Structuralism, as developed in anthropology by Claude Lévi-Strauss, is the approach that analyzes cultural phenomena, including kinship systems, myths, and symbolic classifications, by the underlying, often unconscious structural relationships among their elements rather than their surface content. It draws on the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, who argued that signs gain meaning through their relationships and contrasts with other signs within a system. Lévi-Strauss extended this logic to kinship in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), showing that apparently very different forms of social organization could be understood as variations on a limited set of basic underlying relations, and later to mythology, proposing that myths break down into fundamental units he called 'mythemes,' which generate meaning only through their relations to one another.
Facts
Core ClaimSourced to the subject's own accountThe underlying structure of human thought is the same across all cultures, organized especially around binary oppositions, and cultural phenomena such as kinship and myth can be scientifically analyzed by identifying the relationships among their constituent elements rather than by studying those elements in isolation. 1 Origin YearSourced to the subject's own accountIntellectual foundations lie in Saussurean linguistics from the early 20th century; Lévi-Strauss's foundational anthropological application dates to The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), with Structural Anthropology (1958) as its clearest theoretical statement. Cross-Tradition Connections
Developed By
Critiqued Here
Poststructuralism developed as a critical reaction to structuralism rather than a wholesale rejection; several theorists associated with it declined the poststructuralist label themselves.
Kinship Systems Shaped
Lévi-Strauss incorporated the avunculate (the mother's-brother relationship central to avunculocal residence) into his structural theory of kinship, the 'atom of kinship' analysis.
Lévi-Strauss's structural approach to kinship systems treats bilateral descent as one of the possible permutations of underlying kinship relations alongside unilineal forms.
Lévi-Strauss's The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) analyzed descent and alliance rules, including matrilineal systems, as structural permutations of a limited set of underlying relations.
Lévi-Strauss's The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) analyzed descent and alliance rules, including patrilineal systems, as structural permutations of a limited set of underlying relations.
Sources
Open Questions (1 open question)
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.
What would resolve this Independent replication of Lévi-Strauss's structural analyses on the same myth corpora by analysts working from different theoretical starting points, checking whether they converge on the same underlying structures.
Anthropological theoryWikipedia: Structuralism
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