verbs or adjectives chosen from those available within the system. This technique of interpretation can be seen more easily with a restaurant menu, where items can either be read as components of a meal, or simply as alternative starters, main courses or desserts. Table 1 shows Barthes’ formalized version of this analysis, comparing a range of signifying practices and contrasting the “syntagmatic”(or sequential)

Table 1: “Syntagm and System”, after Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, p. 63.

         These archetypal themes are played out in countless individual myths and Lévi-Strauss’ ambitious intention was to provide a universal “template” for their interpretation. It is this emphasis on universality and the use of binary oppositions as units of meaning that lends his method its immediate impact as well as exposing its obvious limitations. The archetypal themes which appear in myths and seem to limit their potential meaning relate to the inherited structure of language that apparently limits the possibilities of expression. This “displacement” of the individual subject from its sovereign position as a free-thinking person is one effect of the structuralist view of the world which later philosophers attempted to address. The implicit determinism in Lévi-Strauss’ approach to culture seems to result from his overreaction to phenomenology and existentialism – he disparaged their emphasis on the individual subject’s experience and sought instead for a more objective means of analyzing and interpreting reality. His quest, like Edmund Husserl’s, for a truly “rigorous science”, had resulted in a similarly isolated study of the “essential” structures of meaning.

         Projecting some of these insights back into the social context of experience has been the task of those more recent writes who have been influenced by structuralist thinking. Of these, one of the most provocative is the French critic Roland Barthes, who also demonstrated in his later work the influence of structuralism on deconstruction. As Lévi-Strauss had already demonstrated that the linguistic model could be applied to social practices – such as marriage laws, religious rites, food preparation and so on – Barthes was able to extend this thinking into the context of contemporary culture and at the same time assess its political implications for our understanding of sign systems. Barthes also amplified Lévi-Strauss’ analysis of the ways in which signs transmitted their meanings, based on two alternative ways of interpreted a word, either by category or position within a sentence. By this he meant that words could be understood as part of a continuous chain or sequence, where they acquire meaning by their position and context, and through their relationship with other words in same sentence. On the other hand, they can be understood in terms of categories or groups of words, or as alternative nouns

of sound, Lévi-Strauss identified “mythemes” as the units of meaning within a story. As with language, it was not the semantic reference of the individual mytheme that was most important: as he admitted, many myths contained quite superficial literal meanings. What was significant was the way in which the units were combined into a story, the presence or absence of particular characters and the sequence of events in which they were involved. Lévi-Strauss provided a demonstration of his theory in his analysis of the Oedipus myth, which he showed depended on a series of themes which are acted out by the figures in the story. He highlighted a series of general contradiction with which he claimed the myth was attempting to deal, such as the oppositions between culture and nature, male and female, marital relations and blood relations, together with the general mysteries of life and death and the origins of mankind. The fact that myths always address these fundamental dilemmas provides the true meaning beneath their surface appearance and they are thus composed, like works of art, to make sense out of the chaos of the world. This theme of imposing patterns upon the flux of everyday experience forms a parallel to techniques of psychoanalysis such as the interpretation or decoding of dreams.

         The latter field uses the technique as a way of resolving psychological dilemmas and in a similar sense Lévi-Strauss sees a myth as a kind of interpretive or mediating device – an attempt to resolve the kind of oppositions set out in the list above. This theme is often taken up by a particular character within the story, such as with the trickster figure he discovered in the mythologies of the North American Indians. The trickster is a hybrid of mortal and divine being who appears in a range of different guises and is used to help make sense of mysterious phenomena by shifting from one mode of existence to another. This theme of the intermediary as a useful explanatory device also occurs in religious traditions in a somewhat similar role – the Greek gods who could adopt various human forms to interfere with everyday events and the figures of Christ and the angels as divine messengers of the word of God all have the ability to move between one world and another and are thereby used to explain away apparently contradictory aspects of experience.

         In The Elementary Structures of Kinship, which first appeared in 1949, he applied this model to the laws governing marriage in various so-called primitive cultures. At first sight this application might seem somewhat inappropriate, as the make-up of family units appears to be not primarily a means of expression. Lévi-Strauss, however, demonstrates that these relationships are governed by laws – a complex network of codes and prohibitions that provides a sense of order and structure within a community. By this means, he shows that kinship laws act as a form of “representation”, a symbolic language through which a community describes itself in structural terms. By following the authority of these implicit codes, a tribal grouping can maintain its sense of order, as individual decisions and actions can always be related to the larger patterns. Rather than the object-centred approach of traditional anthropology, which concentrated on the nuclear family unit as a basic building block of a society, Lévi-Strauss instead followed Saussure and considered the relations between these units. He observed that patterns of intermarriage followed a ritualized process of exchange, resulting in important bonds between groups of families, due to connections such as parents/siblings, children/cousins, etc. beyond the immediate child/parent relationship. The females were often “exchanged” in marriage, as part of this process of maintaining order, and a similar system often operated in other ritualized customs such as gift-giving, trading and religious practice. To Lévi-Strauss these patterns also betrayed the attempt to explain the underlying structures of nature, such as where the community forms a microcosm of the world, and procreation becomes a metaphor for creation.

         This is explained more comprehensively in what is probably Lévi-Strauss’ most representative book, his collection of essays entitled Structural Anthropology, published in French in 1958. In this book he develops much further the analysis of cultural practices as forms of expression, with studies on the structural analysis of myth, alongside magic, religion and art. This work forms a parallel to his study of kinship in its emphasis on underlying order, in particular the idea that meaning emerges from the way basic units are combined into systems. Where Saussure had analysed language in terms of “phonemes”, or units 

         A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable; it would be a part of social psychology and consequently of general psychology; I shall call it semiology (from Greek semeion ‘a sign’). Semiology would show what constitutes signs, what laws govern them. Since the science does not yet exist, no one can say what it would be … Linguistics is only a part of the general science of semiology; the laws discovered by semiology will be applicable to linguistics, and the latter will circumscribe a well-defined area within the mass of anthropological facts.6

Structures of Society – From Lévi-Strauss to Barthes 

Appropriately, the first to occupy the territory staked out in Saussure’s work was the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, born in 1908, who is perhaps today the most closely associated with the spread of structuralism in cultural analysis. Lévi-Strauss had travelled in South America while teaching in Brazil in the 1930s, and based much of his later writing on this early experience working in the field. In one of his early works, Tristes Tropiques, published in 1955, he described his three major influences as “geology, Marxism and psychoanalysis” – he claimed that all three disciplines demonstrate that “the true reality is never the most obvious”.7 The principle in all these practices, that surface effects are invisibly determined by the influence of underlying structures, is an important factor in Chapter 5 of this book. For now, it is the language model that provided the structure for Lévi-Strauss’ work, as he searched for a similar system of “differences” to that which Saussure had uncovered in language. As an anthropologist he studied societies that had changed very little with the passage of time and this allowed him to isolate them “synchronically”, as Saussure had recommended with language.