The Grammar of Human Culture: Lévi-Strauss and Structuralism
Lévi-Strauss applied structural analysis to myth and kinship. You'll work through binary oppositions and the culinary triangle and ask what they reveal about culture.
Steps
- 1
- Reading· ~11 min
Myths, Mythemes, and the Logic of the Raw and the Cooked
Lévi-Strauss's most spectacular analytical achievement, and what the analysis of myths reveals about universal human thinking.
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- Reading· ~9 min
The Savage Mind, Bricolage, and the Critique of Progress
Lévi-Strauss's most politically important argument, that so-called 'primitive' thought is not inferior to 'scientific' thought but differently organized.
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- Text Explore· ~8 min
Structuralism and the Grammar of Culture
Read the key formulations of Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology and its critics.
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- Argument Map· ~10 min
Structure, Myth, and the Human Mind
Map Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology, its intellectual sources, its major achievements, and its critics.
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- Dialogue· ~10 min
Dialogue: Does Structure Erase History and Agency?
Jean-Paul Sartre's challenge, the most important philosophical objection to structural anthropology.
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- Reflection· ~8 min
Reflection: The Structures You Swim In
Lévi-Strauss's most lasting insight is not about myths in the Amazon. It is about the unconscious grammar of ordinary life.
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