Claude Levi-Strauss - An Introduction

Claude Levi-Strauss is a French anthropologist, most well-known for his contributions to the development of structural anthropology and structuralism.

In his book The Elementary Structures of Kinship, published in 1949, Levi-Strauss argued that kinship relations (which are fundamental aspects of any culture's organization) represent a specific kind of structure. Levi-Strauss studied how people organized their families and established kinship through the alliance between two families when women from one group married men from other groups. He contributed to the creation of genealogical charts, with symbols for fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers and it stands as an example of kinship systems represented as structures.

In 1955, Levi-Strauss established his position as an influential intellectual by publishing his memoir, Tristes Tropiques. The book is written in eloquent prose and gives an ethnographic analysis of the Amazonian people.

His collection of essays, Structural Anthropology published in 1959, laid the groundwork for establishing Anthropology as a discipline. This was followed by the publication of The Savage Mind in 1962. Levi-Strauss presented his theory of culture in the first part of this book and his structuralist view of 'Agency', in opposition to the existentialist philosophy of Satre.

From the second half of the 1960s, Levi-Strauss started working on his four-volume masterpiece, Mythologiques.

The titles of the four volumes are as follows :

1. The Raw and the Cooked (1964)

2. From Honey to Ashes (1966)

3. The Origin of Table Manners (1968)

4. The Naked Man (1971)

Levi-Strauss established the structural analyses of mythology through these volumes. In The Raw and the Cooked, he explains how the structures of myths provide basic structures for understanding cultural relations. These relations appear as binary pairs or opposites. Raw is opposed to cooked where the former is associated with nature and the latter with culture.

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