Chapter 7 10/4

This chapter is centered on the ideas of Mary Douglas, one of the most important social anthropologists of our time and Claude Levi-Strauss. Douglas once again states that the meaning of a word is relational and that it stems from where the word is found in a sentence and the context in which we find it. Douglas stresses the theories of Levi-Strauss and how he believes the mind receives any experience in a structured form; it is human nature that most all of these forms are unconscious. Another reoccurring theme in the book is that ideas come in pairs of opposites, once again stated by Levi-Strauss. We are also introduced to the idea of structuralism, which analyzes different phenomena in terms of their basic units and the way these units are assembled. Structuralists believe that the relationship between elements in something like a myth (something that we are unaware of) is extremely important. According to Levi-Strauss, “In both language and myth, the separate units have no meaning by themselves, they acquire it only because of the way they are assembled.