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Binary opposition is an important concept of structuralism, which sees such distinctions as fundamental to all language and thought. [2] In structuralism, a binary opposition is seen as a fundamental organizer of human philosophy, culture, and language. Binary opposition originated in Saussurean structuralist theory. [3]
Another concept was borrowed from the Prague school of linguistics, which employed so-called binary oppositions in their research. Roman Jakobson and others analysed sounds based on the presence or absence of certain features, such as "voiceless" vs. "voiced." Lévi-Strauss included this in his conceptualization of the mind's universal structures.
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 included this in his conceptualization of the universal structures of the mind, which he held to operate based on pairs of binary oppositions such as hot-cold, male-female, culture-nature, cooked-raw, or marriageable vs. tabooed women. A third influence came from Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), who had written on gift-exchange systems.
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 ...
Structuralism posits the concept of binary opposition, in which frequently-used pairs of opposite-but-related words (concepts) are often arranged in a hierarchy; for example: Enlightenment/Romantic, male/female, speech/writing, rational/emotional, signified/signifier, symbolic/imaginary, and east/west.
On the same principle Claude Lévi-Strauss (1969) claimed that culture is a realization of some hidden property. Though in the case of culture the universal property is not neurological but "Attitudinal". Latter in 2004 he showed, taking examples from different culture, that how attitudinal opposition construct the structure of kinship terms.
In contrast, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss examined the structure of a myth in terms of the abstract relationships between its elements, rather than their order in the plot. In particular, Lévi-Strauss believed that the elements of a myth could be organized into binary oppositions (raw vs. cooked, nature vs. culture, etc.).