French anthropologist and philosopher; founder of structuralism in the human sciences. He applied Saussure’s model of linguistics to anthropology, transforming the study of myths, kinship, and “primitive” cultures.
Key Concepts
- Structuralism: behind the diversity of cultural phenomena lie universal unconscious structures of the human mind — binary, relational, transformational
- Myth: myths are not chaotic narratives but systems of binary oppositions (raw/cooked, nature/culture, high/low) that resolve existential contradictions in society
- Mythemes: the minimal units of a myth (analogous to phonemes in linguistics); meaning emerges from relations between mythemes, not from isolated elements
- The Raw and the Cooked (1964): the cooked is nature transformed by culture — cuisine is a universal symbolic system that encodes the nature/culture distinction
- Savage mind (La Pensée sauvage, 1962): the thought of “primitive” societies is not inferior — it is a science of the concrete, of the sensible, as rigorous as modern scientific thought
- Bricolage vs. engineering: the bricoleur uses elements at hand for new purposes; the engineer starts from abstract concepts — myth is a form of intellectual bricolage
- Kinship and exchange: kinship structures (incest prohibition, exogamy) are the foundation of all society — woman as sign in exchange between groups (later feminist critique)
Influenced by
- Ferdinand de Saussure — structural linguistics
- Marcel Mauss — anthropology of gift and exchange
- Marx — deep structures beneath the surface of phenomena
- Freud — unconscious and structure
Influenced
- Foucault — episteme as unconscious structure
- Derrida — deconstruction of structuralism
- Lacan — structuralist psychoanalysis
- Semiology and communication theory
- Narratology (Greimas, Genette)
Works
The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949); Tristes Tropiques (1955); Structural Anthropology (1958); The Savage Mind (1962); Mythologiques (4 vols., 1964–1971).
See also
Twentieth-Century Philosophy