Are We all the Same?

(image: Construction Worker, Qingdao, China- Anne-Marie, 2007).

*he was just as intrigued as I

Word: Human-of or characteristic of people as opposed to God or animals or machines, esp. in being susceptible to weakness (Human b. New Oxford American Dictionary).

Term: Structuralism- Complex system of interrelated parts (structuralism, wikipedia).

Article: Los Angeles Times, Obituaries, November 4^th, 2009.

“Claude Levi-Strauss towered over the French intellectual scene and founded the school of thought known as structuralism”(Obituaries, Nov.4^th, 2009, LATIMES)

“Part philosopher, part sociologist, and entirely humanist, he studied tribes in Brazil and North America, concluding that virtually all societies shared a powerful commonalities of behavior and thought, often expressing them in myths” (Obituaries, Nov.4^th, 2009, LATIMES).

“He concluded that primitive peoples were no less intelligent than “Western” civilizations and that their intelligence could be revealed through their myths and other cultural keystones. Those myths, he argued, all tend to provide answers to such universal questions as ‘Who are we?’ and ‘How did we come to be at this place?’” (Obituaries, Nov.4^th, 2009, LATIMES).

“By the mid 1980’s, however, his ideas were being supplanted by those of the so-called post-structuralists who argued that history and experience were far more important than universal laws in shaping human consciousness” (Obituaries, Nov.4^th, 2009, LATIMES).