How does Levi-Strauss view human culture?

 Within sociology, structuralism is basically one of the approaches to study culture. Culture is nothing but the learned ideas and behaviours that characterise any society. According to Levi-Strauss, who is also considered as the developer of structuralism, human culture is just an expression of the underlying structures of the human mind. Thus, Levi-Strauss’s structuralism asserts humans act as we do, not because of where we live or other social factors, but because of the actual structure of the human mind. Furthermore, according to him mind of the primitive or what he calls as “savage” is the same as the structure of the minds of the civilized ones. Structuralism has been defined as "the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity"(Angela, 2009).

He elaborates this with the help of an example. Humans like to eat their meat cooked. This is same for both - the “savage” and the civilized. It is not because they are directed by their respective cultures to do so, rather owing to the structures of their brain which tells them that cooked meat is better than the raw. Thus, according to Levi-Strauss the human beings think in binary opposites, owing to the structure of the human mind. For instance: to experience what is hot they must experience what is cold; to know light they must have experienced darkness, and so on.

When Levi-Strauss refers to structure, it is not in the way of the overt structures which are observable on the surface in a society, rather to the deeper abstract and unconscious logical structures that lie under the overt structures. These structures, as discussed above, remain abstract and conceptual. As a result of which, they remain inaccessible to the understanding of the people practicing them and can only be accessed by the analyst himself. For Levi-Strauss society is a system of logical structures.

So basically, Levi-Strauss saw culture only as a means of communication. In other words, from his perspective, culture becomes a system of transmission of meanings. Such meanings function towards holding the society together as a system of exchange. These vehicles of transmission of meaning in any given social structure included all the myths, folklore, stories and even ritual practices and beliefs which together constituted the essential core of what he understood as a culture.

However, the most significant contribution of Claude Levi-Strauss to the study of social structure remains his cross-cultural analysis of myths and kinship systems. Based on which, in his acclaimed essay, ‘Social Structure’ (1953), he pointed out that social structure refers to the models that emerge from the empirical realities. He writes: “The term ‘social structure’ has nothing to do with empirical reality, but with models that are built up after it.” (1953: 279). Understood like this, all the components of a social structure, including myths, rituals, folklores, language and cultural beliefs become a part of the models, on which a social structure is built. According to him, these models act as methods to study the social relations, that make up for a given social structure. By studying the models, one may understand the social relations in a given social structure.

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