ABSTRACT
Claude Lévi-Strauss, a French anthropologist, followed the linguist Ferdinand Saussure and developed a broad-based approach to structuralism. He proceeded in the late 1950s to apply a structuralist analysis to a number of cultural systems, including “totemistic practices, kinship conventions, and myth repertoires” (Tunstall 1979:54). In the course of this work, he discovered that structures within one system were similar to those found in another system. This was not surprising given the assumption of similar mind structures.
