Levi-strauss Binary Opposition

[Krysta Cirilo]

Binaryopposites have been found within numerous narratives, archaic and modern. Even the Bible features binary oppositions. Some examples include Angels vs. The devil, Heaven vs. Hell and Rich vs. Poor. Modern examples of The Titanic film (which reflects reality somewhat) involve rich vs. Poor once more, lower vs. Upper classes and of course, good vs. Evil.

It is hard to critique a man that spoke so much sense. It seems to be evident that innately, we all do understand examples of binary opposites without really understanding how we know them. We were taught right from wrong, but it is from somewhere within us that we can feel right from wrong. An instinctive, universal judgement that has set the standards for us all. Maybe enforcing binary structures into narrative is not a choice and is instead merely a human nature. Maybe it is not something we have the capability of changing without a real effort to. I do not intend on challenging the works of Strauss as I feel they are sensical and relatable to any audience. However, I am intrigued to discover whether or not the binary structure appears as if by magic into my work without my intending it to. I predict that it will, because what is a plot without the very basic good vs. evil?

There is a clear binary being established between the two characters. The man is active, powerful and holding a weapon. The woman is passive, vulnerable and, significantly, being held. Of course, this representation is typical of the male gaze.

If media texts help to normalise certain views and attitudes, we need to critically assess the representation of binary opposites, especially if there is an imbalance of power or we reduce concepts to stereotypes.

Another criticism of binary opposites is that language is much more ambiguous than the theory suggests. Should we really be dividing society into rich and poor? Is gender binary? Is there no grey area between good and evil?

Binary opposition theory provides an effective framework for analysing the media, but we should be more aware of the harm caused by those representations which reduce the world into such basic structures.

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Claude Lvi-Strauss had only the slightest experience of ethnographic fieldwork, and had no formal training in anthropology. Nevertheless, his ideas transformed the discipline, and profoundly influenced the other human sciences. He died on 31 October.

The son of an artist father, and the grandson of a rabbi in Strasbourg, France, Lvi-Strauss was educated in law and philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1935, he joined a French contingent at the new University of Sāo Paulo in Brazil. He embraced the opportunity, because he had a very particular ambition. Jean-Jacques Rousseau once suggested that an expedition should be sent to the Americas to study human nature in its essential state, uncorrupted by civilization. A devotee of Rousseau's philosophy, Lvi-Strauss was determined to execute the master's plan.

Although his American colleagues were steeped in regional ethnography, they were notoriously suspicious of theoretical abstractions. Lvi-Strauss, however, was determined to use observations of hunter-gatherers as the basis for a theory of human nature, like a more empirical Rousseau. Such a soaring ambition required a new theoretical framework. Inspiration came from a fellow exile in New York, the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson. Following the path-breaking contributions of Ferdinand de Saussure, linguistics was in the throes of a theoretical revolution. Lvi-Strauss concluded that it would show the way to a new, generalizing, structural anthropology.

Jakobson was particularly interested in phonemics, the branch of linguistics that deals with the communication of meaning through sounds. He claimed to have split the atom of linguistics, the phoneme. The phoneme had been viewed as the smallest significant unit of sound in speech, but according to Jakobson it was itself a bundle of features made up of pairs of contrasting elements. So, for instance, English speakers invest the contrasting b and p sounds with meaning (the words 'bill' and 'pill' are obviously different to our ears), whereas in other languages the distinction may be unmarked and unheard. Lvi-Strauss argued that systems of classification are constructed on a similar pattern of binary oppositions.

Returning to Paris in 1949, Lvi-Strauss found employment at the Museum of Man and then the cole Pratique des Hautes tudes at the Sorbonne. His massive doctoral thesis, published that year, argued that the imposition of a taboo on incest marked the break between a natural and a cultural order, obliging men to exchange sisters with other men, and so creating family and kinship networks. In the simplest (and implicitly oldest) systems, these networks are structured by a binary classification of relatives into two classes: unmarriageable kin and marriageable affines.

Lvi-Strauss notoriously claimed that he had a neolithic intelligence, that his thought was intuitively sympathetic to that of hunter-gatherers. His grand theory rested on a binary opposition between nature and culture (taken, of course, from Rousseau), and so between the small-scale, technically simple societies that existed during the first 150,000 years of human history and modern civilization, which rendered the simpler societies obsolete. He believed that humanity in its natural condition was adapted to the environment, whereas civilized societies endanger the environment and obliterate cultural variation. This deeply pessimistic view was conditioned by the Amazonian idyll of his youth, and the European catastrophe of the Second World War that followed. But he also believed that people everywhere ultimately thought in the same way, although about different things, and that the clash of cultures is necessary for human adaptation.

The basis of the structural anthropology of Lvi-Strauss is the idea that the human brain systematically processes organised, that is to say structured, units of information that combine and recombine to create models that sometimes explain the world we live in, sometimes suggest imaginary alternatives, and sometimes give tools with which to operate in it. The task of the anthropologist, for Lvi-Strauss, is not to account for why a culture takes a particular form, but to understand and illustrate the principles of organisation that underlie the onward process of transformation that occurs as carriers of the culture solve problems that are either practical or purely intellectual.

This is perhaps one of the first and simplest distinctions between structuralism, together with some forms of cognitive anthropology, and neuroanthropology. The belief that, underlying human expression is a simpler structure of thought, one that can be described as an oppositional framework of categories, is, in my opinion, not consistent with current neurosciences. Structuralist analysis assumes that, underlying surface complexity in myth, ritual, and even conscious thought, there must be a simpler generative matrix (this is also one of my issues with Pierre Bourdieu, and the reason that I think his thought is overly structuralist). Increasingly, neurosciences are leading us to the opposite conclusion, that conscious thought and overt expression are the thin surface of much more complex processes, a staggeringly Byzantine thinking organ embedded within a baroque organism upon which it depends for sensation, experience, subsistence, and even motivation to exist. Even the theorists of mental modularity, with which I disagree on many things, come into direct conflict with the stupendous simplification of mental processes required by structuralist analysis (for more, see Andy Clark & Michael Wheeler: Embodied cognition and cultural evolution).

Arguably, one reason structuralism rose and fell so quickly outside of anthropology was that it extrapolated brilliantly from a particular moment of linguistics and cognitive science (especially cybernetics and information theory), demonstrating the wider implications of their findings for thinking about human culture. Albert Doja (2008: 324) suggests influences beyond linguistic structuralism from new mathematics, information science, cybernetics, game theory, biology and catastrophe theory in the structural analysis of Mythologiques.

The brain does not always, or even often, function in binary, although categorization might (more on that in a moment). Or perhaps more accurately, even if at microscopic levels neurons some neuros behave in binary (arguably), the accumulation of parallel processing, masses of neurons devoted to single tasks, recursion, modularization, and neural heterogeneity quickly make a mockery of attempts to model complex organic processes, let alone thought, as binary systems.

In structuralism, linguistics was the model for a science of human thought, and its methods were the way into cognition. Lvi-Strauss, of course, was an admirer of Ferdinand de Saussure, Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy, and Roman Jakobson, and the influence of structural linguistics extends deeply and explicitly into his broader structuralist agenda.

Increasingly, language appears not to be so much the stuff of thought, but one form of thought, absolutely crucial for understanding human distinctiveness, but hardly the extent of cognition. Both cognitive anthropologists and neuroanthropologists would no doubt agree that language was crucial for understanding the brain, but I suspect that neuroanthropologists are less comfortable with treating functions like categorization as the illustrative cases for discussing all of human thinking.

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