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In a real sense, the deconstructive philosophy of Jacques Derrida is a reaction to (or against) the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss. At the very least, deconstruction is a departure from structuralism — or, perhaps more precisely, from the oppositional logic of structuralism. Lévi-Strauss asserts that the mind, whether 'savage" or "civilized", categorises phenomena in oppositions. (Savage/civilised would be one such opposition, as would such classic oppositions as mind/body, subject/object, space/time, form/content and nature/culture.) The phenomena that the savage mind selects as relevant to categorise in oppositional terms may be different from those that the civilised mind regards as pertinent, but, according to Lévi-Strauss, this in no way implies that the structure of the civilised mind is qualitatively (that is, evolutionarily) either different from or superior to that of the savage mind. In contrast to Lucien Levy-Bruhl, who maintained that the savage mind was "pre-logical" (although he did eventually repudiate the notion), Lévi-Strauss insists that the savage mind is just as logical as the civilised mind. In fact, he contends that the logic in both cases is identical — and it is a logic of oppositions (perhaps the most famous of which, at least in structural anthropology, is the "raw" and the "cooked").

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-10335-5_8

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