Page 75 - Decoding Culture

68 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE

reconstructed by the analyst. In Saussure, notably, this conception
is not cast in terms of any distinctive notion of the unconscious.
Levi-Strauss, however, comes to read the structuralist project with
a view to apprehending unconscious structures, and to see those
structures as universal: 'the unconscious activity of the mind con­
sists in imposing forms upon content, and if these forms are
fundamentally the same for all minds - ancient and modern, prim­
itive and civilised' (Levi-Strauss, 1972: 21) . Paradoxically, then,
what we see here is a social anthropologist undercutting the
strong social and relativistic potential of Saussurian structuralism
in favour of an approach which seeks to comprehend underlying
structure in terms of universal, unconscious categories - to reveal
what an unconvinced Edmund Leach (1970: 60) described as 'a
single unitary message inherent in the architecture of the human
mind'.
The second distinctive feature of Levi-Strauss' structuralism
derives particularly from his admiration for Jakobson's approach to
phonemic analysis. As he does in many of his early writings, Levi­
Strauss turns to kinship to illustrate his point. 'Like phonemes,' he
argues (1972: 34) , 'kinship terms are elements of meaning; like
phonemes, they acquire meaning only if they are integrated into
systems. "Kinship systems," like "phonemic systems," are built by
the mind on the level of unconscious thought.' Accordingly, he
suggests, the systems are of the same type and may be under­
stood using analogous methods. Since Jakobson's method centres
upon binary oppositions, it is this binarism on which Levi-Strauss
draws in formulating his own methodology. Where Jakobson
worked with oppositions between elements such as vowels and
consonants and with contradictions which can be related to each
other because they are analogous in form, Levi-Strauss seeks out
permutations and combinations of units in kinship, in totemic sys­
tems, and, above all, in myth, where, in a hugely ambitious series

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