ANTH 3320 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Ferdinand De Saussure, Prague School, Linguistic System
Document Summary
Myths were sort of a social charter, doesn"t explain origin of things but rather they were documents of regulation that talked about mundane sort od things. This was the kind of story that strauss looked at and kind of analyzes using his structural method or structural analysis. He cared about the arts and structure of the myth. These principles were the perceptions of binary opposites. To understand what he was saying you have to look at linguistics at his time there was a lot going around in linguistics, one of them was the work of saussure. Ferdinand de saussure important in linguistics and revolutionized linguistics, his biggest insight was that there was two distinct types of dimensions in language: langue and parole. They believed that they could be broken down into basic unit of structures. So his thought of culture was kind of like an analogy to the language structure.