Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908 - 2009) is an anthropologist and ethnologist who had a major impact on social sciences and humanities in the second half of the 20th century. Lévi-Strauss became in particular one of the founding figures of structuralism from the 1950s by developing a specific methodology, structural anthropology, through which he radically renewed ethnology and anthropology by applying to them the holistic principles derived from the language , the phonology, mathematics and natural sciences.
Levi-Strauss' innovation in the field of anthropological thought was in the application of linguistic structuralism (see de-Saussure's work) to the social sciences, to culture and, in fact, to reality. The basic idea is that just as language is made up of structures, so are human phenomena. The two most important works of Levi-Strauss dealt with the study of kinship and the study of mythology. Using a large database of data he came to the conclusion that despite what seems like a great mixture of perceptions, the "primitive" world of the natives is an intellectually orderly world, with an almost-scientific order. Therefore, the differences between Western and Indigenous society are only at the surface level, and at the depth level they are secondary. The white person and the black person, red or yellow, process information in the same way, using the same procedures, which are based on several universal binary opposites: nature versus culture, male versus female, life versus death.
Main idea's in Claude Levi-Strauss theory:
"The sad tropics" (
T
ristes Tropiques)
Strauss was interested in fieldwork in Brazil but in his diary he described a difficult journey into the depths of the jungle and his feeling that it is impossible to really understand people who are different from us so he came to the idea that the only way to understand other people's worlds is to see thought patterns The universals that we and they have in common - this is a binary mechanism - thinking through opposites. Was influenced by linguistics and he takes it to the side of culture.The principle of binary thinking is innate, universal and the differences between cultures stem not from the structure of thinking but from the elements with which they think, from the various materials found in every human group.
The story of Oedipus - in order to tell the myth you have to follow the lines - one thing after another. To understand the myth one has to go by the columns and look at each column as a unit.
