of partial patterns had been noted. Relations between the mother and father, for example, had some sort of reciprocity with those of father and son – if the mother had a dominant social status and was formal with the father, for example, then the father usually had close relations with the son. But these smaller patterns joined together in inconsistent ways.

One possible way of finding a master order was to rate all the positions in a kinship system along several dimensions. For example, the father was older than the son, the father produced the son, the father had the same sex as the son, and so on; the matrilineal uncle was older and of the same sex but did not produce the son, and so on. An exhaustive collection of such observations might cause an overall pattern to emerge.

But for Lévi Strauss, this kind of work was "analytical in appearance only." It results in a chart that is far harder to understand than the original data and is based on arbitrary abstractions (empirically, fathers are older than sons, but it is only the researcher who declares that this feature explains their relations). Furthermore, it doesn't explain anything. The explanation it offers is tautological – if age is crucial, then age explains a relationship. And it does not offer the possibility of inferring the origins of the structure.

A proper solution to the puzzle is to find a basic unit of kinship which can explain all the variations. It is a cluster of four roles – brother, sister, father, son. These are the roles that must be involved in any society that has an incest taboo requiring a man to obtain a wife from some man outside his own hereditary line. A brother can give away his sister, for example, whose son might reciprocate in the next generation by allowing his own sister to marry exogamously. The underlying demand is a continued circulation of women to keep various clans peacefully related.

Right or wrong, this solution displays the qualities of structural thinking. Even though Lévi-Strauss frequently speaks of treating culture as the product of the axioms and corollaries that underlie it, or the phonemic differences that constitute it, he is concerned with the objective data of field research. He notes that it is logically possible for a different atom of kinship structure to exist – sister, sister's brother, brother's wife, daughter – but there are no real-world examples of relationships that can be derived from that grouping.

The purpose of structuralist explanation is to organize real data in the simplest effective way. All science, he says, is either structuralist or reductionist. In confronting such matters as the incest taboo, one is facing an objective limit of what the human mind has so far accepted. One could hypothesize some biological imperative underlying it, but so far as social order is concerned, the taboo has the effect of an irreducible fact. The social scientist can only work with the structures of human thought that arise from it.

And structural explanations can be tested and refuted. A mere analytic scheme that wishes causal relations into existence is not structuralist in this sense.

Lévi-Strauss' later works are more controversial, in part because they impinge on the subject matter of other scholars. He believed that modern life and all history was founded on the same categories and transformations that he had discovered in the Brazilian back country – The Raw and the Cooked, From Honey to Ashes, The Naked Man (to borrow some titles from the Mythologiques). For instance he compares anthropology to musical serialism and defends his "philosophical" approach. He also pointed out that the modern view of primitive cultures was simplistic in denying them a history. The categories of myth did not persist among them because nothing had happened – it was easy to find the evidence of defeat, migration, exile, repeated displacements of all the kinds known to recorded history. Instead, the mythic categories had encompassed these changes. Serialism is a technique for composing music that uses sets to describe musical elements, and allows the composer manipulations of those sets to create music. ... Human migration denotes any movement of groups of people from one locality to another, rather than of individual wanderers. ...

He argued for a view of human life as existing in two timelines simultaneously, the eventful one of history and the long cycles in which one set of fundamental mythic patterns dominates and then perhaps another. In this respect, his work resembles that of Fernand Braudel, the historian of the Mediterranean and 'la longue durée,' the cultural outlook and forms of social organization that persisted for centuries around that sea. Fernand Braudel Fernand Braudel (August 24, 1902–November 27, 1985) was a French historian. ... An historian is someone who writes history, a written accounting of the past. ...

Selected bibliography

• Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, ed. *Rodney Needham, trans. J. H. Bell, J. R. von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham, 1969)
• Race et histoire (1952, UNESCO; Extract from "Race and History" - in English; see also The Race Question, UNESCO, 1950)
• Tristes tropiques (1955, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman, 1973) - also translated as A World on the Wane
• Anthropologie structurale (1958, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, 1963)
• Le Totemisme aujourdhui (1962, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham, 1963)
• La Pensée sauvage (1962, The Savage Mind, 1966)
• Mythologiques I-IV (trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman
  • Le Cru et le cuit (1964, The Raw and the Cooked, 1969)
  • Du miel aux cendres (1966, From Honey to Ashes, 1973)
  • L'Origine des manières de table, 1968, The Origin of Table Manners, 1978
  • L'Homme nu (1971, The Naked Man, 1981)
• Anthropologie structurale deux (1973, Structural Anthropology, Vol. II, trans. M. Layton, 1976)
• La Voie des masques (1972, The Way of the Masks, trans. Sylvia Modelski, 1982)
• Paroles donnés (1984, Anthropology and Myth: Lectures, 1951-1982, trans. Roy Willis, 1987)
• Le Regard éloigne (1983, The View from Afar, trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss, 1985)
• La Potière jalouse (1985, The Jealous Potter, trans. Bénédicte Chorier, 1988)
• Histoire de lynx (1991)
• Regarder, écouter, lire (1993, Look, Listen, Read trans. Brian Singer, 1997)

UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) is a specialized agency of the United Nations established in 1945. ... The Race Question is a UNESCO statement issued on 18 July 1950 following World War II. Signed by some of the leading researchers of the time, in the field of psychology, biology, cultural anthropology and ethnology, it questioned the foundations of scientific racist theories which had became very popular at...

See also

• Evolutionary Principle
• structural anthropology
• structuralism
• Alliance theory
• Comparative mythology
• Mythography
• Culinary triangle
• Bricolage

The evolutionary principle is a largely psychological doctrine formulated by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss that roughly states that when a certain species is removed from the habitat which it evolved in, or that that habitat changes significantly within a brief period, that said species will develop abberant and maladaptive behavior. ... Structural anthropology had its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. ... Structuralism as a term refers to various theories across the humanities, social sciences and economics many of which share the assumption that structural relationships between concepts vary between different cultures/languages and that these relationships can be usefully exposed and explored. ... The Alliance Theory (or General Theory of Exchanges) is the name given to the structural method of studying kinship relations. ... Comparative mythology, related to comparative religion, is a field of study which is technically part of anthropology but more usually regarded as part of the subject of ancient history. ... It has been suggested that Folkloristics be merged into this article or section. ... The culinary triangle is a concept thought up by Claude Lévi-Strauss involving three types of cooking; these are boiling, roasting, and smoking, usually done to meats. ... Bricolage – from the French-language verb bricoler, meaning to tinker or to fiddle – is that languages equivalent of the English phrase do-it-yourself. Bricolage is also often contrasted to engineering: building by trial and error rather than based on theory. ...

References

• Levi-Strauss (1970) Edmund Leach, Fontana/Collins ISBN: 0006322557

Sir Edmund Ronald Leach (November 7, 1910 – January 6, 1989) was a British anthropologist. ...

External links

• Extract from "Race and History" (1952 - see also The Race Question, 1950, UNESCO)
• List of works by Claude Lévi-Strauss
• Lecture: The Birth of Historical Societies (Hitchcock Lectures), October 3 and 4, 1984, UC Berkeley (online audio file)
• Strauss.html Overview, in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory (subscriber access only)
• (French) Claude Lévi Strauss' profile on the Académie française site
• (Spanish) Lévi Strauss Interview | In Psikeba
• Linguistic and Commodity Exchanges Examines the structural differences between barter and monetary commodity exchanges and oral and written linguistic exchanges.

Image File history File links This is a lossless scalable vector image. ... Wikiquote is a sister project of Wikipedia, using the same MediaWiki software. ... The Race Question is a UNESCO statement issued on 18 July 1950 following World War II. Signed by some of the leading researchers of the time, in the field of psychology, biology, cultural anthropology and ethnology, it questioned the foundations of scientific racist theories which had became very popular at...

Video

• Documentaire 52': About "Tristes Tropiques" 1991 - Film Super 16