Critique of Levi-Strauss' 'Structuralism and Ecology'

Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French structuralist and one of the most celebrated anthropologist of the twentieth century. His work in constructing a method aimed to benefit in the discovery of meaning in cultural life led him to the formation of a theory in which structural linguistics could be applied to anthropology. His work was greatly influenced by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, to whom the theory of structural linguistics was credited, however, Lévi-Strauss further expanded on Saussure’s work to form his own theory of structuralism, by which all empirical data could be generalized into the smallest, most comprehensive units of data. These building blocks of the most basic units of data could be used in comparison or in contrast of one another, and in doing so Lévi-Strauss hoped to formulate predictive laws of order.  

Lévi-Strauss’ system of structuralism was extended to the application of cultural life, in hopes that he might find some predictability in social structures and the behaviors they produce. Culture, Lévi-Strauss would say, is reliant upon patterns of everyday life - art, ritual, myth, kinship. These patterns are simple social structures intended for the collective use of people. The structures are not systematic, but rather constructs reproduced arbitrarily from culture to culture to promote alliances, facilitate social interactions and work to make society cohere. It is, according to Lévi-Strauss, the social reproduction of structures, not the biological reproduction of human beings that gives meaning to cultural life.

Method

‘Structuralism and Ecology [1984]’ exemplifies Lévi-Strauss’ theory of structuralism as it is applied to native Canadian mythology. His focus was to prove that myths could be reduced to a manageable number of elements, mythemes, that could be arranged and rearranged to form the same story cross-culturally, an ultimate myth from which expectations of society and values of a culture could be expressed. Any cause for change in one story required other parts of that story to change accordingly. Mythemes mimicked the linguistic concept of phonemes, minimally contrasting pairs of sounds that create linguistic meaning. Lévi-Strauss came to analyze social structures, like myths, in the same way structural linguists analyze language; as a model of cultural phenomena as well as the medium of cultural communication.

By outlining the dialectical relationship between two myths of neighboring tribes, Lévi-Strauss explains human’s inherent need to impose order from nature by creating binary oppositions - life and death, culture and nature, self and other. He came to believe that existing cultural ideologies were perpetuated binary mental oppositions that have prevailed through time. Linguists, like anthropologist, sought to segment and classify characteristics of grammar styles in hopes of collecting language universals and reinforcing social structures that reproduce a collective consciousness and group solidarity. Much as Saussure argued that the structure of family allowed individuals to acquire a determinate identity only through relations with one another, the arrangement of mythemes into myths served as a social structure from which a determinate identity could be formulated. These structures highlight values, traits and characteristics which are desirable in each particular culture.