Lévi-Strauss reads a society's family relationships as a sign system: each relation has value only through its differences from the other relations.
In lecture order, as Marci Shore presents each view. The time opens that minute of the lecture on YouTube.
Kinship can be read as a language: its relations form a system on Saussure's model, where each term has value only by differing from the others.
Put simply Lévi-Strauss: family relationships work like a language. As with Saussure's words, each relation means something only through how it differs from the other relations in the system.
What makes kinship a system is not blood or descent but a representation held in people's minds: arbitrary, not grown spontaneously from any real situation.
Put simply Lévi-Strauss: a kinship system is not made of blood ties or descent. It exists in people's minds, as a set of ideas fixed by convention, not something that grows naturally out of real life.
To grasp the avunculate, the bond between maternal uncle and nephew, one must treat it as a single relation inside a kinship system taken as a whole.
Put simply Lévi-Strauss: to understand the special bond between a boy and his mother's brother, you must see it as one relation within the society's whole family system.
Links from these claims to others in the course. Each shows the earlier claim, then the later one that answers it. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
SaussureLanguage is form rather than substance: a combination of sounds means something only inside a particular linguistic system, so meaning is a matter of relations, not of things. L10 · 18:55
Lévi-StraussKinship can be read as a language: its relations form a system on Saussure's model, where each term has value only by differing from the others. L19 · 42:15
Kinship read as a language: units valued only by their differences within the system
Lévi-StraussKinship can be read as a language: its relations form a system on Saussure's model, where each term has value only by differing from the others. L19 · 42:15
DerridaDeconstruction is not confined to books: gestures, choreography, even a room of diners count as text, because Derrida has widened the notion of text to take in all of life. L22 · 23:32
All culture as language becomes all of life as text
Terms that appear in the same claims.