A Macat Analysis of Structural Anthropology

Structural Anthropology (1958) not only transformed the discipline of anthropology, it also energized a movement called structuralism that came to dominate the humanities and social sciences for a generation. Linguistic structuralism studies the meaning of language beyond definitions, looking at the relationships of words and sounds to each other. Lévi-Strauss's insight was to apply this concept of structuralism to anthropology as well. He saw that while some cultures are very different from others, they all seem to have certain internal structural relationships in common. By tracing these structures across cultures, he tried to answer nothing less than the eternal question: "What is Man?"