Abstract

This article explores the question of historicity in the anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss from the viewpoint of his relationship to the Jakobsonian functionalist epistemology of linguistics. Faced with the difficulties of contemporary anthropology in theorizing the structure/event couple (American diffusionism vs. English functionalism), Levi-Strauss finds resources in linguistic functionalism to think about the articulation between synchrony and diachrony in symbolic structures (kinship, totemic systems, mythology). Nevertheless, the concept of the symbolic unconscious that Levi-Strauss constructed on this basis implies a series of displacements of the functional framework which require further study.

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