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Structural anthropology is a school of sociocultural anthropology based on Claude Lévi-Strauss' 1949 idea that immutable deep structures exist in all cultures, and consequently, that all cultural practices have homologous counterparts in other cultures, essentially that all cultures are equatable.
Claude Lévi-Strauss (/ k l ɔː d ˈ l eɪ v i ˈ s t r aʊ s / klawd LAY-vee STROWSS; [2] French: [klod levi stʁos]; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) [3] [4] [5] was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology. [6]
Lévi-Strauss breaks down his argument into three main parts. Meaning is not isolated within the specific fundamental parts of the myth, but rather within the composition of these parts. Although myth and language are of similar categories, language functions differently in myth.
Daniel Chandler defines the term as "a signifier with a vague, highly variable, unspecifiable or non-existent signified". [4] The concept of floating signifiers originates with Claude Lévi-Strauss, who identified cultural ideas like mana as "represent[ing] an undetermined quantity of signification, in itself void of meaning and thus apt to receive any meaning".
Korn's research was based on sociological theory and the history of Buenos Aires, particularly from 1880 until 1945. [2] In 1973, she published the book Elementary Structures Reconsidered , focusing on Claude Lévi-Strauss ' kinship theories and based on her own Oxford thesis, [ 2 ] [ 6 ] and she was appointed a Guggenheim Fellow "for a study ...
One of Lévi-Strauss's many examples is the relationship between two Australian groups, the Aranda and the Arabanna. The Aranda have a complex system for intermarriages that divides all people into two groups and then four stages within each group. The system specifies where the children will live and how they will marry.
Levi-Strauss' theory is supported by fact that patrilateral cross-cousin marriage is in fact the rarest of three types. However, matrilateral generalised exchange poses a risk, as group A depends on being given a woman from a group that it has not itself given a woman to, meaning that there is a less immediate obligation to reciprocate compared ...
In the introduction, Lévi-Strauss writes of his confidence that "certain categorical opposites drawn from everyday experience with the most basic sorts of things—e.g. 'raw' and 'cooked,' 'fresh' and 'rotten,' 'moist' and 'parched,' and others—can serve a people as conceptual tools for the formation of abstract notions and for combining ...