Levi – Strauss: So good he got two names

In order to found an entire field of thought, one must have a certain je ne sais quoi, and Claude Levi – Strauss certainly had it. He is responsible for the formation of the French Structural branch of anthropology which operates on the foundation that all of our concepts of culture are based on fundamental binary oppositions.

In many ways the term binary opposition seems far too hostile for the type of work Levi-Strauss engaged himself in. He was a man who liked to spend the majority of his days in nature. It was, in fact, upon looking at a dandelion that he founded the Structuralist theory. Opposition does not always have to mean disagreement. In Structuralist thought, at least the way Levi-Strauss wanted it to be understood, oppositions are necessary to the functioning of the whole. His binary oppositions can be looked at as almost a balance between two logical counterparts that, together, make up a natural whole within a culture.

The beauty of his theory, which can also be the limitation to it, is that no one before or after him has exemplified originality as he did with Structuralism. Levi-Strauss was the first theorist to come up with this unique perspective on how we perceive the world and in turn affect it because of our perceptions. In his paper, Structuralism and Ecology, he wrote, “this organic environment is so closely tied to the physical environment that man apprehends the second only through the mediation of the first.” As opposed to his predecessors who were focused on blueprinting how anthropology could record and make use of the withering world around it; Levi-Strauss was intent on acknowledging that there were patterns in place in the form of binary oppositions that depended on our inactive cooperation. By inactive I mean Levi-Strauss believed that these oppositions were already present and wholly necessary before anyone could intervene. Humans create these oppositions as the basis to culture and they are, in many ways, pan-cultural. Levi-Strauss was the first of his kind to give nature almost all the credit in determining the cultural patterns that man has adopted. To his credit however, Levi-Strauss has had a profound effect and following in fields like cultural anthropology, most notably the study of myths and in linguistics his work has been proliferated and heralded. Binary oppositions are incredibly present in myths and Levi-Strauss’ theory has become the staple to categorizing myths and noticing many pan-cultural commonalities. In the same sense, the study of linguistics has been improved because of Structuralism and its ability to make people aware of the “interplay of binary oppositions and transformation rules” which Levi-Strauss denotes are inevitably present in all languages.

No one before him thought like him and no one after him was immune to the brevity and reach of his ideas. Levi-Strauss brought Structuralism to the forefront of how anthropology today views other cultures. Are we all different or do we just frame our concept of culture around different pairs of opposition? The idea that the necessity of balance is inevitable as well as something all cultures share is groundbreaking and we have Levi-Strauss and a dandelion to thank.