ABSTRACT
In the social sciences, similar modes of reasoning and analysis were associated with the movement of structural anthropology and its greatest proponent C. Lévi-Strauss, who insisted that research should focus on the relationships among units of social systems, rather than on the units themselves. For LéviStrauss, oppositions are rudimentary forms of relations among units and terms, which can then be grouped together to provide classicatory systems that serve the constitution of social and cultural structures. He argued that while the lowest and most rudimentary level of classicatory systems was founded on dierences and oppositions among terms, these oppositions were subsequently linked together through structural similarities and permutations, ultimately underscoring homologies that testify to elementary structures of human thought. Roughly put, dierence or opposition constituted a means of classication of a given cultural system (or subsystem), through which the various terms were dened and put in place. At a higher level, however, the structure of relations among terms in one (sub)system was said to be correlated to those of other (sub)systems, as homologies, contradictions or dialectical relationships. us, dierences between terms allowed similarities between dierences to be established (Utaker 2009). In a case of totemism, for example, one could say that the opposition between two animals was the same as the opposition between two clans. As for the structural linguist, therefore, oppositions constituted for Lévi-Strauss the most basic element of human symbolic thought (Lévi-Strauss 1963; Leach 1974).
