ABSTRACT
Claude Levi-Strauss was born in Belgium in 1908, of a Jewish family. Levi-Strauss’ central interest has been constant throughout his career; it has been to expose the underlying logical order which exists beneath all the richness and diversity of human culture. Levi-Strauss was extremely impressed by these rigorous, scientific achievements, and we can best understand his collection of early essays in Structural Anthropology as a search to find exactly how to utilise the idea that language was a key tool in decoding cultural reality. The problem of totemism had exercised the minds of many anthropological theorists throughout the nineteenth century. The mythology of pre-industrial society may appear to be very strange, even arbitrary in its operations, but this is an illusion, quickly dispelled when one analyses the concrete codes employed in the construction. The laws of thought themselves can be reduced to physico-chemical laws, thus the regularities of human culture can all be re-expressed as invariants established by the natural sciences.
