Lévi-Strauss argues that “social anthropology is devoted especially to the study of institutions considered as systems of representations” (1963a:3). Lévi-Strauss uses “representations” as Durkheim did, to refer to beliefs, sentiments, norms, values, attitudes, and meanings. Those institutions are cultural expressions that are usually unexamined by their users; in that narrow but fundamental sense anthropology examines the unconscious foundations of social life: “Anthropology draws its originality from the unconscious nature of collective phenomena” (LéviStrauss 1963a:18). This search for the underlying structures of social life led Lévi-Strauss to explore three principal areas: systems of classification, kinship theory, and the logic of myth.
Edmund Leach, not usually sympathetic to Lévi-Strauss, provides a handy paraphrase of the basic argument of structuralism:
The general argument runs something like this: what we know about the external world we apprehend through our senses. The phenomena which we perceive have the characteristics which we attribute to them because of the way our senses operate and the way the human brain is designed to order and interpret the stimuli which are fed into it. One very important feature of this ordering process is that we cut up the continua of space and time with which we are surrounded into segments so that we are predisposed to think of the environment as consisting of vast numbers of separate things belonging to
named classes, and to think of the passage of time as consisting of sequences of separate events. Correspondingly, when, as men, we construct artificial things (artifacts of all kinds), or devise ceremonials, or write histories of the past, we imitate our apprehension of Nature: the products of our Culture are segmented and ordered in the same way as we suppose the products of Nature to be segmented and ordered. (1970:21)
The segmentation and imposition of form on inherently
formless phenomena (like space or time) reflect deeply held
structures from the bedrock of humanness. At this point, the theoretical parallels between linguistics and the study of language
and anthropology and the study of culture become important.
Structuralism is not a mere restatement of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; Lévi-Strauss does not argue that language shapes cultural perceptions in that direct manner (1963a:73, 85). Rather,
there are parallels between language and certain aspects of culture such as kinship, exchange, and myths, because they are all
forms of communication:
In any society, communication operates on three different levels: communication of women, communication of goods and
services, communication of messages. Therefore kinship studies, economics, and linguistics approach the same kinds of
problems on different strategic [that is, methodological] levels
and really pertain to the same field. (Lévi-Strauss 1963a:296)
The path of analysis had been blazed by the development of
structural linguistics, which Lévi-Strauss was introduced to by
the linguist and Slavic specialist Roman Jakobson during their
shared exile in New York. Lévi-Strauss states, “At the time I was
a kind of naive structuralist, a structuralist without knowing it”
(Lévi-Strauss and Eribon 1991:41), but learning of the advances in
linguistics was “a revelation.” According to Lévi-Strauss, the revolutionary aspects of these developments were (1) the shift of linguistic focus from conscious behavior to unconscious structure,
(2) the new focus on the relations between terms rather than on
terms, (3) the importance of proving the concrete existence of systems of relationships of meaning, and (4) the goal of discovering
general laws (1963a:33). Those became Lévi-Strauss’s analytical
objectives as he turned to examinations of kinship, exchange, art,
ritual, and myth—all of which are forms of communication analogous to language (Lévi-Strauss 1963a:83–84).
Phonemes are the minimal units of sound that a group of
speakers consider distinct; for example, the aspirated /th/ in
“top” and the unaspirated /t/ in “stop” are considered to be the
same sound “t” in English but are different sounds in Thai. LéviStrauss argues that phonemes and kinship terms are both elements of meaning, although meaningful only in reference to
systems that “are built by the mind on the level of unconscious
thought” (1963a:34). A kinship system, like language, “exists
only in human consciousness; it is an arbitrary system of representations,” but representations whose organizations reflect unconscious structures (Lévi-Strauss 1963a:50). Consequently,
Lévi-Strauss holds that
the unconscious activity of the mind consists in imposing
forms upon content, and if these forms are fundamentally the
same for all minds—ancient and modern, primitive and civilized (as the study of the symbolic function, expressed in language, so strikingly indicates)—it is necessary and sufficient to
grasp the unconscious structure underlying each institution
and custom. (1963a:21)