Are the universal mental structures Claude Lévi-Strauss claimed to find in kinship and myth genuinely cross-cultural, or are they an artifact of the analyst's own Western, scientific interpretive framework projected onto other cultures?

Post-structuralist critics, notably Jacques Derrida, challenged whether Lévi-Strauss's binary-opposition-based mental structures are truly universal and objectively discoverable in the data, or whether the "mythemes" and structural patterns he identified are shaped by his own analytical choices rather than found independently in every culture he studied.