Structuralism III of the History of the Origins of World Philosophy: Lévi-Strauss

Structuralism No. 3: Levi Strauss

　　Claude. Levi Strauss (1908-) is a French anthropologist and sociologist. Born in Belgium, he studied law, philosophy and psychology at the University of Paris in his early years, receiving a doctorate in philosophy and literature. From 1935 to 1939, he taught sociology at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and at the same time went deep into the local indigenous tribes to conduct anthropological investigations, obtaining a large amount of first-hand information, which became the main basis for his anthropological research results. During World War II, he lived in the United States and taught at the School of Social Surveys in New York. After the war, he returned to China and served as deputy director of the Musée des Anthropocenes in Paris. Since the 1950s, he has taught sociology at the University of Paris and the Institut de France. His academic achievements were mainly in anthropology and mythology, and his achievements were mainly due to the structuralist methods he transplanted from linguistics, and he made many important expositions on this method and its universal values, so that he is considered the founder of structuralism. His major works include: The Family and Social Life of the South Bikwala Indians, The Basic Structure of Kinship Relations, Race and History, The Tropics of Sorrow, Structural Anthropology, Vol. 2, Totem Today, The Mind of the Barbarians, and Mythology, Vol. 4.

　　

1. About the concept of "structure".

　　"Structure" is the core concept of structuralism. But on the question of what exactly is "structure", structuralists have made different understandings from the perspective of their own field of study. Lévi-Strauss was influenced by Jacobson structural linguistics while teaching in the United States, and was the first to extend this approach beyond linguistics. In his view, structure is the integral social fact between all its constituents. But it is not an observable structure of social relations phenomena, but a deep "abstract entity" that determines the relations of reality, something that ties together different examples in society, like the "transformative syntax" of linguistics that transitions from one variant to another. He uses the analogy of music: the phenomena of social relations are like the transposition of a musical theme, and this musical theme is the structure of the piece.

　　Lévi-Strauss's statement on structural properties is well recognized by structuralists. He pointed out: "First, the structure shows the characteristics of a system, which is composed of several components, and the change of any one component causes changes in the other components. Second, for any given pattern it should be possible to arrange a series of transformations produced by a set of patterns of the same type. Third, the above properties allow it to predict how the pattern will react if one or more components change. Finally, patterns should be composed in such a way that all observed facts become directly understandable. "

Here he illustrates the decisive role of structure in nature, i.e., that the composition of things does not determine the nature of things, and that the structure between components and components—an intrinsic integral relation—determines things and the properties of components, and that components have meaning only in structure. Changes in structure change the properties of things and their constituents, and changes in constituents can only form formal variants in unchanging structures. He emphasized the importance of rational constructs in the acquisition of knowledge. For in his view, facts do not automatically reveal the truth, perception cannot make people gain knowledge, and observation cannot discover the structure behind phenomena. The reengineering of reason plays an important role in knowledge and theory.

　　Lévi-Strauss also distinguished between the concepts of "structure" and "pattern". Structure, he argues, is a "real" existence, patterns are the product of reason that plays a revelatory role; structures are understood through patterns. But this is not to say that structure is a material basis with objectivity, that structure is only the "unconscious" product behind all socio-cultural superficial relationships. Patterns describe the deep structures of the social unconscious through intellectual constructs.

　　

2. About the structure of kinship.

　　This is a structuralist analysis of social kinship based on Lévi-Strauss's social investigation of indigenous tribes in Brazil. In his view, kinship is a manifestation of kinship structure. Previous anthropologies, when studying kinship, only focused on the various components of kinship and did not pay attention to the structure between the components. It is precisely this structure, rooted in the social unconscious, that determines the meaning of kinship. The relationship between kinship and its structure, like the relationship between words, sentences and language structures, can decompose the various "items" in kinship and reduce them to the most primitive and simplest relationship. Levi Strauss argues that the irreducible relationship in the structure of kinship is a marriage relationship in which a woman is exchanged. The role of this structure is to put an end to random marriages, and civilized society has developed from this.

　　

3. About the mythological structure.

　　Myths are the legends of early human beings about the origin of the world, the origin of human beings, social relations, living customs and religious beliefs, which contain various germs of later civilizations and contain the ideas and concepts of early human beings. To this end, scholars have collected, sorted out, interpreted, and compared myths and legends from various angles around the world, forming a mythology. From the perspective of cultural anthropology, Lévi-Strauss used a structuralist approach to study ancient Greek and Roman mythology in an attempt to reveal the ideas and social relations of Europeans in ancient times. At the same time, he demonstrated in detail how to use structuralist methods to analyze a structure.

　　First, Levi Strauss separates mythology into superficial structures and deep structures—mythical stories and mythological structures. He collected many mythological stories, arguing that although they differ in plot, their internal structures have similarities, and it can be seen that various expressions derived from the same structure can be seen. These stories cannot be said to be the earliest, the most fundamental, or the most true, but juxtaposed with each other as variants of the same structure.

　　Levi Strauss then set out to break down these mythological stories as surface structures in order to find meaning in them, i.e., mythological structures. He broke down myths into basic components according to the storyline, which he called "mythological elements"; he disrupted them and reclassified them. If a story is represented by a string of numbers, such as: 124782346814578125737 ..., where each number represents a plot, then decomposing them into mythological elements becomes a separate component, such as: 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 2, 3 ,......。 Classify the mythological elements in each story separately, such as: all "1" to one column, all "2" to another column, and so on, and list the table, which has a new combinatorial meaning. By analyzing and explaining this meaning, we can find the deep structure of these stories. Lévi-Strauss used this method to analyze the Greek myth of king Oedipus's murder of his father and mother, and concluded that this myth expressed the primitive people's concern and exploration of the origin of man.

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