Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-wzw2p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-30T07:18:24.585Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core

Chapter 1 - Lévi-Strauss, linguistics and structuralism

Paul-François Tremlett
Paul-François Tremlett
Affiliation:
The Open University
Get access

Summary

The human sciences will be structuralist or they will not be at all… The ethnologist, faced with thousands of societies and the incredible multiplicity of facts, must do one of two things: Either he can only describe and take inventory of all this diversity, and his work will be very estimable but it will not be scientific. Or else he will have to admit that behind this diversity there lies something deeper, something common to all its aspects. This effort to reduce a multiplicity of expressions to one language, this is structuralism. Maybe someday it will no longer be called that; I don't know and I don't care. But the effort to find a deeper and truer reality behind the multiplicity of apparent realities, that seems to be the condition of survival for the human sciences, whatever the undertaking is called.

(Claude Lévi-Strauss, There are no Superior Societies)

According to Lévi-Strauss, the conjunction of structural linguistics and social anthropology is a “revolution” akin to a “paradigm shift,” to borrow Kuhn's (1970) famous phrase, in the social sciences. “A transformation of this magnitude,” he writes, “is not limited to a single discipline” (Lévi-Strauss 1993a, 33). As such, Lévi-Strauss confidently claims that structural linguistics will play a “renovating role with respect to the social sciences” (Lévi-Strauss 1993a, 33), an argument premised on the notion that structural linguistics is the only one of the social sciences “which can truly claim to be a science” (1993a, 31), and that social anthropology, at least until this momentous conjunction of forces, has lacked the necessary synthetic rigour through which it might properly call itself a science.

Type
Chapter
Information
Lévi-Strauss on Religion
The Structuring Mind
 , pp. 9 - 28
Publisher: Acumen Publishing
Print publication year: 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×