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Levi-Strauss proposed that the initial motivation for the exchange of women was the incest taboo, which he deemed to be the beginning and essence of culture, as it was the first rule to check natural impulses; and secondarily the sexual division of labour.
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]
Claude Lévi-Strauss introduced the "Alliance Theory" of exogamy, [9] that is, that small groups must force their members to marry outside so as to build alliances with other groups. According to this theory, groups that engaged in exogamy would flourish, while those that did not would all die, either literally or because they lacked sufficient ...
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.
It finds its origins in Claude Lévi-Strauss's Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949). 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 ...
The exchange of women is an element of alliance theory — the structuralist theory of Claude Lévi-Strauss and other anthropologists who see society as based upon the patriarchal treatment of women as property, being given to other men to cement alliances. [1]
As a method of studying this oppression in all social forms, Rubin examines kinship structures as they were theorized in The Elementary Structures of Kinship by Claude Lévi-Strauss. In particular, Rubin focuses on 1) the "gift exchange" of women and 2) Strauss' idea of incest as the ultimate human taboo.
A structuralist approach may study activities as diverse as food-preparation and serving rituals, religious rites, games, literary and non-literary texts, and other forms of entertainment to discover the deep structures by which meaning is produced and reproduced within the culture. For example, Lévi-Strauss analysed in the 1950s cultural ...