In the early 1940s, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) was an exiled French anthropologist teaching in New York when he met the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson. That meeting changed anthropology, and arguably changed the humanities.
Jakobson was a structuralist linguist working in the tradition of Ferdinand de Saussure. The core of Saussurean linguistics is the distinction between langue (the abstract system of a language: its rules, its structure, its grammar) and parole (particular instances of language use: specific utterances, conversations, sentences). The meaningful unit in linguistics is not the individual sound or word in isolation but the relationship between elements within the system. The word "cat" means what it does not because of an intrinsic connection between the sound and the animal, but because of how it differs from other words in the language: cat/bat/hat/car, each distinct because of systematic differences in a relational system. Meaning arises from difference, not from any intrinsic property of the sign.
Lévi-Strauss had a transformative idea: what if culture works the same way? What if myths, kinship systems, ritual practices, and food preparation are not just collections of local customs but operate like languages, with underlying grammars that generate their particular instances? And what if these underlying grammars reveal something universal about human mental structure, just as the capacity for language seems to be universal across cultures?
This idea became structural anthropology. Its central claim: beneath the enormous surface diversity of human cultures, there are universal structural principles that organize human thought and practice. These principles are not consciously known by the people who use them, just as native speakers do not consciously know the grammatical rules of their language. They are the unconscious infrastructure of culture.
The specific form these structures take, Lévi-Strauss argued, is binary opposition: the human mind systematically organizes experience through pairs of contrasting categories. Raw vs. cooked. Nature vs. culture. Hot vs. cold. Life vs. death. Male vs. female. Sacred vs. profane. These binary pairs are not descriptions of fixed realities but organizing principles that shape how experience is carved up. And cultures, however different their specific content, are all doing essentially the same organizational work with these same fundamental tools.
The ambition is extraordinary. Lévi-Strauss is not just making a claim about how anthropologists should study cultures. He is making a claim about the structure of the human mind itself. If all cultures, across all times and places, organize experience through the same structural principles, this tells us something about what kind of thing a human mind is: a pattern-matching, binary-organizing, opposition-resolving structure that expresses itself through whatever cultural materials are locally available.