Between an “objectified thought” and a “subjectless rationality”: spirit and nature in Lévi-Straussian structuralism
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Abstract
This article examines the structural analysis of myths as undertaken by Claude Lévi-Strauss, its relevance to the formulation of his notion of spirit, and how the anthropologist ventured some conceptual generalizations regarding nature. Such aims entail considering Lévi-Straussian structuralism—according to the justification provided by its own creator—from a perspective that subsumes, without denying it, the empirical vocation of anthropology under epistemological speculations. These speculations are discernible in his reflections on the relations between nature and spirit, as well as on the status of the subject in the consolidation of the structuralist project of comparative analysis of Amerindian mythology.
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