ABSTRACT
The relatively recent discovery of “culture” in social science and social theory is not only due to the important social transformations of our world in this half century, changes intensifying our consciousness of cultural phenomena-“globalization,” the rise of a postindustrial society and its information technologies, the growing consciousness of world peoples about one another. Today’s “cultural turn”1 is also a response to mid-and late-twentieth-century intellectual movements, particularly the sciences of linguistics and semiotics, whose impact has extended to fields as wideranging as literary studies and psychoanalysis, sociology and anthropology. More than any other figure working in the social sciences, the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose “structural anthropology” was inspired by the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, has forced upon us a rethinking about the operations of language and of collective symbols and myths.
