[lbo-talk] do people still read post-structuralism? (Levi-Strauss est mort)

c b cb31450 at gmail.com
Wed Nov 4 06:10:13 PST 2009


Asad Haider :

Post-structuralism" includes Levi-Strauss, who saw himself as a scientist and argued that mythology could be comprehended by a universal mathematical formula? And at the same time Althusser, who argued that Levi-Strauss represented "structuralist ideology" and positioned himself as the representative of orthodox Marxism within the French Communist Party against the dominant neo-Stalinist revisionism?

^^^^^^^^ CB: Yeah actually, Levi-Strauss is ( still alive at 100)* a structuralist, structuralist anthropologist. He's pretty much the founder of structuralism in anthro-sociology, using an analogy from structural linguistics. So, he is not a _post_-structuralist. The post-structuralists, evidently , are some sort of negation of Levi-Straussian structuralism. The math he claims can be applied to myths and other aspects of human culture is Group Theory algebra, isomorphism , homomorphism, etc.

* Ironically I wrote this two days ago, and then yesterday I heard that Levi-Strauss had died.



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