Claude Levi-Strauss

I was saddened yesterday to learn of the death of one of my favourite 20^th century anthropologists Claude Levi-Strauss. He was the creator of the theory of structuralism and is considered one of the 'fathers of modern anthropology'. He was the first significant anthropologist to focus on the human mind in relation to society, as opposed to the structural-functionalists who studied lineage and kinship groups. It is a complex theory and here I will attempt to make sense of it and highlight some of the criticisms levelled against it.

Levi-Strauss was a French anthropologist who during the 1930's lived in Sao Paolo, Brazil, where he conducted fieldwork on the Mato Grosso region. This was to form the basis for the work that ultimately made his name: Tristes Tropiques.

He returned to France in 1939 to fight in WWII, but when in 1940 France surrendered, he left for America after being dismissed from his teaching post by the Vichy regime (Levi-Strauss' parents were of Jewish origin - thus making him 'undesirable').

In America Levi-Strauss met the famous anthropologist Franz Boas who had a great influence on his continuing work.

Levi-Strauss' structuralism was different to his functionalist predecessors; he was not concerned with the function of social structure, but with the logic of it. The structures he analysed were those of the human mind - implicit, unconscious, but always social. The way Levi-Strauss saw social structure was in terms of human thought generating it, by creating a system of thoughts, rules and laws, determined by which member of a particular society was organising it - the "ideal" structures of society.

It is important to remember with Levi-Strauss' work that the human mind with which he theorises is not the individual human mind, i.e. universal psychological mechanisms, but instead universal structural principles; the principles human beings use to think about social life. Levi-Strauss argued that there are basic structural principles or rules that are universal and apply to all cultures, but what each structure consists of varies from culture to culture.

The most important social rule according to Levi-Strauss was the incest taboo. With this, an aversion to incest, there was the emergence of culture. This is a classic binary opposition of nature : culture. However, Levi-Strauss went against the simpler reason for avoiding incest - that it is biologically healthier - and theorised a more social-based reason: people avoided incest so as to move outside their family groups and quite simply make friends, or alliances - marital alliances. For Levi-Strauss the incest taboo is not a negative rule of marriage avoidance, but instead a positive rule of marriage prescription. The taboo forces people to marry outsiders - thus establishing contact networks and thus social groups.

This theory brings me onto Levi-Strauss' work on marriage itself. He considers this in terms of complex and elementary societies. A complex society is one where marriage choices are independent of kinship concerns, such as in the West. An elementary society is one where there are clear marital exchanges and reciprocal marriage rules. His 'marital exchanges' can be either restricted or generalised. Restricted will involve one group of sisters exchanging sisters with another group, whereas generalised will involve three or more groups of people exchanging wives.

Levi-Strauss also looked at mythology - he approaches it as a kind of language in itself. Myth, he argued, can reveal structural principles of the human mind, which take the form of different scenarios and images. It is a way for people to explain their origins, and thus a way to, according to Levi-Strauss, explain their society. From this Levi-Strauss deduces that people are subjected to an unconscious desire to impose order on their world (hence making mythological stories) - people cannot resist the desire to classify. There is an inherent demand in human society for classification and order. He explains this fully in his famous work La Pensee Sauvage.


There are many criticisms levelled at Levi-Strauss' work - I will provide a brief summary:

1) Universalism - why does it have to be the same structural principles for everywhere and everyone?

2) His ethnography (from Brazil) is poor, lacking depth and true understanding, particularly of the languages of the studied tribes.

3) His model for human society is perhaps too artificial, especially in its inclusions of binary oppositions.

4) His analysis of myth is not realistic. He does not explain it terms of what people actually think but instead in terms of mental hypotheses.

5) Women appear as voiceless pieces of exchange in his theories on marriage and kinship. This could explain why his theory lost popularity in the late 20th century as the rise of feminism, and particularly feminist anthropology, would have generated backlash to his theories.


Despite these flaws, some of which you may agree with and some you may not, there are positive aspects to Levi-Strauss' work. He attempted, albeit perhaps unsuccessfully, to create a model to explain culture - we must acknowledge the difficulty of what he was trying to do. Secondly he did well to demolish the erroneous preconception of automatic Western logic and the illogical nature of the "exotic Other" (supposed ‘primitive’ societies. For him all people are experimenting with the world in the same way (remember that his universal principles govern everyone).

Levi-Strauss can be credited with the creation of a new theory and thus a new way of viewing anthropology. His work has generated much appreciation as well as criticism – one cannot deny that he has succeeded in provoking debate. Having lived to almost 101 years old he has seen the changing face of anthropology throughout the 20^th century, and his work was an integral part of that change.

Claude Levi-Strauss: 1908-2009