2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

conscious phenomena.
F ROM LANGUAGE TO MYTH
This definition gives us just a preliminary characterization, but one nonetheless useful
in order to see structures at work. Let us proceed to a further, but still preliminary refine-
ment of the method with a canonical example drawn from linguistics before approaching
the analysis of anthropological endeavors like the study of kinship systems or the study of
mythology.
Lévi-Strauss, declaring in a bold move that anthropology deals with a different kind of
reality, but is a science of the same type of linguistics, applies the same definition and meth-
od to his discipline. In his first important work, The Elementary Structures Of Kinship, he
describes the general problem facing anthropology as essentially similar to the problem
facing the linguist when confronted with the strange phenomenon of different sounds hav-
ing different roles in different languages and yet seemingly following some hidden rule.
Since the problem was solved in phonology through the introduction of an abstract entity,
the phoneme, an analogous solution must be found in anthropology. In the study of kinship,
says Lévi-Strauss, we observe that the number of psychological “attitudes” (like “affection-
ate,” “warm,” “hostile,” etc.) that individuals may have toward each other is almost unlim-
ited, yet we find that societies actually use only a very small number of them within their
kinship systems. Moreover, not only the attitudes are often very different, sometimes soci-
eties adopting kinship systems with very similar terms (e.g. “wife, “husband,” uncle,” etc.)
have diametrically opposed attitudes regulating the behavior between the elements of the
system. Any explanation of this difference based on the biological features of the terms,
therefore, is bound to fail, since they require that
each detail of terminology and each special marriage rule is associated
with a specific custom as either its consequence or its survival. We thus meet
with a chaos of discontinuity. No one asks how kinship systems, regarded
as synchronic wholes, could be arbitrary products of a convergence of several
heterogeneous institutions (most of which are hypothetical), yet nevertheless
function with some sort of regularity and effectiveness. 7
7. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie Structurale…, 42; Engl. tr. 35.
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