The name Lévi-Strauss is not to be confused with a brand of jeans; it is also a brand of structuralism. The structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in Belgium on 28 November 1908 to French parents. He undertook a law degree at the University of Paris, then taught sociology at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. He carried out sociological expeditions in Brazil in the 1930s, and these expeditions are what sparked his work on structural anthropology, although he was, in his own words, “a structuralist without knowing it” until 1942 when he started to read structural texts and realised there was an entire discipline that articulated his own thoughts and research methods. He is also influenced by Marx, and considers himself to be one of the few “purely structuralist thinkers”. He has applied structural theory to studies of myth, ritual and kinship.
Lévi-Strauss's contribution to structuralist thought is that he provides a scientific account which shows the world as a world of meanings; he believes that structuralism can be used to reveal the unity of all cultures. Two of his works are considered classic: Anthropologie structurale (1958) and the earlier Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949). The most frequently cited area of Lévi-Strauss's work is his study of mythology.
Lévi-Strauss is interested in the structural pattern which gives the myth its meaning. Through his examination of myths from all over the world, he has identified that myths are organised in binary oppositions (for example, good/evil) just like the basic linguistic units. Myths can be broken down into individual units (“mythemes”) which, like the basic sound units of language (“phonemes”) acquire meaning only when combined together in particular ways. Lévi-Strauss is then interested in the structural pattern which gives the myth its meaning. He believes this linguistic model will uncover the basic structure of the human mind, that is, the structure which governs the way human beings shape all their institutions, artefacts and their forms of knowledge. The rules which governed these combinations could be seen as a kind of grammar, a set of relations beneath the surface of the narrative which constituted the myth's true “meaning”. Further, modern structuralist analysis of narrative (known as narratology) began with Lévi-Strauss's pioneering work on myth.
Lévi-Strauss and his type of structuralism are no longer fashionable as a theoretical approach or method, and has since been taken over by post-structuralists such as Derrida. However, it is important to remember that Lévi-Strauss and his structuralism provided an important contribution for debating the nature of “meaning”.