The Ideological Bases of Lévi‐Strauss's Structuralism

In: American anthropologist: AA, Band 73, Heft 3, S. 537-544

Abstract

It is clear that Lévi‐Strauss combines in his writings, and often inextricably, the roles of anthropologist (read scientist) and philosopher (read ideologist). This rather unusual combination of anthropological and philosophical dimensions of Lévi‐Strauss's thought is the result of two tendencies that often seem to be pulling in different directions: his scientific conception of socio‐cultural phenomena (or the delineation of a scientific method for harnessing human behavior under the rubric of sociological laws), on the one hand, and his conception of what society should be (or the ideological statement of what constitutes a "good sociological life"), on the other. In order to understand the nature of structuralism and Lévi‐Strauss's contributions to anthropological theory and practice, these two aspects of his thought must be clearly distinguished. This is what I hope to accomplish in this article.