Rejecting functionalist, sociological and psychological approaches as being too light in interpreting mythology, Levi-Strauss’ (1958) new “structuralism” posited a universal logical pattern to the human mind and in this perspective religion is of a totally different phenomenon in nature.
He has been unswerving in his search for the universal structures of human thought and social life. He points out that although anthropologists have tried studying mythology it has not been successful as myths are still widely interpreted in conflicting ways: as collective dreams, as the outcome of a kind of esthetical play, or as the basis of ritual. Mythological figures are considered as personified abstractions, divinised heroes, or fallen gods. He further laments that study of mythology has been reduced to either an idle play or a crude kind of philosophical speculation.
His formalistic structuralism tends to reinforce analogies between “primitive” and sophisticated thinking and also provides a new method of analysing myths and stories. Taking cue from structural linguistics, in particular the work of Ferdinand Saussure, Levi-Strauss has sought to reveal a grammar of the mind, a kind of universal psychology with a genetic base, which gives rise to social structures. He explains that myth is language: to be known, and to be told; it is a part of human speech. He further elaborates saying that in order to provide its specificity we must be able to show that it is both the same thing as language, and also something different from it. He interestingly analyses myth with Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole, one being the structural side of language, and the other the statistical aspect, langue belonging to a reversible time, parole being non-reversible. Just as there are limits to linguistic variation, so there are certain basic innate patterns of culture based on a series of binary oppositions. Thus, all societies distinguish between the raw and the cooked, the raw standing for nature (and women) and the cooked for culture (and men). Myths reveal common story lines that can be used to understand the limited number of ways in which human beings interpret the world. The structural analysis of myth, which is a pioneering work of Levi-Strauss in anthropology, has influenced many scholars in the 21st century. Levi-Strauss contends that primitive religious systems are like all symbolic systems, fundamentally communication systems.
In Indian context Dumont (1959) takes the structuralist perspective of religion manifested in the worship of village deities. He finds the opposition between ‘purity’ and ‘impurity’ and interdependency of both the values in the religious thoughts. The ‘purity’ is strongly associated with vegetarian food offered to the sanskritic gods and ‘impurity’ associated with non-saskritic gods and other spiritual beings that receive the offering of non-vegetarian foods. The purity is superior to impurity, and these values have transcended to form the basis of caste system.