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Lévi-Strauss

15 January, 2016 - 09:14

Lévi-Strauss is another structuralist who influenced Barthes. Lévi-Strauss was an anthropologist who applied Saussure's theory to anthropological areas of study, such as kinship. "Although they belong to another order of reality, kinship phenomena are of the same type as linguistic phenomena" (Lévi-Struass, 1963, in R. Innis, p.113). Lévi-Strauss accepted Saussure's idea that "Language (langue), on the contrary to speech (language), is a self-contained whole and a principle of classification. As soon as we give language first place among the facts of speech, we introduce a natural order into a mass that lends itself to no other classification the norm of all other manifestations of speech" (Saussure, 1959, in R. Innis (ed.), p.29). He went further, however, by conceptualizing language itself as the production of its society.

Like Saussure, Lévi-Strauss focused on the structure of language, and sought to find the hidden structures that he believed to exist in archetypes. Based on the laws of language underlying speech, he specifically tried to uncover the underlying substructure of various cultural phenomena such as customs, rites, habits, and gestures - phenomena which themselves said to be intrinsic to the creation of language (Kurzweil, 1982, p. 64). He also examined the und erlying structure of the myth. Its substance does not lie in its style, its original music, or its syntax, but in the story which it tells. Myth is language, functioning on an especially high level where meaning succeeds practically at 'taking off' from the linguistic ground on which it keeps on rolling (Lévi-Strauss, 1955, in H. Adams & L. Searle (Eds.), p. 811).

Kurzweil (1982) indicates that Barthes questioned why the dimensions of time often become irrelevant for creative writers. This question is very similar to that of Lévi-Strauss, who wrote, With myth, everything becomes possible. But on the other hand, this apparent arbitrariness is belied by the astounding similarity between myths collected in widely different regions. Lévi-Strauss (1955) explains this problem, Therefore the problem: If the content of a myth is contingent, how are we going to explain the fact that myths throughout the world are so similar? (p. 810). It seems natural that Barthes was attracted to Lévi-Strauss's findings of the similarities between tribal myths in discrete cultures, as well as between structural elements in the lives and tales of diverse tribes.

Through his work, Lévi-Strauss believed that there would be one universal system connecting all myths and all societies. Barthes, despite not being a Marxist, but working as a scholar who wanted to reveal the false notions in petite-bourgeois ideology, adopted Levi-Strauss's systemic approach (Kurzweil, E., 1982, p. 64-69). He expected to analyze all past and future creative acts and works through the language their authors used, and argued that these authors were no more than expressions of their times and societies (Kurzweil, E., 1982, pp. 64-69).