De Saussure's linguistic theory led Claude Levi-Strauss , an anthropologist-structuralist who worked during the 20th century, to identify the way in which culture functions similarly to language, and following Roman Jacobson saw the human brain as organized in the form of binary pairs of opposites. Levi-Strauss marked a series of such basic contrasts in which any culture can be understood in terms. Levi-Strauss, who studied the myths of different peoples, argued in his structural anthropology that the myth obeys binary laws of action and through them described a series of dichotomies, one of the main ones being the dichotomy between nature and culture. He saw the myth as a logical model designed to reconcile and deal with contradictions concerning fundamental questions of human existence, with the compromise between the two poles being achieved by an intermediary helping to deal with the threatening middle ground.
Victor Turner, a British anthropologist , studied the nature of rites of passage in different societies and argued for the existence of two types of social structures. The first is a state of the 'status system' which is the stable state of social order, and in contrast the liminal state in which the rites of passage are carried out - the 'communites'. The differences between the characteristics of these two situations are described by Turner through a series of binary oppositions, such as a stable structure versus characteristics of transition and movement, equality-inequality, lack of property-ownership, sacred-secular and more. Social life, both of individuals and of groups, moves between these two situations - two polarizing and inseparable poles. (see Turner on Liminality)
Mary Douglas, a British anthropologist and sociologist, is following Levy-Strauss in trying to understand the world under study through sorting and categorization. Douglas researched the laws of purity and impurity in primitive religions, and saw them as symbols that defined the boundaries of society. It linked the pure-unclean opposition to other basic social relationships, such as the relationship between order and disorder, existence-non-existence, form-lack of form, life and death.
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