Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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 makes clear that "la pensée sauvage" refers not to the discrete mind of any particular type of human, but rather to 'untamed' human thought: "In this book it is neither the mind of savages nor that of primitive or archaic humanity, but rather mind in its untamed state as distinct from mind cultivated or domesticated for the purpose of yielding a return."
The main object of this text is Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose structuralist anthropology analyzed the relationships between elements of cultural systems such as mythology. Derrida admires the reflexivity and abstract analyses of structuralism, but argues that these discourses have still not gone far enough in treating structures as free-floating ...
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]
Strauss showed that men were principally in control of the exchange and reception of women, or a kind of kinship exchange, rather than simply a gift exchange based on principles of reciprocity (as Marcel Mauss argued in his essay, The Gift). Rubin considers this "exchange of women" to be an "initial step toward building an arsenal of concepts ...
The structuralist anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss proclaimed that the goal of the human sciences was "not to constitute, but to dissolve man". [26] He systematised a structuralist analysis of culture that incorporated ideas and methods from Saussure's model of language as a system of signifiers and signifieds.
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".
Lévi-Strauss, based, at the same time, on the sociological and anthropological positivism of Durkheim, Mauss, Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, on the economic and sociological Marxism, on Freudian and Gestalt psychology and on structural linguistics of Saussure and Jakobson, realized great studies on areas myth, kinship, religion, ritual ...