You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Few of the poststructuralist intellectuals and deconstructionist literary critics, whose investigations are now fashionable in our universities, refer any longer to Claude Levi-Strauss. Even fewer recall that Levi-Strauss was the first “structuralist,” the anthropologist-philosopher who advocated applying Ferdinand de Saussure's and Roman Jakobson's theories of structural linguistics to the understanding of cultures—initially to primitive ones and then to all of civilization. But 20 years ago, Levi-Strauss's methodical search for unsuspected harmonies, for systems of relations, in the most disparate cultural practices and beliefs promised to uncover the origins of culture in nature. Tfistes Tropiques ( ) was a bestseller, and Structural Anthropology ( ) revolutionized anthropological thinking. What happened in the interim, we must ask, to cause Levi-Strauss's recent book to be nearly ignored both by the Parisian intellectual public and by anthropologists?
In the 1970s and the early 1980s the four volumes of his Mythologigues appeared. He had defined the constituent units (smallest components) of the myths he had chosen to contextualize; and he had compared them cross-culturally. Thus, he had demonstrated the application of the linguistic method described in Structural Anthropology. Concentrating on underlying forms of tribal beliefs rather than on empirical data, and emphasizing