Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :Myth and Meanting
"What I would say is that the greatness and the superiority of scientific explanation lies not only in the practical and intellectual achievement of science, but in the fact, which we are witnessing more and more, that science is becoming able to explain not only its own validity but also what was to some extent valid in mythological thinking."
Science rocks. It explains lots of stuff in the world. And evidence of the fact that scientific inquiry is superior to other forms of inquiry is the fact that science is now enabling us to understand not only natural elements but also cultural elements, like myth.
Here, we see Lévi-Strauss arguing that the study of culture is a scientific endeavor. Picking up where Saussure left off, he's elevating the structuralist method to the status of a science.
Saussure's plot for world domination via semiology is making strides. Lévi-Strauss, coming from the field of anthropology, was making that point that universal laws and binary oppositions were just as responsible for the princesses, dragons, and morals in myths all over the world as they were for things like chemical reactions.
Quote :Myth and Meanting
"Probably there is nothing more than that in the structuralist approach; it is the quest for the invariant, or for the invariant elements among superficial differences."
You have a red dress, a blue t-shirt, and floral short-shorts. Hmmm…all different, right? Yes and no. Superficially, the clothes are different—you wouldn't wear the shorts to a wedding. But when we look at the tags, lo and behold: they're all 100% cotton! In this case, cotton is the "invariant," or common element, that unites these various fashionable items despite their superficial differences.
Lévi-Strauss' explanation here is useful for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it's saying what's most central to the structuralist approach—oh joy! It also highlights the way that contrast is of the utmost importance to structuralists. That's the idea that on the surface there are always "superficial differences," but beneath those details there is always some kind of common structure. Saussure made this distinction in relation to language. Here, Lévi-Strauss generalizes the concept for the structuralist approach as a whole. This distinction is not just about language anymore: it's a distinction that applies to everything.
Quote :Structural Anthropology
"[T]he recurrence of kinship patterns, marriage rules, similar prescribed attitudes between certain types of relatives, and so forth, in scattered regions of the globe and in fundamentally different societies, leads us to believe that, in the case of kinship as well as linguistics, the observable phenomena result from the action of laws which are general but implicit. The problem can therefore be formulated as follows: Although they belong to another order of reality, kinship phenomena are of the same type as linguistic phenomena."
You know how we find marriage in every culture? Incest taboos? Father and mother figures? Well, this suggests that there are universal "family rules" that exist all over the world. Yeah, just like those "grammar rules" that govern all acts of speech. So family is like language. On the surface, families seem different, but if we dig deeper we can discover the "grammar" that governs all family relationships, even if your family has dinner an hour later than your next door neighbor, and you both have different food from a family on the other side of the globe.
Lévi-Strauss makes a daring leap from linguistic structures to social structures. He's basically saying: you know what, all of human society is structured like a language. This is an important moment in structuralism because it opens the door for other theorists to look at everything in society and culture in terms of linguistic structures, not just language.