The Structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss

Regna Darnell
University of Western Ontario
Summary

Despite the importance of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism to a range of disciplines, little historiographic attention has been given to the sources of his thought about universals of human cognition. This paper examines his roots in Durkheimian sociology and his borrowings from Boasian anthropology and Prague School structuralism (documenting his rather startling lack of engagement with language as such). Biography, public pronouncements of Lévi-Strauss, and ongoing scholarly commentary are used to broaden the understanding of structuralism as an international tradition transcending the boundaries of linguistics as a discipline.

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