Shazhinbatyn, A. Claude Levi-Strauss’ Structural Anthropology

Abstract: A French philosopher Claude Levi-Strauss radically re-considered the ethnos issue by including it in a whole range of questions traditionally related to philosophical anthropology. By studying the ethnographic data Claude Levi-Strauss changed the approach to anthropological researches, too. In his works he noted that many ethnologists including Marcel Mauss and Bronislaw Malinowski already acknowledged that a researcher should not analyze separate social facts because the ethnic issue assumed that the research did not study the social facts as they were but their interpretation by people. Without the human factor that assumes a subjective interpretation of this or that phenomenon, it is impossible to understand the depths of the ethnological research. The author of the article used method of historical research combined with the methodology of philosophical anthropology. The author also used the methods of structural anthropology that usually views the ethnocentrism as a prejudice excluding everything ‘abnormal’ from the culture. The novelty of the article is in the author’s attempt to define the place of Claude Levi- Strauss’ structural anthropology in ethnic studies. For the first time in Russian and Western philosophy ethnicity is viewed as an anthropological phenomenon. The author also defines the role of structural anthropology in the process of ‘anthropologization’ of the ethnic research and describes general principles lying in the basis of studying the culture of different epochs and ethnic groups.

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