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Contemporary Cultural Theory

gravely threatened with common biological extinction’ (Eagleton,
1989a, p. 188).

HIGH STRUCTURALISM

Lévi-Strauss
Both Barthes and Lévi-Strauss came into contact with Saussurean
linguistics partly by way of the legacy of Russian Formalism and
the Prague School. Lévi-Strauss’ The Elementary Structures of
Kinship, first published in 1949, dealt with a typically ‘anthro-
pological’ subject—marriage and descent—but in a typically
semiological fashion, through the attempt to construct a
‘grammar’ of kinship (Lévi-Strauss, 1969). The incest taboo, he
would conclude, ‘is in origin neither purely cultural nor purely
natural’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1985, p. 24). He believed it could be
explained only in conjunction with kinship structures and, to this
end, turned to an analogous symbolic system, ‘phonology’, as
theorised by Jakobson. Both kinship and phonology are system-
atic; in both, individual terms or entities are determined by their
difference from others in the system; both function as uncon-
scious structures; both are governed by general laws
(Lévi-Strauss, 1963, p. 33). For Lévi-Strauss, the principle of
‘reciprocity’, of gift and counter-gift based on the exchange
of goods and women, provided the common element uniting all
manifestations of kinship structure, and was thus also the source
of the incest prohibition.
In the four volumes of Mythologiques, published between 1964
and 1971, he sought to explain how the passage from nature to
culture was symbolised in the indigenous cultures of North and
South America. All the Indian peoples, he concluded, ‘seem to
have conceived of their myths for one purpose only: to come to
terms with history and, on the level of system, to re-establish a
state of equilibrium capable of acting as a shock-absorber for the
disturbances caused by real-life events’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1981,
p. 607). Meaning did not inhere in the myths themselves; the
myths were media or ‘grids’ through which to make sense of a
world that can never be known in itself. The Osage Indians of

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