Claude Lévi-Strauss

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) was a French anthropologist who applied structuralist methods from linguistics to the study of myth, kinship, and cultural systems. In works such as The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), Tristes Tropiques (1955), and the four-volume Mythologiques (1964–1971), Lévi-Strauss argued that cultural phenomena are not collections of independent facts but transformational systems operating on underlying binary oppositions.

Lévi-Strauss treated myth as an algebraic calculus: myths from different cultures can be shown to be transformations of one another, just as equations can be transformed through permitted operations. The method was controversial in its specific applications but profoundly influential in establishing that cultural analysis could be structural rather than narrative or historical.