Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1908–2009)

Traditionally, anthropology was dominated by detailed studies of particular peoples, but in the 1950s, Claude Lévi-Strauss developed an analytical approach to culture that provoked the linguistic turn throughout the humanities. Lévi-Strauss looked at the patterns of similarity and differences between aspects of different cultures—kinship, myth, religion, magic, food—and showed how they could be interpreted systematically. He introduced the idea of structural linguistics to help in this task of cross-cultural comparison and established the approach of structuralism that resonated far beyond anthropology. Structuralism offered a method that could be applied to instances of cultural form independently of the historical detail and ethnological specificity. In Structural Anthropology (1958 [English trans. 1968]), Lévi-Strauss argued that kinship systems could be analyzed with an approach, derived from the linguistics of Nikolai Troubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson, that identified pairs “of oppositions” (1968, 35). When kinship was reduced to a series of components (husband, wife, son, uncle, etc.) whose variable patterns of relations across different societies were represented using symbols borrowed from mathematics, the analysis revealed structural consistencies in the various transformations of relations between terms. Apparently, different kinship systems were simply different ways of achieving a certain type of mediation, namely, that it is “the women of the group, who are circulated between clans, lineages, or families, in place of the words of the group, which are circulated between individuals” (1968, 61). Lévi-Srauss argued that the techniques of structural linguistics could be applied to kinship because its cultural form is realized in and through language, through the way people refer to each other and account for their relations. In rebutting the sexism implicit in the asymmetry between the sexes in his analysis, he pointed out that the women in these systems were not mere objects but were able to speak and contribute to the formation of culture.

One of Lévi-Strauss's most significant contributions to the analysis of culture was to point out that an abstract theory is not necessary for a member to have a detailed and systematic knowledge about what he or she is doing. The complex classifications and taxonomies of plants and animals created by premodern people require equivalent mental operations to science but use a different approach. Presuming that those things that look alike function alike, for example, may not stand up to experimental scrutiny but such a “science of the concrete” does help to organize complex classification systems. Mythical thought is, he says in The Savage Mind (1962 [English trans. 1966]), a “kind of intellectual ‘bricolage’” (1966, 13) drawing on signs that already [Page 850]have a cultural currency as ideas, using “whatever is at hand.” In contrast, the science of the engineer constructs ideal concepts designed for each specific project that escape the constraints of their cultural origins. Whether designing a new commodity, putting together images and copy for an advertisement, producing a television program, or shopping for an outfit, the participant in consumer culture is engaged in a complex bricolage of signs to create something new that nonetheless carries the traces of the culture from which it has been formed.

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