Millions of words have been written trying to explain or apply the theories of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss since the publication of his work “Structural Anthropology” in 1958. More than a few of the resulting texts in disciplines as varied as sociology and philosophy are dense, turgid and jargon ridden, or so the complaint goes. But Mr. Lévi-Strauss himself could be simple, direct and elegant when he wanted to be. Structuralism, he once said, is simply “the search for unsuspected harmonies” across cultures.
In fact, his life’s work was dedicated to detecting and codifying what he believed to be the underlying structures common to all societies. Working among Amerindian tribes in the Amazon and elsewhere from the 1930s onward, he found those harmonies to be especially manifest in mythology. In any society, he maintained, “the purpose of a myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction.”
As he saw it, the human mind tends to organize thought and culture around binary opposites, and to try to resolve the resulting tension through the creative act of mythmaking. Here are four pairs that, explicitly or implicitly, are important in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who died a little over a week ago just shy of 101.Continue reading the main story