Dead or alive, it's all binary oppositions round here

Amidst all the excitement yesterday, I failed to mark the passing of Claude Lévi-Strauss, without whom linguists, anthropologists, literary critics and many others would simply be wandering around describing everything as 'nice' or 'interesting'.

Astonishingly, having died at the age of 100, the inventor of structuralism (alongside the structural linguists) outlived not only his own theory, but its successor, poststructuralism (both approaches are fascinating, and still 'work', but other critical trends have supplanted them, such as postcolonialism).

Lévi-Strauss was a little suspicious of his ideas being used outside anthropology, the field in which he challenged Western concepts of civilisation and primitivism. His insight was to posit that 'reality' is a mental concept of comparisons and alternatives - binary oppositions - rather than an objective fact. The linguistic demonstration is simple: 'cat' has no relationship to the small furry animal referred to, but it's distinguished from 'rat' - another small furry animal - through the subsitution of a single letter: the opposition determines the way we understand the world.

For Lévi-Strauss, structural linguistics was a branch of social science, because the principles by which we organise experience (such as symbolism) could uncover the structures of the brain. His work has become central to cultural studies and important for literary criticism - a great thinker has passed away.