Claude Lévi-Strauss (jan 1, 1908 – jan 1, 2009)

Description:

About:
-born in Belgium, attended the Sorbonne, then taught at Collége de France
-fieldwork in Brazil among indigenous groups (limited)
-influenced by Mauss and the concept of total social phenomena
-interested in the mental structure undergirding social behaviors
-became a central figure in the French intellectual movement that included figures like Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault

Major Works:
-The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949)
→ argues that the structures governing kinship systems are universal and can be understood through reciprocity--that the exchange of women between groups forms the bases of social organization
→ helped establish structural anthropology by showing that seemingly diverse kinship systems around the world could be analyzed through common underlying structures
-Mythologiques
-argue that myths, like language, have underlying structures that follow similar rules across cultures; myths express universal human concerns and can be decoded to reveal these deeper truths
→ myths use binary oppositions (e.g., life vs death, nature vs culture) to organize human experience

Main concepts:
-structuralism
→ human culture can be understood through the identification of underlying structures that organize human thought and behavior
→ applied to myths, kinship, language, and social organization, arguing that all human societies are shaped by universal mental structures
→ structures often expressed through binary oppositions (raw vs cooked, nature vs culture, male vs female)

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