Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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".
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]
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.
Lévi-Strauss' most succinct definition of a House was that it is "a corporate body holding an estate made up of both material and immaterial wealth, which perpetuates itself through the transmission of its name, its goods and its titles down a real or imaginary line considered legitimate as long as this continuity can express itself in the language of kinship or of affinity and, most often ...
According to Levi-Strauss, the universal prohibition of incest pushes human groups towards exogamy where certain categories of kin are forbidden to marry. The incest taboo is thus a negative prescription; without it, nothing would push men to go searching for women outside of their inner kinship circle, or vice versa.
"Structure, sign, and play" discusses how philosophy and social science understand 'structures' abstractly. Derrida is dealing with structuralism, a type of analysis which understands individual elements of language and culture as embedded in larger structures.
For example, in Richard Wrangham's (2009) book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, he relies on Leach in describing Lévi-Strauss's analysis of cooking in relation to human culture. [ 14 ] Leach's first book was Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954); it challenged the theories of social structure and cultural change.
In their theory of schizoanalysis, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari made radical uses of the ideas of the signified and the signifier following Lacan. In A Thousand Plateaus , extending from their ideas of deterritorialization and reterritorialization , they developed the idea of "faciality" to refer to the interplay of signifiers in the ...