San Francisco Philosophy Reading Group

We are reading Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Structural Study of Myth and The Science of the Concrete. These readings introduce Structuralism’s application beyond linguistics into anthropology and myth analysis.

In The Structural Study of Myth, Lévi-Strauss applies Saussurean principles to myth, arguing that myths, like language, form structured systems. The meaning of a myth does not reside in individual narrative elements but in their relational structure. Myths operate through binary oppositions—life/death, nature/culture, male/female—and their transformation across variants reveals a logic beneath surface content. Lévi-Strauss treats myth as a language whose underlying grammar expresses universal mental structures.

In The Science of the Concrete, he contrasts “primitive” and “modern” thought, rejecting the notion that so-called primitive societies are less rational. Instead, he claims that indigenous classification systems—often dismissed as “mythical” or “pre-logical”—are deeply systematic, rooted in a logic of sensible qualities. These systems reveal a mode of knowledge that is analogical rather than abstract, synthetic rather than analytic.

Both texts exemplify Structuralism’s core assertion: that meaning arises from structure, not content. Lévi-Strauss’s method seeks invariant structures beneath cultural variation, advancing the claim that human cognition itself is structured like a language.