Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose structural analysis of myth, kinship, and culture became a cornerstone of structuralism. He argued that all human cultures exhibit underlying logical structures — binary oppositions — that reveal the universal architecture of the mind.

Lévi-Strauss applied Saussurean linguistics to ethnology, treating myth as a language structured by oppositions such as raw/cooked, nature/culture, and self/other. His Mythologiques tetralogy traced structural patterns across hundreds of South American myths, establishing structuralism as a dominant method in the human sciences before poststructuralism displaced it.