Claude Lévi-Strauss: Structural Anthropology
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Einstein of the Human Sciences
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) transferred Saussure’s linguistic method to ethnology – and thereby became the “father of structuralism” in the broader sense.[1] His works – Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949), Tristes Tropiques (1955), Anthropologie structurale (1958), and the four-volume Mythologiques (1964-1971) – shaped a generation of French intellectuals.
Lévi-Strauss’ fundamental thesis was bold: human culture functions like a language. It consists of elements (kinship relations, myths, totem animals) that derive their meaning not from themselves, but from their position within a system of differences. The anthropologist need not ask “What does this myth mean?” but rather “How does it differ from other myths? What transformations are possible?”
The Incest Taboo as a Universal Structure
Lévi-Strauss’ first major thesis concerned the incest taboo. Why do all known societies – for all the variety of their concrete rules – prohibit sexual relations between close relatives?
The traditional answers were biological (inbreeding is harmful), moral (it is “unnatural”), or psychological (Freud: the Oedipus complex and its overcoming). Lévi-Strauss argued structurally: the incest taboo is the basic rule that distinguishes culture from nature. It compels exogamy – the exchange of women between groups. This exchange is what first constitutes social relations beyond the biological family.[2]
The point is this: the incest taboo has no “meaning” in the conventional sense – it is not explained by a function (health) or a value (morality). It is a formal structure marking the transition from nature to culture. It is the grammar of society.
The Structural Analysis of Myths
Lévi-Strauss’ main work is the Mythologiques – a monumental analysis of more than 800 myths of North and South American Indigenous peoples. His thesis: myths are not primitive attempts at explanation that science has superseded. They are an independent form of thought – “la pensée sauvage” (the savage mind, or wild thought) – which is just as rigorous as scientific thought, only operating by different means.[3]
The structural method does not analyze what a single myth “means,” but how myths relate to one another. One myth is a transformation of another: where one speaks of fire, another speaks of water; where one thematizes the sky, another the earth. These transformations follow rules – like the transformations of grammar.
The Anti-Humanism of Structuralism
Lévi-Strauss explicitly formulated the “anti-humanism” of structuralism – a thesis that Foucault and Althusser will later radicalize:
“The ultimate goal of the human sciences is not to constitute man, but to dissolve him.”[4]
What does he mean by this? Traditional humanism – from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment to existentialism – placed man at the center: as a free subject, as the creator of culture, as the bearer of history. Lévi-Strauss shows that man is not the creator of structures – he is their effect. Kinship systems, myths, language: they think through man, not man through them.
This is not an elimination of man, but his decentering. Man is not origin, but the crossing-point of structures that exceed him. This sounds pessimistic – but Lévi-Strauss saw in it a liberation: from the narcissism of Western humanism, which had made itself the measure of all things.
Lévi-Strauss and Hegel
Lévi-Strauss’ relationship to Hegel was complex. On the one hand, he shared Hegel’s claim to totality – the Mythologiques is an encyclopedic project that seeks to capture all the myths of a continent within a single system. On the other hand, he rejected Hegel’s philosophy of history.
The decisive difference: for Hegel, history is the progress of consciousness toward freedom. “Primitive” cultures are preliminary stages that are overcome. For Lévi-Strauss there is no progress – only different transformations of the same structures. “Wild thought” is not primitive, but different. There is no hierarchy of cultures.[5]
This critique hits Hegel’s problematic statements about “peoples without history” and Africa (see Chapter 12). But it overlooks what Hegel offers methodologically: a theory of mediation that explains how structures develop, transform, are sublated. Lévi-Strauss’ structures are timeless – they do not explain how anything new arises.
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On Lévi-Strauss, see the intellectual biography by Patrick Wilcken, Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (London, 2010). ↩︎
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (Paris, 1949), chs. 1-2. ↩︎
Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage (Paris, 1962), esp. ch. 1: “La science du concret.” ↩︎
Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage, concluding chapter. ↩︎
Lévi-Strauss’ critique of Western philosophy of history in: Race et histoire (Paris, 1952), UNESCO lecture. ↩︎