Levi-Strauss wanted to provide a new basis for the human sciences, so that they can become thoroughly scientific and exact, like physics/chemistry/etc.
He viewed structuralism’s goal as becoming a framework for all the human sciences.
in ‘59 he got a chair in the College de France thanks to Merleau-Ponty. He lived for 100 years!!
Structural anthropology: explains societies and their manifestations as a “whole,” endowed with a self-regulated internal coherence that escapes the consciousness of the individuals.
Humanism is a problem (Race and History; 1952). We aren’t “one” humanity, there is no homogenous humanity to be spoken of - by human nature, intellect, capacity for knowledge, truth or morality.
Humanism as universalism is what prompted the declaration of “human rights,” as declared in Paris in 1948.
Applied to ethnology, humanism creates distortions.
Cultural differences = accidental additions to an identical core.
Ethnologists, however, must be interested in Alterity, in the Other, so these cultural differences, the ethnologist’s vs. the other’s, is what is important. Their differences are irreducible.
Totems have connections (there’s always more than one), and these totemic laws are how people create culture from nature.